CHAPTER EIGHT

Conclusions and Reflections

Many of us today fail to appreciate the character of the barriers that separate those parts of the world which communists rule from the United States and Western Europe, even after the changes that have occurred in recent years. Even during the tense 1930s, when the Nazis had begun to inflict their barbarities on some elements of the German population and to threaten Germany’s neighbors, thousands of citizens from other countries freely traveled through and lived in Germany, as Germans did in other countries, except the Soviet Union. Publications and broadcasts crossed boundaries as freely as peoples did. Trade flourished. Similarly, we forget that more Poles lived and studied in Western Europe in the sixteenth century than do today, even though that earlier period endured religious wars, conflicts within and among petty and large states, and ineffective transportation. The thawing of Soviet policies toward the West in recent years is therefore just a small step in the direction of relationships that in earlier years were traditional between peoples of states on the verge of war.

Some Soviet and American political institutions look alike on the surface, but the distinctions are deep and fundamental. Indeed, Soviet efforts to adopt Western forms and even to use the same vocabulary to describe their institutions show the attractive power our institutions and values have and the Soviet need to mask the vast dissimilarities.

The tensions that dominate Soviet-American relations, and that make formal academic exchange programs necessary and difficult, depend in part upon the clashes between two dissimilar political and economic systems. However, they also reflect the conflict between two rival ideologies, the impact history and suspicion have had upon each society and upon their relationships, and the frank collision of competing national interests throughout the world. The sharpness of the disagreements derives in good part from the peculiarities and asymmetries of the relationship. The two states have different goals and styles. Our approach is open, relaxed, and flexible, while the Soviet system emphasizes secrecy and unity. Both approaches are so fundamental to their societies that neither can abandon or significantly modify its principles without undermining its system. Specifically, the Soviet Union cannot afford freedom, just as we cannot abandon it without betraying our most basic values. The Soviet Union cannot grant Western scholars, or Western businessmen, the freedoms essential to Western society and to any economic and cultural relationship without undermining the Soviet system, while we face a dilemma just as crucial.

As this volume shows, Soviet officials hold their positions firmly, and they are tough and skilled in their advocacy of Soviet interests. The constant struggle reflects not only the nature of the competing positions and of Soviet tactics, but also the adversary relationship that prevails between the two states. Both in economic and cultural relations, where maximum mutual benefit demands cooperation, the competitive adversary spirit transfers the relationship from a relaxed and friendly one to shrewd, determined bargaining, to some degree poisons the atmosphere, and prevents the two parties from moving together toward a cooperative and even interdependent stage.

Between 1958 and 1975 several academic exchange programs carried out as parts of the official exchanges agreements signed biennially by the two governments enabled somewhat more than a thousand American scholars to spend from two months to two academic years in the Soviet Union. The principal program enabled approximately 650 graduate students and young scholars to spend an academic year, generally in either Moscow State University or Leningrad State University; the other programs have allowed more than two hundred teachers of Russian to spend a summer in a special program at Moscow State University and approximately three hundred senior scholars to enjoy one or several months of research and meeting colleagues, generally in the Soviet Union’s two major cities. Soviet scholars in approximately equal numbers have enjoyed similar opportunities in universities throughout the United States. During the period between 1958 and 1975 our government, foundations, and universities together spent less than $50,000,000 to support academic exchange programs with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, only a fraction of the annual budget of a major state university in the 1970s or of the cost of the Apollo-Soiuz joint manned space laboratory in July 1975.

Perhaps as many as 3,000 graduate students and scholars from all Western countries together spent a few months or an academic year in study and research in the Soviet Union from 1958 through 1975, and approximately the same number of Soviets have studied in the West. In contrast, in 1974-75 alone, somewhat more than 150,000 foreign students and scholars studied in the United States. In the same year, about 25,000 foreigners, of whom only about 200 were from Western countries, studied in the Soviet Union. In most years from 1958 through 1975, more students from Iceland than from the Soviet Union have studied here. In 1972-73 alone, more than 3,600 British students and approximately 2,000 each from France, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Greece have attended our universities.

Throughout these seventeen years, less than twenty Americans have taught for even a semester in the Soviet Union. Probably no more than two hundred, and certainly less than three hundred scholars from Western countries have taught in Soviet institutions for a semester or a year throughout this period. About ninety percent of these men and women were language teachers, and more than half came from France. In 1974-75 one large American state university, Indiana University, had approximately four hundred citizens of countries other than the United States as members of its faculty.¹

Throughout the period since 1958 the United States, its universities, and its learned societies have made little progress in expanding the volume of academic exchanges. Indeed, the 1963-64 peak for the most important part of the program, that for young scholars, was reached again only in 19 7475 and exceeded only in 1975-76. The target the Committee set in 1964 for the period 1965-70 was twice as high as the actual figure realized. The apparent increase in numbers since 1971 is due almost entirely to special short exploratory trips, subsidized largely by IREX and the National Academy of Sciences, in hopes that this will lead to important meetings or to joint research projects. The highly publicized May 1972 agreement for cooperation in science and technology has led to a large number of brief meetings of working groups of scientists in a dozen fields (about 150 participated in 1973 alone), but three years later only one American scientist had begun research in the Soviet Union under this program.

Moreover, the pattern of the academic exchange programs has remained substantially unchanged, and progress has been slow and grudging. Indeed, the Nixon-Brezhnev agreement in Washington in 1973 froze the framework through 1979. Basically, academic exchanges are governed by a larger exchanges agreement concluded by the governments. They remain a primitive form of barter or horse-trading, an artificial and unnatural arrangement with a quota system and a restrictive spirit, with access to a laboratory balanced against access to a library, and reciprocity, not equity or mutual advantage, being the guiding factor. The basic restrictions remain, and most changes have been minor and cosmetic. Constant pressure from the Committee and IREX, with vigorous support from the Department of State, and some thawing of the Soviet system have reduced the number of Soviet rejections of qualified candidates. In 1974-75 and 1975-76, the Ministry of Higher Education accepted all IREX nominations in the principal program, as it had in 1962-63, although it did not then place them in Soviet institutions when the academic years began. The Soviets now grant admission to spouses of participants and even to couples with their children. Most of our scholars are still assigned to Moscow and Leningrad, but since 1967 a handful have been sprinkled among other cities, especially in European Russia, and restrictions on access to archives and on travel have loosened somewhat.² In recent years the KGB has been less evident and less barbarous than formerly, though it no doubt observes our participants and their Soviet associates with its traditional care. The Soviet government remains sensitive to research subjects on contemporary politics and foreign policy, but in 1973-74 and 1974-75 it allowed some research on contemporary social problems. Soviet officials in general are more relaxed and flexible in negotiation than earlier. Other Western states have progressed, too, especially France and the United Kingdom. In short, the situation has improved over 1958-59. Above all, one must remember that no American studied in Soviet universities between 1936 and 1958 and that the Soviet decision to send some of their elite to their central rival and to accept Americans in their dormitories touches a most critical Soviet nerve.

However, we have made little progress toward free interchange of information and ideas. Some Soviet attitudes and practices have appeared to change, but the Soviet Union has not shifted its basic policies. We are still far from the circumstances in which Coolidge, Kerner, and George R. Noyes worked in relative freedom under the tsars or in which the Moselys, Robinsons, and Simmonses lived and worked in the Soviet Union between 1924 and 1936. The Soviet government remains adamantly opposed to relaxing controls over the movement of people or ideas, as the two years of negotiations over the European security agreement and Soviet actions since the Helsinki agreement was signed have both demonstrated. Most of the issues that divide us have therefore remained impervious to even the most skilled and adroit diplomacy. As the report of IREX for 1972-73 indicated, “Detente has not solved any fundamental problems of scholarly contact with the Soviet Union.”

The changes in the program with Eastern Europe have been far more fundamental and substantial, and the size and character of the gap in policy and performance in these exchanges, compared with those with the Soviet Union, have grown gradually even in those years in which Soviet policy has relaxed. Finally, of course, the entire relationship remains utterly subject to Soviet government control, and no one can be certain concerning the permanence of any Soviet policy toward the outer world.

Thus, the academic exchange program has been a relatively constant and stable element in Soviet-American relations since 1958. It began and sustained itself through a time of immense ferment and change within American higher education. It has been important as a symbol. It has served as a link between two contentious states at delicate times, when failure, cancellation, or a breach of one kind or other might have intensified a crisis. It has helped bring about other changes, and it has made prospects for continued peace a little brighter. But the progress has been slight and painful, when one considers the imagination, energy, and resolution expended.

In 1955 only a dozen American scholars had lived and studied in the Soviet Union. Now we have a relatively large cadre of specialists who have had that experience. In fact, the academic exchange program is far less essential for Russian studies than it was two decades ago. Many scholars became interested in Russian affairs because the Committee helped open the door to the Soviet Union, and a direct relationship exists between access to Soviet society, limited as it is, and the great boom in Russian studies in the 1960s. About eighty percent of those who have participated in the academic exchange program have been specialists in one field or another of Russian studies, generally history, literature, or political science, in that order. These men and women in particular have benefited greatly from the increased knowledge and understanding of the Soviet Union they acquired from living in Soviet cities and working in Soviet libraries and archives, a benefit that they have made national and even international through their teaching and publications. Their opportunities have also helped make their views of Soviet life and policy less abstract and doctrinaire, and more realistic and humanistic than they would have been. One of the principal consequences of these exchange programs has been the humanizing of Western observers, who had been paralyzed by great slogans and written generalities. These program’s have deepened our knowledge of ourselves and helped to carry on the intellectual modernization of the American university by encouraging systematic study of other cultures. Our participants' independent judgments help supplement and challenge the views of government officials on issues of national concern. Finally, their qualities and their achievements have helped give Russian and East European studies a responsible national base.

Our Russian specialists have enjoyed many common experiences, but they emerged with many different interpretations of Soviet reality. Generally, they returned from the Soviet Union more critical of the Soviet system than when they arrived. These attitudes may be among the more important consequences of the academic exchange program, and they will help shape our image of the Soviet Union for many years ahead.³

American participants in other fields of study, especially mathematics and basic physics, have also benefited, sometimes significantly. In the field of medicine, we have learned from Soviet research on hypertension, immunology, and blood diseases, and from study of Soviet systems of medical education and of providing public health service. Our scientists have also acquired a realistic appraisal of Soviet science, its strengths, weaknesses, organization, and needs, especially in physics, engineering, and the life sciences. The concrete evidence reflected by articles in scientific journals is much less important than the invisible but often priceless leaps in information and insight that occur when scholars come together to engage in research.

American scholars, who have benefited so much from the work of others with longer scholarly traditions than ours, have also appreciated the opportunity to join the international community of scholars and work with some who enjoy less freedom and, usually, less adequate research facilities than we do. We have learned, again, that no one has a monopoly on truth and that there is a difference between the contemporary political condition and the eternal human condition. We already have impressive evidence that our research on things Russian, which benefits from some access to materials in the Soviet Union, helps sustain and enliven Soviet scholarship, which in the humanities and social sciences in particular suffers from restraints with which American scholars have never been afflicted.

Those Americans who have studied in Eastern Europe have in addition been impressed by the faith, determination, and skill with which most East European peoples have sought to defend their national traditions and to regain their freedoms. The growing national appreciation of the simple truth that the countries of Eastern Europe differ from each other and are vastly different from the Soviet Union may be one of the most important consequences of our increasing understanding of Russia and Eastern Europe. Scholarly studies of Eastern Europe also demonstrate the dynamism of national communism there. They have thus increased our insight into the minority problems facing the Soviet Union and the pressures that have riven the international communist movement.

The academic exchange programs have produced a number of other important side effects. They have, for example, increased the emphasis upon effective teaching of Russian. They have persuaded scholars and universities to cooperate in national programs at a time when they were competing for prestige, funds, and students. They have served as effective barometers of larger Soviet policies, particularly during periods when Western officials have had difficulty fathoming Soviet intentions.

Moreover, free cooperation between our scholars and our government has improved as our participants have increased their knowledge of the realities of Soviet life and of international politics. Few American specialists on Russia and Eastern Europe have written extensively about Soviet foreign policy or Soviet-American relations, but the books and articles published generally reflect balance and objectivity. No specialist on the Soviet Union has joined the currently popular revisionist school, whose members have little knowledge of the Soviet system, have not lived or worked there, cannot read Russian, and usually fail to analyze even the Soviet materials that are available in Western languages, but who assign the bulk, if not all, of the responsibility for the cold war to the United States.

The national interest, of course, is quite separate from that of our scholars, as it is from that of businessmen eager to profit from opportunities for trade.⁴ Western governments and peoples have supported academic exchanges, not only because they increase knowledge and understanding, but also because they enlarge Soviet participation in world affairs and open chinks in the wall around the Soviet Union. They see the increasing flow of people and information as a liberating force that may lead to a mellowing and moderating of Soviet policy. In addition, these programs, and their survival already for almost two decades, give us more leverage in negotiating with the Soviet Union than we had, for example, in 1955.

Academic exchanges, and other exchanges as well, increase and improve the Soviet elites' knowledge of the American people, thus beginning to reduce some of the misapprehensions caused in part by Soviet philosophy, propaganda, and way of looking at the world and in part by simple lack of information. The Institute of the USA, the most important Soviet research organization for studying the United States, was founded only in 1968. Even in December 1971, when the Institute of History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences organized the first conference of Soviet specialists on American history, it brought together only 130 men and women from throughout the Soviet Union. Moreover, many in that group were propagandists, not scholars. As early as July 1964, after the academic exchange program had been in operation for only six years, seven Soviet alumni were serving in the United States in the Soviet Embassy in Washington, at the Soviet mission to the United Nations, or as representatives of the Soviet mass media. Presumably, they were able to serve their country better because of the semesters they had spent in our universities. At the same time, we gain from having knowledgeable observers report about us.

The very existence of the exchange programs and of the more relaxed Soviet-American relationship that they reflect, the increased trickle of information the Soviet government tolerates, and the subtle Western pressure to relax Soviet controls encourage dissidence and dissent among intellectuals, ethnic and religious minorities, and all those who simply want more freedoms. Even the great majority of utterly loyal Soviet citizens have been influenced by the observations and attitudes of their colleagues who have traveled abroad or worked closely with foreign scholars. Thus, every Soviet scholar abroad and every American and other foreign scholar in the Soviet Union help break down the wall which has isolated that country from the rest of the world.

Soviet rulers have paid especial attention to these programs and to East-West trade and constantly measure their advantages and hazards. They have naturally emphasized research in the scientific and technical fields central to continued Soviet progress. The scientists and engineers who have benefited from the various exchange programs and from increased access to professional literature are among those most critical of the Soviet system, particularly of the restraints it places upon travel and access to information. They therefore constitute a modest pressure upon Soviet policies. More important, they have introduced critical information and attitudes directly into the research areas crucial to the Soviet government and into the higher reaches of the Soviet system.

The evident brooding sense of dissatisfaction among some of those most central to their country’s continued intellectual, scientific, technical, and economic progress already constitutes a serious problem for the leadership. It will almost certainly grow if contact with the West deepens, and it may increase even more vigorously should it be restricted. In this sense, Louis XIV’s dictum that states touch only at the top remains true, and Western influence flows into the Soviet Union through the new elites.

However, we pay a price for these benefits. For those who go to the Soviet Union, the most annoying costs are the monumental inefficiencies of the Soviet system, which they cheerfully accept, and the indecencies and indignities to which many are subjected and which they bitterly resent. During the past five years some basic improvements have occurred, but most changes have been cosmetic. Glaring inequities still abound; Columbia University has assisted dozens of Soviet scholars and artists, but Vitali Rubin, a Soviet specialist in classical Chinese philosophy, cannot obtain a visa to begin his appointment at Columbia. Similarly, we gave Soviet television crews full access to our facilities, while the Soviet government did not allow American crews to film the launching of the Soviet spacecraft in the Apollo-Soiuz exercise in July 1975.

Most Americans engaged in any of the cultural exchange programs are especially concerned because they occur under an official intergovernmental agreement. Our scholars, cultural leaders, and officials were all reluctant in 1958 to accept the exchanges agreement because we sought free trade in men and ideas, not a primitive barter, or even reciprocal trade, in which bureaucrats count scientists and athletes as carefully as bales of cotton. We still seek arrangements in which scholars may travel and study freely in the Soviet Union, and we remain eager to ensure similar opportunities for Soviets. However, the Soviet government would open its frontiers and some of its cities, universities, laboratories, and archives only if the United States accepted an official agreement. The agreements themselves, which explicitly define and limit the opportunities for study and ensure Soviet control over a substantial part of the activities, therefore constitute a major penalty for us.

Any Western government inevitably becomes involved in important relationships involving the Soviet Union because of the nature of the Soviet system. Our government, like others, has been directly engaged in the cultural relations process since negotiations began in the fall of 1957, but it has encouraged institutions such as universities and private foundations to assume administrative responsibilities. Direct exchanges between universities failed utterly in the first few years, but the universities retained until 1969 full control over the most important academic exchanges under their chosen instrument, the Inter-University Committee. However, under IREX, university interest and authority have slowly declined and the central authority of IREX has enlarged. Thus, the history of Russian studies and of academic exchanges both illustrate how a few gifted and dedicated individuals launched functions over which individual universities, then a group of universities, a corporation drifting away from university influence, and finally the government have gradually increased their influence and control.

The government’s role has grown in the last decade in particular and threatens to become overwhelming, making Washington a kind of St. Petersburg-on-the-Potomac. Foundation support will continue to decline, even as prices rise. The government thus looms as the main, almost the lone, financial supporter, which will of course increase its authority. The Department of State’s contribution to the IREX budget for 1976-77 may account for more than half of the total (it was somewhat less than one-third in 1974-75). When the Department and the National Endowment for the Humanities contribute the great bulk of IREX’s financial support, as well as all those of the National Academy of Sciences, the Public Health Service, and other organizations engaged in exchanges of scholars, exchanges will in effect become a government subsidiary and instrument.

Ironically, the ideas concerning joint research on common problems that the Committee proposed in 1964 and that were discussed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the following three years were accepted by the Soviet government in the 1970s under conditions that increased our government’s authority over exchanges and higher education. These agreements on weather, environmental protection, medicine, science and technology, agriculture, transport, and oceanography promise benefits to both countries and progress toward peaceful relations. At the same time, they also buttress federal influence. Moreover, the dangers are increased by the 1975 Helsinki agreement, even though the Western states fought to draft a document which would increase the free flow of men and information. First, the signatory governments in effect gave a kind of formal approval to the principle that cultural relations shall be the responsibility of governments. Second, the effort to monitor the flow of ideas and people will only increase the role of government. Indeed, as President Kingman Brewster of Yale University recently noted, our scholars and universities must now devote increasing energies to defending their independence from the expanding powers of their own benevolent government.

However, the greatest cost we pay in accepting controlled cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union is granting respectability and dignity, parity and legitimacy to a government that denies the freedoms essential to civilized life. Sending novelists to a country, or accepting chemists from one in which historians are imprisoned for seeking objectivity and in which scientists of independent mind are hounded from their positions, is a high price, one that may lead into further moral demobilization and intellectual corruption. We have become so accustomed to exchanges agreements with the Soviet Union and the states of Eastern Europe that the restrictions which used to chafe are now quietly accepted. We are often far more critical of similar restrictions when exercised by other states than we are of those that communists rule.

Those who support cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union, whether or not they are aware of the moral issues raised, point out that we have no choice, that the Soviet Union exists in an ever-smaller universe, that the United States itself is a flawed society in an imperfect world, and that we must use the instruments available to advance learning and at the same time to press for free movement of men and ideas. In short, academic exchanges with the Soviet Union as presently organized are unsatisfactory, but the most satisfactory we can hope to obtain in current circumstances.

Men such as Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn illustrate with blinding clarity the dilemma that academic relationships with the Soviet Union pose. They agree that the United States should negotiate with the Soviet Union in order to reduce the likelihood of war. However, they and their counterparts in Eastern Europe condemn us for weakness and irresolution and for failing to use our influence, or for wielding it ineffectively, to advance the rights of the Soviet and East European peoples and therefore the prospects for genuine peace. They urge that we not grant legitimacy and respectability and, above all, not provide scientific and technological assistance to a government that denies its citizens rights to which they are entitled under their own constitution.

The Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe naturally would not allow or encourage academic exchanges unless they believed their benefits were considerable, and more than ours. Thus, the Soviet leaders clearly believe that the exchanges operate to their advantage, just as we believe they do to ours. In fact, advantages from exchanges must be considered mutual if they are to survive and thrive.

Soviet advantages and disadvantages from academic exchanges are in many ways the obverse of ours. Soviet scholars, of course, have many of the same interests as Americans. In particular, they welcome opportunities to go “out,” to share information and insights with fellow specialists, to acquire a new perspective, and to obtain recognition from the international community of scholars. However, most have no influence, although senior scientists, or scientific administrators, may have some input into central decisions concerning contact with the outside world.

For Soviet leaders, the main advantages are clear. They appreciate the respectability and prestige the exchanges bring and the impressions that their artists, dancers, and eminent scientists create. As Zhores Medvedev has revealed in detail, they also use travel abroad as a patronage instrument, denying those of independent or unorthodox mind the opportunity and awarding a bonus to those who faithfully endorse every government action. They exercise some influence over American scholarship by denying admission to qualified scholars with legitimate subjects. Many discouraged from studying twentieth-century history, the Soviet economy, or Russian foreign policy thus turn to subjects more comfortable for the Soviet system, or even abandon Soviet studies. Some timid intellectuals refrain from protests against Soviet treatment of dissidents and from participating in conferences in which subjects distasteful to the Soviet government might be discussed. Some may even censor themselves.

The Soviet Union utilizes cultural exchanges to narrow the considerable gap between Soviet and Western science and technology by obtaining access to the equipment, techniques, and discoveries of our campuses and laboratories, just as it uses trade to obtain industrial data and to inject Western technology into critical parts of the Soviet economy. Thus, the Soviet Union has obtained significant increments to its scientific and technical knowledge, from basic information concerning polio vaccines and training in econometrics and new systems of business management to the latest work in electronics, oil drilling, and biochemistry. In 1969-70 all twenty-nine Soviet participants in the main academic program were scientists. In 1971-72 thirty-one of thirty-four were scientists or engineers. In 1973 eight Soviet nominees were computer specialists. The same proportions prevail in exchange programs with other Western countries. In 1970, for example, ninety percent of the Soviet scholars in the German program were scientists. All thirteen agreements for cooperative research the Soviet Union has so eagerly signed in the 1970s involve science and technology, and American scientists agree that the Soviet Union learns far more than the United States does from them.

Finally, the Soviet government seeks to create the impression that the Soviet Union is not a threat, that the basic issues which divide the Soviet Union and the West have been resolved, and that the world has returned to some kind of placid normalcy in which Western efforts to maintain military strength and coordination are unnecessary. They have achieved considerable success with this policy, which has contributed to the gradual decline of Western resolution and unity.

The Soviet price from these programs is in many ways the American benefit, because the programs provide dissonant information, stimulate dissidence, and open up some of the higher levels of Soviet society to Western ideas. “Cooperating with capitalism” exposes the Soviet government to criticism from the People’s Republic of China and from fervent old-line communists and radical revolutionaries everywhere, while at the same time it increases hope among the critics and restless millions. Occasional defectors are an embarrassment. Moreover, the Soviet system and the means its leaders use to restrict the costs inflict further damage. The secrecy and the restrictions it imposes upon those foreigners whom it admits on a carefully controlled basis create resentment and hostility among many visitors and a sense of shame among informed Soviet citizens, as the policies of Nicholas I and Alexander III did in the nineteenth century. Soviet policies in the established restrictive pattern are often the most powerful enemies of the system. Thus, the Soviet blackout of American TV reports from Moscow early in the summer of 1974 on Sakharov and the Jewish dissenters was a colossal blunder because it undermined the massive effort to portray the system as liberal and open.

However, the main price, and a fearfully high one, is the infectious spread of Western ideas from the contacts the exchanges allow. Soviet rulers claim the enthusiastic support of their peoples, but at the same time they deeply fear their exposure to outside influences. Travel, art forms, hybrid corn and Holsteins, the presence of Soviets in American dormitories, exhibits of kitchen equipment, cooperation in cancer research, study of computer technology, and the adoption of our business management techniques—all affect the Soviet intellectual elite, as Pepsi Cola, jazz, mini-skirts, jeans, and grain do at other levels. Any Soviet citizens who remember Khrushchev’s boasts in the earlv 1960s about surpassing the United States in important fields of production must wonder what has happened. Even the most obtuse Soviet citizen must suspect from the flow of Western science and technology that the West retains its cultural leadership. Imagine the effect here if we were drinking kvas and importing Soviet equipment to exploit our oil and gas resources.

The Muscovite rulers clearly appreciate the price they pay to satisfy their desperate needs and to obtain the envisaged political advantages. They apparently believe that the most grave internal threat is from those most highly educated. The government of Brezhnev very much resembles that of Nicholas I, which also sent students abroad, in its “plot mentality” and in the suspicion with which it views its own peoples. This ideological sensitivity is reflected in constant vigilance campaigns and the refrain that there can be no peaceful coexistence in ideology. However, the more they borrow abroad, the more they open the new Soviet elite to ideas that they consider dangerous. They have learned that the Soviet Union cannot be open technologically and closed culturally, and that any relaxation, even to obtain great benefits, simultaneously raises great hazards. The Soviet position at the Conference on European Security and Cooperation in Geneva reflected this reinforced fear of “the free exchange of people and ideas.” Soviet insistence that the Conference ensure “respect for the principles of sovereignty and nonintervention” and “strict observance of the laws, customs, and traditions of each other” represents a position already enshrined in the exchanges agreements. The Soviet Union wishes to participate in cultural exchanges and to increase trade, but on the condition that it maintain censorship and other forms of control. It seeks “a fire that will not burn.”

The Soviet Union lives in one world and now seeks to join the world, but it relentlessly rejects “ideological coexistence.” It demands that its dogmas be unchallenged with especial insistence because the Soviet Union in the 1970s has no new ideas to sell and is stagnant and vulnerable. Fifty years ago Soviet economic plans and exciting cultural life offered many attractions to the outer world. Today, the Soviet Union possesses enormous military power, but it is a society based on faith and dogma. It has little intellectual vitality in an age when ideas are, as ever, important. As Sir Isaiah Berlin noted two decades ago, there is a “silence in Russian culture.”

Thus, the very nature of the exchange program places the Soviet government on the horns of a fearful and eternal dilemma. To obtain benefits that it thinks important, even crucial, it must risk contamination of its intellectual elite and of its ideological foundations. To allow ballet troupes to dazzle crowds abroad, it must accept the likelihood that some of its best dancers will defect, no matter how precise the controls. To obtain scientific, technical, and military information and some political advantages, it must expose itself to criticism and at the same time tolerate gentle pressure for similar policies from East European governments, which are much more interested than the Soviet Union in freer relationships with the West. In summary, just as the Department of State and the universities ever ponder the wisdom of enduring the inequalities and hazards Soviet practices create, and the threat to our principles these relationships pose, so the Soviet rulers constantly discuss the balance between the advantages they acquire and the “infections” that constitute the price. They cannot afford freedom, and they therefore seek a series of reciprocal trade agreements in which they barter opportunities for research useful to us for information useful to them.

Eastern Europe is a part of the Soviet empire, but yet another world. The dilemma for the East European governments is even more acute than that of the Soviet government, as is their need for access to Western science, technology, and intellectual sustenance. The magnetic and contagious attraction that the West has for long exercised on Eastern Europe, intensified by events since 1945, has been boosted by the various exchanges, the greatly increased economic ties, and the tantalizing opportunities to taste the previously forbidden fruits. These erode the economic, ideological, and political bases of the governments and weaken ties with Moscow in the same kind of “unbinding” that the Russian empire witnessed a century ago. They promote pragmatic and more traditional attitudes and tend to make the communist leaders ever more nationalistic. They also bring closer together the peoples and their governments—the peoples eager to “rejoin Europe” and to enjoy the benefits of this century’s advances, and the governments eager to acquire Western information to modernize their economies.

However, the East European governments cannot import knowledge from our universities, laboratories, factories, and farms without importing the ideas and values at the heart of Western institutions. These constitute a continuing source of infection among a people already vulnerable. The Soviet rulers have long considered Eastern Europe a barrier against the West. In present circumstances, it has become a carrier from the West, raising specters of 1956 and 1968 but under more subtle and dangerous circumstances. It is a section of the Soviet empire not yet digested, and perhaps indigestible. In a sense, the 1956 and 1968 efforts to press dramatically toward greater freedom or toward “socialism with a human face” were all successes in the long run, although they were apparent immediate failures. The level of information throughout Eastern Europe has risen substantially. In spite of all the restrictions, in Czechoslovakia and Romania in particular, the overall picture is brighter than in 1955.

A shrewd British observer has pointed out that one can reach the Soviet Union only over a wall and across a moat, while entrance to (and exit from) resilient Eastern Europe is simpler, through a crisscross of turnstiles, which Eastern and Western Europeans are now mastering. Moreover, because it stands at the crossroads of European civilization, Eastern Europe will remain an especially critical area and a most likely cause of future tensions between the Soviet Union and the West. If the peoples of Eastern Europe succeed in inching their way to increased liberties and to greater independence from Soviet rule, the Soviet Union will be directly affected and the future of Western Europe, and of the world, will become significantly brighter and freer.

Academic exchanges, and cultural relations as a whole, have survived all the crises the stormy period since 1958 has produced. Soviet practices have improved somewhat over the years, particularly since 1969, in part because the Soviet government has begun to feel more comfortable with programs that produce substantial benefits, even though they raise great hazards. They also reflect worsening Soviet-Chinese relations; the increasing Soviet need for access to American grain, science, and technology; the decreasing Western fear of communism and of Soviet expansion; the decision of Western and Soviet leaders to turn toward Ostpolitik and Westpolitik, respectively; and the turn from confrontation to negotiation.

This momentum remains subject to lurches of one kind or another. A change in leadership and policy in the Soviet Union or another explosion in the Middle East could destroy the carefully constructed structures and patterns and return us to the stark days of critical confrontations. However, a Soviet return to utter isolation from the West seems most unlikely. Indeed, if these delicate and complicated programs should thrive, they might help produce even more fruitful relationships, not only mitigating conflict but directing some of the ambitions of both countries toward international cooperation in fields such as agricultural production and health care.

Those especially interested in cultural relations in general and academic relations in particular often overestimate their significance. They do in fact play a modest role, and the numbers of people involved will remain small.⁵ The importance of academic exchanges, and that of the larger grouping—cultural, economic, scientific, and technological relations—is likely to increase both in an era of negotiation as well as confrontation, but economic and military power, vitality and stability, resolution, and skill in diplomacy will remain more important in world politics than any mustard seed. Cultural relations, even when skillfully used, can only supplement.

The major issues, the petty wrangles, and the contemporary dilemmas of exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union are deeply rooted in well-established traditions, which help provide useful historical perspective. The exchange programs also reflect the historical relationship between Russia and the West, one that derives from Byzantium. The policies of Peter, Catherine, and Stalin, who sought to transform Russia and to borrow from the West without being “corrupted” in any way, help illuminate contemporary issues. The political and cultural fascination that the West has exercised on Russia as a European borderland state reflects the attractive power of Western culture, which has been active, positive, and infectious throughout the last several centuries, and never more than today. However, we have reason for caution concerning the supposed impact of Western ideas upon Russia, which has demonstrated a striking capacity to absorb scientific and technical data without substantial effect upon its political system or values. The great English scholar, B. H. Sumner, noted that Peter the Great more than 250 years ago saw the West as the “home of shipbuilding and navigation, the reservoir of naval, engineering, and gunnery skill, the possible supplier of loans, and the hoped-for ally in a great combination against the Ottoman empire.” Peter returned to Moscow impressed by “what wealth, trade, manufacturers, and knowledge meant to a country in terms of power and prosperity,” but “he did not explore the springs and motive forces of this western achievement; he did not seek to understand the workings of financial, political, or administrative institutions; and he had little or no conception of the slow and varied stages by which England and Holland had grown to be what they were.”⁶ Peter simply recognized new sources of power and borrowed as rapidly as possible in order to transform Russia.

The external threats that the Soviet rulers perceive today differ in location and character from those Peter saw. They, like Peter, seek to absorb the new elements of power in order to strengthen the state and to make life more palatable. Historians continue to debate to what degree Peter, the first Russian Westerner, successfully resisted Western cultural inroads. However, all agree that the political system has remained absolute in spite of all the contact with the more liberal West.

The United States should promote cultural exchange programs because of the nature of the crisis and because open and peaceful relations are fundamental to our system. Moreover, freedom is our main strength and our best instrument, and we should make full use of it in a contest with a system that is extraordinarily rigid and suffers from conservative leadership. Western Europe and the United States now constitute the intellectual center of the world, in art and architecture, in music and literature, in philosophy (including Marxism), and in all the sciences. We should utilize this remarkable intellectual and cultural vitality. We should rejoice that the contest between the Soviet Union and the West has shifted to include a competition in ideas on a peaceful field, with intellectual weapons—a contest for which we are particularly well equipped and one from which all peoples, though not the Soviet system, will benefit.

However, we must remember that science, art, learning, and our economy are all parts of our total culture and essential elements in our negotiating position with the Soviet Union. We should both defend the freedom essential to our culture and use its products to advance our interests and those of better relations. In particular, we should grant the Soviet Union access to our advanced technology only as it moves toward free movement and equal rights of interpenetration. The United States and its allies should therefore continue to press for free movement throughout Europe. Soviet jamming of radio broadcasts must end. Journalists must be guaranteed the right to function and report freely. We should not be satisfied with vague agreements about reuniting families, but we should insist upon the free flow of publications and the right of people to travel. In short, we should use keen Soviet interest in our technology to obtain the freedoms essential for the survival of a free Europe and a peaceful world—or deserve the popular disillusion and the Soviet contempt that failure would produce. At the same time, we must appreciate that this approach carries a price and creates a dilemma because it increases our government’s authority over cultural and other activities. It thereby places cultural relations, and trade as well, on the chess board of issues concerning which both governments negotiate, and it reduces our own freedoms.

The success with which the West has protected Soviet dissidents illustrates the Soviet dilemma and the significant way in which we can marshal our resources to advance human rights and international security. The presence of 240 foreign correspondents in Moscow, the skill with which these men and women and the Soviet dissidents have kept in touch with each other, the diffusion of information about the dissidents throughout the world, and broadcasting back into the Soviet Union information about them and their views have restricted Soviet action against them and protected them. Thus, the Soviet decision to expel, rather than to imprison, Solzhenitsyn in February 1974 reflected in part his courage and in part the pressure exerted by the information made available to the world and then to the Soviet public at a time when the Soviet government was desperate for Western scientific and technical aid.

Similarly, the warning that the National Academy of Sciences issued in September 1973 served to safeguard Andrei D. Sakharov, to define the price of more open relationships with the West, and to demonstrate that we are determined that the Soviet Union modify its policies if it is to obtain the benefits of cultural and economic cooperation. Sakharov was in serious danger until President Philip Handler of the National Academy informed the Soviet Academy that depriving Sakharov of his rights would end Soviet-American scientific cooperation. The Soviet government then chose to continue to tolerate Sakharov and his activities.

If we defend our principles shrewdly and resolutely in this unending struggle, the Soviet government will twist in constant debate over a painful dilemma. It will be forced to choose between reducing sharply or even ending intellectual and economic relations with the West, trying to combine more open relations with the West with ever tighter controls over its own peoples, or adopting a far more flexible and relaxed policy toward control over the Soviet population, one that would almost certainly undermine the system. Consequently, academic relations raise fundamental questions for any totalitarian government.

The very questions raised by this aspect of Soviet-American relations explain why academic exchanges are both sensitive and important to the improvement of relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. These exchanges are less crucial than discussions concerning limitations of nuclear weapons and those concerning the reduction of military forces in Central Europe, but they touch principles central to both societies and they serve as a most illuminating indicator of Soviet policies. They demonstrate that changes have occurred within the Soviet Union and in Soviet policies toward the West. However, the political system remains fundamentally untouched, and controls over the population are as systematic and effective as before. We are little closer to or more intimate with the Soviet population than twenty years ago. The Soviet Union has relaxed some restraints in its relations with other states, but slowly and without revising its philosophy, reducing its military strength, or weakening its control of Lenin’s “commanding heights.” The United States and the Soviet Union remain locked together in a shrinking world, suspicious of each other, unable on the one hand to conquer by force but equally unable to disengage or to find some kind of armed security. In short, the cultural exchange programs reflect the eternal contest between authority and freedom, as well as the age-old pressure that Russia has exerted upon its western borderlands. The present conflict in many ways seems one between Lenin’s ideas and the state he established and those of Jefferson and Wilson. It is also a struggle between power and freedom. The concentration camp and the Berlin Wall, the open library and the traveling scholar, are its appropriate symbols.

¹Reference to the comparative magnitude of Western trade with states that communists rule may help keep this perspective. In 1973 West Germany, the Soviet Union’s most important trade partner, had more trade with tiny Luxemburg than with the Soviet Union, and its exports to Sweden equaled those to the entire Soviet bloc.

²In 1975-76 the Soviet Ministry placed only three of the fifty-two Aneeican junior scholars outside of Moscow and Leningrad.

³Mr. David Bonavia’s comment that correspondents arrive in Moscow green, that those who leave after a short time come out white with anger and fear, and that none come out “red” applies to most participants.

⁴Some argue that the notion of gain or loss for academic or scientific exchanges is inappropriate; the programs represent joint ventures of mutual benefit above and beyond politics. (See Oliver Korshin, “U.S.-U.S.S.R. Medicooperation,” Exchange, [X, No. 4 ISpring, 1974], 29-32.)

⁵According to the Department of State, 13,768 Soviet citizens and 17,071 Aeeicans participated in the various programs under the official cultural exchanges agreements during their first fifteen years, from 1958 through 1973.

⁶Benediet H. Sumner, Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia (New York, 1951), 34, 41.