![]() At the height of the Cold War it was widely believed that the Russian people, not just their leaders, were somehow not human, The subsequent discovery that Russians had no horns, that they, too, were born and died, suffered and loved, that they grew tomatoes and produced cars and toilet paper (albeit sometimes of inferior quality), that they too were afflicted with pollution and tooth aches came almost as a shock. If the political system and the cultural environment happen to be as different as the American and the Soviet are, the difficulties of understanding seem insurmount able. The key to the riddle is psychological: People all over the world tend to interpret events by their own values and experience. On the contrary, a solid body of knowledge has been amassed over the years. It simply is not true that we know very little about the Soviet Union. Looking back on more than a quarter of a century of American‐Soviet relations, the great riddle is not what Soviet policy is, but rather why so little progress has been made in understanding it. The history of American‐Soviet relations is full of spirits which had to be laid to rest: the spirit of Geneva and the spirit of Camp David, the spirit of Paris and the spirit of Vienna. On past occasions American public opinion has almost invariably erred on the side of exag gerated hopes, followed inevitably by feelings of equally unwarranted anticlimax. But the proof of the pudding, to quote a phrase Karl Marx was fond of, is in the eating. It is encouraging to know that Leonid Brezhnev accepts the principles of sovereign ty and noninterference. There were long communiques about common principles, but the decisive issue whether these principles will lead to firmer struc tures of peace. With the possible exception of the ABM treaty, the agreements signed in Moscow were not in themselves of exactly overwhelming po litical importance. So although there was nearly unanimous praise last spring for the Nixon‐Brezhnev summit meet ing, although it was promptly hailed then as a turning point, a milestone the opening of an era, that meeting, too, will be judged by its ultimate consequences. Interpretations change radically over the years. Today we take a more balanced view of Yalta: It was not a betrayal because most Western concessions were probably inevitable but neither was it a page of glory in the annals of American diplomacy. ![]() “We were absolutely certain that we had won the first great victory of peace.” And the Soviet press announced that Yalta was a “memorable milestone on the road to ensure world peace and security.” Ten years later, at the height of the Cold War, Yalta had become a synonym for a sellout. “We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day,” wrote Harry Hopkins. When President Roosevelt returned from Yalta in 1945, there was hardly a dissenting voice.
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