U.s.-soviet Relations In The Era Of Detente

Richard E Pipes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000009767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book contains the papers on Soviet foreign policy, concentrating on the constants that form the bedrock of Soviet policy and the Soviet variant of a policy of detente. It deals with the cultural-historical background that lies behind the political outlooks of the United States and Russia.

One
Russia’s Mission, America’s Destiny

The Premises of U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy

This paper was prepared for a meeting of historians in Washington, D.C., in December of 1969. It was to have been accompanied by a second paper that took a different point of view, stressing the common interests of the two countries, and George Kennan was to have commented upon it. Unfortunately, the writer of the other paper was forced to abandon the project, and at the last moment Mr. Kennan was unable to come, so I wound up having the floor to myself.

The détente in American-Russian relations since Stalin’s death to which the world at large owes its relative peace, has tended to obscure basic differences not only in the long-term interests of the two powers, but also in their whole manner of looking at foreign affairs. Although it is fashionable to credit the détente to alleged “convergences” in the development of the two countries, it is probably more realistic to attribute it to a stalemate in their diplomatic and military rivalry. A stalemate in such a conflict is bound to be temporary, and must not be allowed to deceive by concealing what remain very fundamental and deep-seated differences in the way the two rivals regard the world outside their respective borders. Historically viewed, these can be traced to two sources: the two countries’ notion of the world and their place in it, as shaped by inherited religious and philosophic traditions; and their notion of the political process as formed by experience in domestic government.

The conception which Americans and Russians have of their respective place in the world has one feature in common. Each country, though in a different sense, is an offshoot of European civilization, and yet each—again, on different grounds—rejects this civilization. This negative feature establishes a certain superficial resemblance between Americans and Russians and, on the level of individual human contact, permits a rapport often lacking in the relations of either with Europeans proper. Less sophisticated champions of the convergence theory often point to this fact as evidence that the two nations must, in time, come together. But to the historian in this case the similarities are less impressive than the differences. Specifically, that which Americans and Russians reject in European civilization is more significant than the insistence of each on having created a new and distinct civilization.

The Xenophobic View

As Peter Chaadaev pointed out in his Philosophical Letters (1829–1831), Russia cut herself off from the rest of Europe when she chose to receive her Christianity from Constantinople rather than from Rome. From Byzantium, Russia absorbed a singularly conservative, anti-intellectual, and xenophobic ethos. The Byzantine Church insisted more emphatically than the Latin on orthodoxy, because it viewed Christianity as a perfect achievement, once and for all realized through Christ’s martyrdom. Conservatism was imbedded in its whole conception of the church as the trustee of Christ’s legacy, anti-intellectualism in the attendant fear that all independent thinking endangered the foundations of the church, and xenophobia in the conviction that those who did not belong to it—deviant Christians above all—would suffer damnation.

The Russian version of Orthodox Christianity exaggerated further these attitudes, because the Russian clergy (especially during the Moscow period) was both less educated and more isolated than the Greek and therefore inclined to have an even higher opinion of itself. The collapse of Byzantium did nothing to shake this faith. Like Jews after the destruction of Jerusalem, Russians interpreted the fall of Constantinople to mean that the Byzantines had been punished for their betrayal of the true faith (specifically, by their agreement in the 1530s to reunite with the Catholic Church at the councils of Florence and Ferrara). This belief made Russians more determined than ever to avoid contact with foreigners, and, in the splendid solitude in which they had been left as the last remaining state professing the Orthodox faith, to protect its purity.

This religiously conditioned view of the world outside one’s walls heavily influenced the foreign dealings of the Moscow state. There is nothing surprising in this influence, considering that the monarchy and church in Moscow lived in a condition of mutual dependence that verged on the symbiotic. Like Imperial China or Tokugawa Japan, Moscow felt no need to enter into regular diplomatic relations with foreign powers, though it was not averse to receiving their envoys and occasionally even dispatching embassies to them. Foreign missions arriving in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Moscow were held under conditions of virtual house arrest and escorted out of Russia the instant their task was accomplished. The Moscow government’s feeling about foreigners is well illustrated by the symbolic ceremony of washing hands which the Tsar performed after dismissing an embassy, using a discreetly covered pitcher and basin placed for this purpose by his throne.¹

Moscow’s scorn for the external world, for the world of the non-Orthodox, is no less reflected in the vacuous reports submitted by its envoys on return from foreign travels. One searches in vain in these stateinye spiski for evidence of curiosity about foreign institutions and customs, so pronounced in the literature left behind by Western travellers to Russia of that time. Or, to be more precise, there are signs of curiosity but it has the nature of bewilderment and amusement, rather than of serious interest. Muscovite envoys visiting Renaissance Italy, Reformation Germany, or Elizabethan England saw nothing of interest to report, since nothing they experienced there had had any relevance to the cosmos as they envisaged it.

* * *

Even before the accession of Peter the Great, this rigid posture toward foreigners began to relax, because no matter how the church felt about contact with infidels and heretics, the monarchy could not very well defend it and the realm from Catholics, Lutherans, and Moslems unless it adopted the latest military techniques from its adversaries. With Peter the secularization of the monarchy was completed and the traditional policy of isolation abandoned. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Russia joined the European state system and by entering into alliances with its members became an active partner in balance of power diplomacy. The sheer immensity of the Russian Empire—as Russians under Peter liked to boast, their territory equalled the visible surface of the full moon—always caused a strain on European diplomacy, because such a giant was difficult to fit into the intricate structure built on the equilibrium principle. And so we have the French complaining in 1735, when the first Russian troops appeared on the Rhine to help Austria in the War of the Polish Succession, that “barbarians” have lodged in the heart of Europe, and Castlereagh eighty years later referring to the thoroughly Frenchified Alexander I as a “Kalmuck prince.” But that was only when the Russians were on the other side. The same French and British warmly welcomed the Russian battalions when they were needed to restore the European balance in their own favor.

Imperial Russia gladly, almost eagerly, played the game. She tried hard to become a regular member of the great powers’ club and to follow its rules, often to the detriment of her own national interests, as Slavophile publicists were wont to point out.

But in retrospect the adherence of imperial Russia to the European state system appears to have been more precarious than contemporaries realized. What had seemed an irreversible trend in Russian history, turned out to be but an episode. The conventional foreign policy which the imperial government pursued was that of a Westernized court leaning on a Westernized gentry. It expressed the views of a new élite which had broken with the Muscovite traditions and expected great benefits for Russia from close involvement in the affairs of Europe. It was not the policy of what became known in the mid-nineteenth century as the “democratic intelligentsia,” who wished the government to devote all its attention and resources to the resolution of domestic ills. Even less was it a policy favored by the ordinary citizenry—the peasants, artisans, industrial workers, merchants, shopkeepers, lower functionaries (public and private), and the clergy. These lower orders had been barely touched by Westernization. Their culture remained rooted in that of old Moscow; that is, they continued to reject all of non-Orthodox civilization, as represented by foreign countries and state systems and by Russia’s own Westernized élite.

Had Russia escaped revolution, the non-Westernized bulk of its population in all likelihood would have become Westernized and Russia would have joined the international state system for good, as happened with Japan. The October Revolution prevented this from occurring. By rejecting the political, economic, and social institutions of the old régime, the Bolsheviks, unconsciously and inadvertently, also cut Russia off from Western culture from which these had been drawn. Once the smoke of the Civil War was cleared, it became apparent that in October 1917 much more had been dethroned than the monarchy and private property: with them disappeared the Westernized élite which for two centuries had served as Russia’s link with the West, and through it, with the world at large.

Under Stalin, the country’s administration fell into the hands of elements, drawn largely from an amorphous petty bourgeoisie, which throughout the imperial period had been forced to sit on the sidelines, excluded from the seats of power—elements characterized by resentment, conservatism, anti-intellectualism, and xenophobia. The élite which has controlled Russia for the past fifty years may well be irreligious and even militantly atheist: but having come to power on what is in effect an anti-Western program, it has no other culture to fall back on except that of Muscovy. These people instinctively think of themselves as a nation sui generis, unique and unrelated to any other, part of no state system or international community, the only guardians of true Orthodoxy, once Christian, now Communist. Like their Muscovite ancestors, they see nothing to be learned from foreigners save technology, especially when it has military application.

Reading the recent memoirs of Stalin’s daughter, a historian receives a jolt from her account of a conversation with Suslov. She had requested a passport so that she could carry to India the ashes of her recently deceased husband, and ran into difficulties. “What is it that attracts you so much abroad?” Suslov, apparently genuinely puzzled, wanted to know. “Why, my family and I never go abroad, and don’t even feel like going. It is not interesting!”² Shades of boyars and priests whose beards he had clipped and whose properties he had despoiled, exacting revenge on Peter the Great! He had thought life abroad so interesting that for a time he worked there as an ordinary laborer.

Strangers and Sinners

Contempt for that which lies outside one’s national boundaries is not unfamiliar in the United States, but it is not characteristic of those who make national policy, and certainly not of those who have responsibility for the making of American foreign policy. The external world on which Americans are most likely to turn their backs is that which the language of historiographic shorthand calls “feudal”—the world of privilege and authority resting on inherited wealth in land. It is a selective and a qualified rejection whose criteria are drawn from a major strain of European culture, namely the ethos of the mercantile and manufacturing classes first articulated (as Werner Sombart has shown) in the Italian city states of the late Middle Ages and subsequently adopted by the European bourgeoisie at large. The United States has assimilated this ethos mainly through the agency of English liberalism. In Europe it never gained exclusive domination, because there it had to contend with strong anti-liberal, anti-bourgeois traditions of the Church and aristocracy.³ In the United States where, for all practical purposes, there was neither Church establishment nor a true aristocracy to dampen business exuberance, what had been the ethos of a class promptly turned into the ideology of a nation.

American isolationism does not rest on an exclusivist, Manichean outlook rooted in a community-oriented religion; instead, it is rooted in a religion extolling the individual conscience and free will. Individualistic and voluntarist, it assumes that nations, like persons, are capable of finding the true path. The American habit of injecting morality into diplomacy descends (genetically speaking) from the moralist obsession of the liberal middle class, especially the English. Behind it lies the passion which had moved Wilberforce to agitate against slavery, Cobden against foreign tariffs, and Gladstone against Turkish atrocities. It derives from the religious-philosophical conviction that there is a right and a wrong in every action and that man must constantly make a choice between the two. The refusal to grant diplomatic recognition to a wicked government is a logical extension of the principle of private conduct that one must not associate with depraved persons. If England itself has not followed this practice, it is only because the management of its foreign relations has been customarily entrusted to patricians who lack such moral qualms.

Neither in the old, conservative isolationism of America, nor in its new, radical strain does xenophobia play a prominent part. American isolationists like to think that nations, like individuals, must solve their own problems. Those that display self-reliance, courage in the face of adversity, a commitment to equality of opportunity for its citizenry, the American is instinctively prepared to like. The admiration which the so-called “New Left” professes for Cuba or North Viet Nam is based on many of the same values that lay behind the extravagant sympathy that the Old Right expressed for Finland. This outlook clearly implies involvement in affairs of the world at large, and a sense of belonging—if not, indiscriminately, tó all humanity, then at least to that segment of it which shares the American ideal of self-perfectibility. It is an isolationism qualitatively different from that sense of exclusiveness pervading the Muscovite and Soviet ruling élites, which tends to confound nationality and historic mission: as different as Liberal Protestantism is from Greek Orthodoxy from which the two isolationisms, respectively, derive.

* * *

So much for the broad context within which foreign policy is conducted. Now, as to the choice of means, the following generalization may be suggested: that Russian diplomatic methods have been shaped by the experience acquired in administering a vast multi-national empire, whereas the American ones are best explained by the country’s predominantly commercial and manufacturing background.

The Russian State emerged on the fringe of an extensive but loosely constructed and chronically unstable Turco-Mongolian empire. In order to form a national state, Moscow not only had to impose its authority on rival Russian principalities, but also to repel, subdue, and integrate the Turco-Mongol and Finnic populations with which it was surrounded. As a result, in Russia the process of nation-building took place concurrently with that of empire-building. The two processes, so distinct in the history of Western states, cannot in the case of Russia be readily distinguished either chronologically or geographically. In the second half of the sixteenth century, after it had captured Kazan but long before it had completed the self-imposed mission of “gathering the Russian lands,” Moscow already administered a sizeable colonial population of Tatars and peoples of the Finno-Ugrian race. To these, in the seventeenth century, were added the natives of Siberia and the Ukrainian Cossacks, in the eighteenth the nomads of Central Asia, the Crimeans, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Poles, Jews, and the Baltic nationalities, and in the nineteenth, the Finns, Caucasians and Moslems of Turkestan.

To say that the Moscow state avoided entering into regular diplomatic relations with foreign powers does not, therefore, mean that it had no foreign dealings. Even before the accession of Peter, the Russian government had at its disposal a great amount of foreign expertise, but this it had acquired from administering subject peoples, both Western and Oriental, not from dealing on equal terms with other sovereign states. The PosoVskii Prikaz (“Office of Ambassadors”) knew much less, relatively speaking, how to handle foreigners than did the Bureaus or prikazy of Kazan, Siberia, and Little Russia, which were charged with administering immense territories inhabited by peoples of alien races and religions. In some measure, the same held true of the imperial period during which the Ministries of War and of the Interior had more extensive day by day contacts with non-Russians than did the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The implications of this historical fact are not far to seek. A country whose governing apparatus has learned how to deal with foreign peoples from what are essentially colonial practices is not predisposed to think in terms of “a stable international community” or of “the balance of power.” Its instincts are to exert the maximum force and to regard absorption as the only dependable way of settling conflicts with other states, especially those adjoining one’s borders. There is little need here of theory, because the options available concern tactics rather than strategy or objectives.

To anyone acquainted with the rich literature on the international relations of the Western powers it must come as a surprise to learn that there is no definitive or even merely comprehensive history of Russian foreign policy. The literature on the theory of Russian foreign policy is so meagre that it may be said not to exist at all. That Russians have felt no need to compile the record of their external relations or to investigate its principles is in itself a significant fact, illustrative of their general attitude toward the outside world.

In analyzing the conduct of Russian foreign policy another peculiarity of Russian history must be taken into account, namely that its [state organization] had always been highly elitist. For reasons which cannot be gone into here, throughout Russia’s history its governments have administered the country by means of a servi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Russia’s Mission, America’s Destiny
• 2. Some Operational Principles of Soviet Foreign Policy
• 3. America, Russia, and Europe in the Light of the Nixon Doctrine
• 4. Détente: Moscow’s View
• 5. Détente: A Discussion with George R. Urban
• 6. Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War
• 7. Soviet Global Strategy
• 8. Militarism and the Soviet State
• Index