Word: soviet
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...kept turning up in the back of our box at the opera . . . the embarrassed refusals of nearly everyone whom we asked to our rooms for a chat and a cup of tea. ... It is a fact of pointed interest to Americans, since it is shaping-or warping-the entire Soviet foreign policy...
During the war Author John Fischer,* an associate editor of Harper's, studied Soviet affairs for the Board of Economic Warfare; in 1946 he spent about two months in the Ukraine as a member of the UNRRA mission. As if to answer former UNRRA colleagues who attacked "inaccuracies" in his Harper's articles, he admits that he hardly qualifies as a full-fledged Soviet expert. But he thinks he learned why the Russians act as they do, and puts his case plainly and without rancor...
...Ukraine, Fischer writes, he saw little of the conspiratorial bitterness generally supposed to pervade the Soviet Union. "Nowhere have I ever met more generous, kindly folk, nor any who behaved with such instinctive courtesy." Members of the UNRRA mission rode about in their own automobiles as they chose, "nor did anyone ever try to prevent us talking to people on the streets." Workers in factories arid on farms were obviously short of comforts, and grumbled about hard times. But the grumbling was "not much different from that of American consumers who are fed up with food shortages and house hunting...
That the U.S.S.R. itself will deliberately provoke a major war Fischer doubts; the country, he believes, will be far too weak during the next 20 to 30 years. The danger as he sees it is rather that the Soviet Union might stumble into war through trying to repair its weakness-i.e., in trying to widen its protective belt of satellite states, it may encroach on the West's own conception of security...
Framework for America. Author Fischer recommends endless U.S. patience and tact, coupled with a positive doctrine of thus-far-and-no-farther. "So long as the Soviet leaders believe that an attack from the West is inevitable, they are not going to give up their kind of security.. . . Whether we like it or not, they have set the framework within which America must work out its own policy...