US/USSR handshakes - 18 July 1975

There was something touching and hopeful, and I thought, rather grim about the headlines which told us that on Thursday night, Russians picked out American tourists on the streets of Moscow, and gave them joyful bear hugs by way of saluting the successful docking of the Soviet and American spacecrafts.

One American news magazine, days before the successful link up, published the surprising sentence "that handshake between Thomas Stafford and Alexei Leonov is in a very real sense the major objective of the mission". I always suspect sentences that begin "in a very real sense", because they usually mean the writer's not quite sure of himself, but hopes to bully you into what he hopes is true. And both in the Moscow bear hugs and the handshake in space, what we are being asked to see is the triumph what we have, for so long, called, detente – a vague word, which in English, I suppose you could translate by relaxation, release of tension, a dissolving of fear and suspicion.

Everybody will know what I meant, when I said, the sight of ordinary Russians and Americans embracing in public, was touching, and hopeful. Heaven knows the ordinary decent people of all countries have sighed and yearned during the past 30 years, for an end to the watchful distrust with which American and Russia have eyed each other and to the massive armaments they have been building to ensure their security. And in spite of the corruption of governments and corporations, and the ranging violence of our time, I'm still hopeful enough to believe that in every land on earth, there is a body, of ordinary decent people. Whether that body can then make itself successfully heard is another question.

But many of you maybe puzzled by my saying that in those pictures of the mutual bunny hugs – a bear hug can kill you – there is also something grim. What I meant, to be quite blunt about it at the start, is that the bunny hugs on the streets of Moscow may very well be greeted in the Kremlin with the grin on the face of the tiger. It is possible, and many of us would long for it to be true, that Mr Brezhnev and his colleagues deeply hope for an end to mutual suspicion and are willing to let other nations go their own way without instruction or subversion from Moscow.

And if this implies an unfair suspicion about the long-range motives of Moscow, it’s true that they can point out that lately there has been precious little evidence of goodwill on the part of the Americans, what with the disgraceful interference of the CIA in the political fate of other nations, not to mention this week’s disclosure that American oil companies have been spending millions of dollars to bribe political parties of every stripe, including the Communists in other nations, so that they will still be in business no matter who comes out on top. It looks like six of one and half a dozen of the other.

But – and it’s a very important but – the revelations about the near-criminal activities of the CIA and the briberies of the oil companies, have been forced into the open, not by foreign agents or refugees or journalists, but by the Americans themselves, and mainly by investigating committees of the Senate of the United States. Whatever else is wrong with America, there is no disposition on the part of the elected representatives of her people to hide the mote in her own eye. There is no more worrisome or vital institution in the American system than the investigating committee of Congress. It never sleeps, and so it’s always revealing a mess, somewhere or other – usually in its own government and in American business.

Well, it's putting it very mildly indeed to say that there is no comparable watchdog over the Soviet government or the behaviour of its trade commissions. Time and again the very useful United Nations' surveys of life, and business, health, industry, armies and navies of the member nations, they always end with blanks and the footnote "No figures available for the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China".

For 30 years, the Soviet Union in particular has gone on preaching peace, deploring the aggression of others and insistently protesting its devotion to democracy in the hope of our not noticing that whatever else they have in their country, democracy is not it. Even Hitler didn’t act so mealy-mouthed about the language of government. He said that democracy stank, and away with it.

So people all over the world argue about the intentions of the Russians, not on agreed facts, but on the basis of what they like to think must be true. From time to time some powerful Russian figure, a scientist or a writer, escapes or is such a haggling nuisance at home that he is allowed to leave. This happened with refugees from Nazi Germany and the distinguished ones, the Einsteins and Thomas Manns and the like, spoke out in their new lands and they gave frightening testimony about the outrages in their homeland which – and this is worth remembering – which the ordinary decent body of Germans hadn’t heard about, or didn’t want to hear about.

I vividly remember what happened in the late 1930s when these distinguished exiles arrived in the United States at a time when Americans were fearful that, if there was a European war, they’d be dragged into it. The arrival of people like Einstein was highly uncomfortable for those Americans who hoped that Hitler might be bought off or, somehow, neutralised. President Roosevelt was almost blatantly, pro-Ally from the start, so he had no compunction about inviting Einstein to the White House.

But a lot of people protested the invitation, not because Einstein was a malign figure – on the contrary it would be hard to imagine a more loveable political innocent, a more Disney-like teddy bear – but Einstein bore witness to the persecution and the obscenities of Hitler’s Third Reich. He made it harder for isolationalists to say that Hitler’s outrages had been exaggerated or to believe that buying him off was an honourable thing to do.

Well, history has a habit of repeating itself in extremely uncomfortable ways, and there has appeared in America a Russian refugee, not a teddy bear, not a political innocent, but an extremely articulate, some say, a great, writer, who on the subject of Russian aims and intentions, is keeping about as quiet as John the Baptist. He is Alexander Solzhenitsyn. A year ago, all of us rejoiced when he came out, and his book The Gulag Archipelago was read with almost reverent respect by people of all political views. So long as Mr Solzhenitsyn kept his frightful revelations in print, and between hard covers, he was a great man.

But then, about a month ago he came out with a terrifying article which was no more reasonable or contemplative in tone than the blast of the trump of doom. It was about the third world war. He said that the third world war was not on its way, it was already well along, and the Russians were winning it all along the line.

He listed all the countries that had succumbed to Russian pressure, one way or another, since the second war. He made a pitiless count of the treaties with the west which had been broken or ignored. He noted the penetration of Russian arms, and influence, across the Mediterranean, into the Middle East and Africa. The so-called uncommitted world, he saw already, as a very committed and uncomplaining and, in the United Nations, a jubilant Russian satellite.

Well, it was to students of political science, shall we say, a bit thick. It was a very distressing piece because it didn’t suggest, it proclaimed, that the western world, is already doomed. Well an article is soon forgotten and pretty soon we heard from Dr Kissinger and Mr Gromyko about fresh hopes for the arms limitations talks. And then coming up there was the great cooperative effort in space – I ought to say that the space link-up did not produce general rejoicing in America, there is no question that the Americans are way ahead of the Russians in space technology and some people, conservatives especially, thought that $250million was quite a price to pay for teaching the Russians a good deal about space techniques they would like to know.

By an unfortunate coincidence, the spacemen were strapped in their crafts just as Alexander Solzhenitsyn surfaced, very visibly, to make a public address before 2400 members of the national industrial trade union, the most powerful labour body in the United States. At the very moment that we were all ready to let bygones be bygones and believe fiercely in the goodness of the Soviet-American get-together, Mr Solzhenitsyn has the nerve to get up in a public forum, denounce Communism as a slavish tyranny, deplore Soviet-American friendship as an evil sneer, and warn us all again that sooner or later people who cherish their liberty cannot truck with a system that is unflaggingly dedicated to suppressing liberty wherever it dares to raise its voice.

Mr Solzhenitsyn, in other words, was a nuisance. He was an embarrassing nuisance to not only to the White House but to political moderates, and to liberals who have praised him, because he suddenly became the darling of the right, of the Reagans and the Goldwaters, and the hard hats who have always applauded any abuse – not only of Russia, but of any regime anywhere that calls itself socialist, or liberal.

But, the melancholy mistake made by many liberals was to say that because Mr Solzhenitsyn was suddenly embraced by the right, he is therefore a rightist reactionary. This is a mean insult to a brave man. Maybe, let us pray, the Russian-American handshake in space does signify an era in which, since we have to get along with the Russians, we shall manage to do so without finding ourselves out-armed, out-tricked and out-flanked by them. But whether that is possible or not, we still have to face the contradiction between the Russians' beautiful gestures and the shuddering facts of the kind of life their system imposes.

We, too, can embrace the Russian in a bunny hug, provided we take care to see that in the process, we are not being frisked. And meanwhile, though Mr Solzhenitsyn is an embarrassment, we'd better admit that he is the same sort of embarrassment, in a comfortable time, as Savanarola, and Thomas Jefferson and John Milton.

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