YU. KASHLEV

Progress Publishers Moscow

Translated from the Russian by David Sinclair-Loutit Designed by Yevgeni Permyakov

CONTENTS

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Author's Introduction

Page 7

History Reviewed

The Course Laid Out by Lenin Through the Ice-Floes of the Cold War The Main Trend

11 12 17 25

\

First printing 1979

«Mojio^a5i rsapAHH» 1976 English translation © Progress Publishers 1979

Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

II

The Peace Programme in Action

29

To Eliminate the Hotbeds of War!

33 For a Radical Turn Towards Detente and Peace in

Europe

40

The Historic Helsinki Conference

52 The USSR and the USA; From Confrontation to

Co-operation

66

III

The 25th Congress of the CPSU: For Disarmament and

Detente

81

Socialism and Peace Are Inseparable

81

A Task of the First Priority

86

Implementing the Helsinki Agreements

111

The Belgrade Meeting and Human Aspirations

118

For the Sake of Peace and Freedom

123

men 1

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IV

Detente: Who Profits and Who Loses from It? "I Want to Be Alive" In the Interests of All Nations

i*

131 131 136

014(01)---79

An Instrument of Co-operation The Enemies of Detente

,142 148

Peaceful Coexistence and the Struggle Between Ideologies

``Ideologisation" or ``Deideologisation''?

Today's Urgent Problems

True and False Defenders of Democracy

The Right to Know: Who Is Better Informed?

The Struggle for the Minds and Souls of the Young

Conclusion

161 161 166 170 182 197

Mankind has fought over 14,000 large and small wars. These have carried away nearly 4,000,000,000 human lives-that is to say about the same number as there are people living in the world today.

The Soviet Union suffered the greatest losses during the Second World War: the nazis destroyed 1,710 towns, burnt 72,000 villages, and razed 32,000 factories.

Since 1945 the world has spent 6,000,000,000,000 dollars on arms-that is to say about the total gross product of all the world's countries in 1976. Over half this sum was spent by the United States of America alone.

Since 1945 the USSR has made a total of about 70 important proposals on the questions of disarmament and consolidating international security.

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION

Over the last few years I have taken part in several very interesting and very different international conferences and meetings-in Moscow, Paris, Nairobi, Belgrade, and elsewhere. All of these left me with the impression that international relations, especially between the socialist and the capitalist countries, have entered a new stage, that times have truly changed since the days of open confrontation and the cold war.

In this respect I find particularly memorable the two years I spent in Geneva where I was taking part in the drawing up of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe. The external appearance of that cosy Swiss town which fits like a horseshoe on the shore of Lake Geneva provided a sharp contrast to what was going on in the town's numerous conference halls: in these passions were boiling and diplomats arguing; besides the preparatory meetings for the European Conference, the Soviet-American Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, sittings of the UN Committee on Disarmament, and many other conferences and meetings were all taking place there simultaneously. Documents were being drawn up at all these that would influence the course of events far beyond Switzerland's frontiers and even far beyond Europe's.

While all being interesting and important in themselves, all these negotiations taken together provided a picture of a dynamic international political life resembling a vast building site where decrepit houses are being knocked down at the same time as new ones that are to stand for many years to come are being erected. Seeing all this from close up, it was impossible not to be struck by the importance of the about-turn away from the former con-

frontation in international relations towards general cooperation and a better mutual understanding between nations that was then being accomplished. It was an about-turn that the Soviet Union had worked for throughout the 60 years of its existence. Today, too, the country considers the consolidation of peace to be its main foreign policy task.

One of the clearest and most convincing proofs of the Soviet Union's faithfulness to the cause of peace among nations was the passage in October 1977 of the new Constitution of the USSR. I happened at that time to be in Yugoslavia's capital at the meeting of the representatives of the 35 states which took part in the European Conference. Many of the participants in the Belgrade meeting took the opportunity at official sittings to congratulate the Soviet Union on the passage of its Constitution, a document that embodies mankind's dreams of peace and friendship between nations. It not only once again reaffirmed the Soviet Union's unshakable line for peace, security, and mutual understanding between nations, but also -and this most directly concerned the work then being done at the Belgrade meeting-gave force of law to all the main principles of interstate relations contained in the Final Act signed in Helsinki.

Regrettably, however, the Western countries do not wish to take upon themselves any constitutional or international legal obligations to strive for the peace and security of all nations. The arms race continues and there are not infrequent aggravations of tension. Mankind would seem to be at a crossroads from which it can either take the path of detente, security, and co-operation or that of continuing the arms race and at best balancing on the brink of war.

The international situation in the last quarter of the 20th century will depend on what is done and how things are done in this respect. Will it finally be possible to negotiate an end to the arms race and agree to disarm or are various countries going to continue to stockpile weapons

that endanger mankind's very existence? Will it be possible to turn the international detente which has just begun into a truly universal and irreversible process or will the enemies of peace manage to slow it down or even torpedo it? Will mankind find a way to join forces to fight such scourges as hunger, illiteracy, the diseases from which millions and millions of people surfer in the world, and the damage being done to the ecological balance or will all these things be left as a sorry legacy to the 21st century?

These are the kind of problem we have on our agenda today. What I would like to do in this book is to examine the heart of these problems and ways of solving them, to recall certain pertinent facts about modern political life, to describe what I have seen at the international negotiations being held nowadays, my fears in connection with the activities of the enemies of peace and detente, and my faith in the possibility of irreversibly excluding war from the facts of human life.

I HISTORY REVIEWED

The 1970s began under the sign of what came to be called in the West the "Soviet peace offensive" which is considered to have started with the 24th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the spring of 1971. The immense and truly historic significance of the Congress lay in particular in the fact that it correctly, on the basis of a profound scientific analysis of international development trends, defined the moment at which a radical reorganisation of the relations between the socialist and capitalist worlds had become possible and inevitable. The Congress approved a Peace Programme that was unprecedented in depth and scope and at the same time realistic. This Programme constituted an agenda, an action programme for the whole of international life for many years to come.

What is the most important aspect of the colossal change that has come about in the world situation since then? In brief, it is that the principles of the peaceful coexistence of the socialist and capitalist countries have been widely accepted and recognised as the only possible basis for the whole structure of international relations. The historic significance of this change cannot be overestimated: without it the transition from confrontation and cold war to the socialist and capitalist countries' mutually profitable co-operation, the elimination of the most dangerous hotbeds of war on the globe, and the consolidation of the prospects for peace in this and future generations would all have been unthinkable. That all this has become possible is without a doubt due mainly to the socialist countries and to the Soviet Union, to their consistent and peaceful foreign policies whose foundations were laid by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

The Course Laid Out by Lenin

This incident took place a few years ago. A group of foreign tourists was being shown round the study of the founder of the Soviet state in the Kremlin and their attention was caught by one of the objects on Lenin's desk: a bronze statuette of a monkey sitting on a copy of Darwin's On the Origin of Species and thoughtfully examining a human skull. The guide explained that the statuette had been given to Lenin in 1921 by an American businessman whose name was unfortunately no longer known.

``I can give you some help in this," one of the visitors broke in. "His name was Hammer, Armand Hammer. That's me." And the elderly American recounted the story of how he had been one of the first Western businessmen to visit Moscow, how he had been received by Lenin, and how he had given him that statuette. On doing so, Hammer had said that the statuette in his opinion illustrated Darwin's theory of man's evolution from monkeys. Lenin had disagreed with him and given his own interpretation, saying that the sculptor had wanted to warn mankind about how it might become degraded and return to a primeval state if people did not put an end to wars and start living peacefully with one another.

To live peacefully with one another. ... With Lenin this was not just words. One of the results of the Great October Socialist Revolution was that it posed a principally new problem: on what basis were the relations between the first workers' and peasants' state and the capitalist world around it to be based? This was a question that Marx and Engels had not elaborated theoretically since they had supposed that the proletarian revolution would be victorious not in one but in several capitalist countries simultaneously. Neither was there any seeking the answer to this question in the annals of the past.

Lenin considered that the main task of Soviet foreign policy at that time was to ensure conditions favourable to the building of socialism in Russia. "The position of

the socialist revolution in Russia," he wrote, "must form the basis of any definition of the international tasks of our Soviet power."* After the 1917 October Revolution, the building of socialism in practice became not only a vital national requirement for Soviet Russia, but also the first socialist state's main internationalist duty to the workers of the world, the main way in which it could help develop the international revolutionary movement. The very fact that it was struggling for peace and for peaceful coexistence with the capitalist countries meant that it had to preserve the gains made by the workers of Russia and of the world-the victorious socialist system-and at the same time help accelerate the world revolutionary process, the social and national liberation of all exploited and oppressed people. Lenin once said that the Bolsheviks had created a completely new set of international relations which would make it possible for all the oppressed nations to throw off the imperialists' yoke. According to Lenin, the Soviet state's foreign policies had to be an important revolutionising factor that would help the cause of socialist revolution. Thus, even then the foundations laid by Lenin to socialist foreign policy contained two main principles: proletarian internationalism and the peaceful coexistence of states with differing social systems.

Lenin put particular emphasis on the question of war and peace in the complex tangle of foreign political tasks facing the young socialist republic after the October Revolution. "We know, we know only too well," he wrote, "the incredible misfortunes that war brings to the workers and peasants. For that reason our attitude to this question must be most cautious and circumspect."""* Never doubting in the victorious advance of socialism around the planet, Lenin decisively rejected in his uncompromising struggle

* V. I. Lenin, "On the History of the Question of the Unfortunate Peace", Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 443.

** V. I. Lenin, "Ninth All-Russia Congress of Soviets", Collected Works, Vol. 33, p. 148.

against leftist adventurism, the ``export'' of revolution or any violent instigating of it from outside by means of war. Socialism needs no aggressive wars, something alien to its very nature, to come out victorious. On the contrary, it is precisely the struggle for peace which is becoming socialism's main foreign policy task since it is in conditions of peace that it can best prove itself and make fuller use of the advantages over the capitalist system inherent in it for the good of its people and of the world revolutionary movement.

Basing himself on a scientific analysis of these propositions, Lenin came to the conclusion:

-the peaceful coexistence of states with differing social systems was unavoidable and would be a reality for a long historical period;

-peaceful coexistence was desirable from the point of view of the current and long-term interests of the building of socialism in Russia, of the world revolutionary process, of the working masses and of all peoples fighting for their social and national liberation.

These extremely important conclusions lie at the basis of the foreign policy actions of the CPSU and of the Soviet state to this day.

That the socialist state's first foreign policy document was the Decree on Peace signed by Lenin is well known and also very symbolic. In it Soviet Russia proposed to the warring states that they immediately open negotiations with a view to concluding a just and democratic peace and expressed its resolve to "conclude peace successfully, and at the same time emancipate the labouring and exploited masses of our population from all forms of slavery and all forms of exploitation".*

What was imperialism's answer to this noble call from the socialist state? Blinded by hatred for the Land of Soviets, the West's ruling class was unable then (and for

a long time afterwards) to grasp the historical inevitability of peaceful coexistence with the socialist state and adopted aggression as its foreign policy line towards Soviet Russia. It is from those days that Winston Churchill's cynical call for the Bolshevik baby to be smothered in its cradle dates, while US President Woodrow Wilson declared in 1918 that the Allied powers considered Bolshevism the only enemy against which they ought to rally.

The years immediately following the October Revolution saw the armed intervention of 14 capitalist states against Soviet Russia, the economic blockade of the country, its diplomatic isolation, and the deployment of a monstrous campaign of lies and slander about socialism.

Yet revolutionary Russia withstood the three years of armed struggle forced upon it by the imperialists and continued to hold out to foreign nations the hand of friendship, confirming its desire for peace and peaceful coexistence with states with opposite social systems. Describing Soviet Russia's peaceful foreign policy. People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs Georgi Chicherin said at a meeting of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee in June 1920: "We are guiding neither our system nor our power towards confrontation.. .. Our slogan has never changed: peaceful coexistence with other governments, whatever they represent."*

The first representative conference in which the Soviet state participated was held in Genoa in 1922. It was there that Lenin's ideas concerning the peaceful coexistence of states with differing social systems were heard for the first time from an international rostrum. "While retaining the principles of communism as its point of view," went in part the Soviet delegation's declaration at this conference, "the Russian delegation recognises that the present historical epoch which allows for the existence in parallel of the old and the nascent social systems makes it urgently necessary that there be economic co-operation between

* Documents on Soviet Foreign Policy, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, pp. 638-39 (in Russian).

* V. I. Lenin, "Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies", Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 252.

the states representing these two systems of property ownership... ."* Soviet diplomats have invariably confirmed their belief in the principle of peaceful coexistence at every international forum in which they have since participated.

The Soviet socialist state's international position grew ever stronger along with its political and economic consolidation. There came a time when the USSR was diplomatically recognised, when our country began to take an active part in international talks and in the activities of international organisations.

In the 1930s, as a result of the aggression of the Japanese militarists against China and the establishment of the nazi dictatorship in Germany, universal peace found itself in real danger. The Soviet Union energetically participated in diplomatic activities to ensure collective security, signing treaties on mutual aid with France and Czechoslovakia, expressing its readiness to conclude a convention on mutual military aid with Britain, and as a whole doing all that could be done to prevent a world war. But at this stage, too, anti-communist feelings among the most reactionary ruling circles of the West took the upper hand: their policies led to the Munich deal with Hitler and their desire to use the fascists to strike a mortal blow against the land of socialism resulted in the outbreak of the bloodiest war in mankind's history.

The Second World War, nevertheless, demonstrated in practice the possibility of various kinds of co-- operationmilitary, political, and economic-between the Soviet Union and the capitalist states united in an anti-fascist coalition. The differences in their social systems did not prevent them from joining in the struggle against the common enemy-nazi Germany. The Soviet Union not only defended its socialist gains and its national independence at the cost of the lives of 20 million of its sons and daughters who fell in the struggle against nazism, but also saved many

* Documents of Soviet Foreign Policy, Vol. V, Moscow, 1961, pp. 191-92 (in Russian).

countries from being enslaved by the nazis. The gratitude to the Soviet Union expressed on many occasions both orally and in writing by the top leaders of the USA, Britain, France, and of other capitalist states is known to all. It seemed then that they, like the rest of the world, had learned from that war the truth-that the new social system victorious in the USSR could not be destroyed by force of arms and that the West should, therefore, direct its policies towards peaceful coexistence and mutually profitable co-operation with the Soviet Union. The war years demonstrated that this was not only possible, but simply imperative in the interests of peace and the progress of mankind.

Through the Ice-Floes of the Cold War

Unfortunately, the lessons of the war were soon forgotten by the ruling circles of the United States of America, Britain, and the other imperialist powers. They developed the aggressive anti-Soviet doctrine of "containing communism", the policies "from positions of strength" and of "balancing on the brink of war". What were they hoping for? To prevent the victory of socialism in the countries of Eastern Europe and Asia, to ``undermine'' the USSR's economy by means of the arms race, atomic blackmail, and economic blockade, to paralyse the Soviet Union's foreign policy initiatives, and in the final count to establish imperialism's undivided rule worldwide.

It has recently become fashionable in the West to discuss the sources of the cold war. Many historians and political commentators in Western Europe and the USA are now looking back at the events of thirty years ago in a search for the precise date of the start of the cold war and the names of its fathers. As a rule they strive to lead their readers or listeners to believe that the cold war and the international tensions and the arms race resulting from it were to be blamed on the Soviet Union and on the "aggressive line" of the Kremlin.

2---547

Meanwhile, studies not only by progressive, but also by a number of bourgeois authors far from sympathetic towards socialism describe the events that led to the sharp post-1945 worsening of relations between the former Allies in the anti-Hitler coalition in reasonably thorough detail backed up by documents. Before the Second World War was over certain forces in the leaderships of the Western countries, the USA and Britain in the first place, worried not so much about defeating nazi Germany as about preparing for the post-war confrontation with the Soviet Union and their dream of making it obey the diktat of imperialism. It was precisely these forces that came to power in the United States of America after Roosevelt's death in the spring of 1945. Among their numbers were the country's new President Harry S. Truman, the future Secretary of State and author of anti-Soviet doctrines John Foster Dulles, the banker and the first Secretary of the Department of National Defence James Vincent Forrestal (who, incidentally, was later literally ``maddened'' by the "Soviet threat" and threw himself out of the window of a psychiatric hospital shouting that Russian tanks were invading Washington), and many other political figures and representatives of big business and the military who as early as 1945 had promulgated the taking of a "hard line" towards the Soviet Union. They were the ones who urged the manufacture of the American atomic bomb which was ``tested'' in August 1945 on Hiroshima and later on Nagasaki. One American political figure in fact said that the bomb dropped on Nagasaki was not the last bomb of the Second World War, but the first bomb of the third world war. And it was clear to all against whom that war was to be fought.

America's military-industrial complex was striving not to lose the huge profits to which it had become accustomed during the war by heightening international tensions and accelerating the arms race and stood behind the supporters of confrontation with the Soviet Union. The American US News EWorld Report wrote that in the

formula "cold war" the USA's leaders had found something similar to a "perpetual motion machine" for the economy, a method for extracting vast sums of money from the tax-payers who financed the arms race. The journal recognised that if all the possibilities offered by the cold war were used to the full, the money inflow would be practically unlimited. (Skipping ahead in time, it should be said that in the following years the American militaryindustrial complex did not do at all badly out of the cold war, earning itself trillions of dollars all in all.)

The very term "cold war" was invented, as is well known, by the US government adviser on foreign policy matters after the war Bernard Baruch, a financier, and was later given currency by the well-known publicist Walter Lippmann, who used it as a title to a series of articles.

The part of main trumpeter of the cold war was given to Winston Churchill who came out in March 1946 in the American town of Fulton with a provocative antiSoviet speech. The threats contained in it and his blackmail of the Soviet Union were demonstratively applauded by his select American audience with Harry S. Truman at their head. Churchill's speech in the town of Fulton is considered to be the date on which the cold war was officially declared.

Although not a few attempts are still being made today in the West to falsify the truth about what took place then, to deny the universally known facts about the reasons for the cold war and who was to blame for it is becoming ever harder. Thus, the American historian Arthur Schlesinger recognises in his book The Crisis ot Confidence that after the Second World War the United States of America abandoned the policy of co-operation that had been followed during the fighting and, influenced by its possession of the atomic bomb, started down the path of aggression with the aim of liquidating Russia's influence in Eastern Europe and creating capitalist states around the Soviet Union's frontiers.

2«

Soon after the beginning of the cold war American imperialism and its Western allies embraced the aggressive doctrine of "rolling back" communism. Its authors called openly for a preventive war to put an end to the socialist system in the USSR and in the People's Democracies. The Korean war (1950-1953), the attempted antisocialist putsch in East Berlin (1953), the counter-- revolutionary uprising in Hungary (1956), the formation of NATO and of other aggressive blocs, the ``balancing'' on the brink of "hot war", the all-out "psychological war" against socialism, the discrimination in the field of trade, and the formation of an immense anti-communist propaganda apparatus were the elements that made up the cold war (and, as can be seen from the events in Korea, not just a cold war) that imperialism waged against the socialist countries and which reached its apogee in the early 1950s. In those days the American leaders allowed themselves to mock the very term "peaceful coexistence" in public and to joke that only over their dead bodies would they ever allow such a coexistence with the Communists.

However, neither the cold war, nor the economic blockade, nor its undermining activities helped imperialism to prevent the formation and consolidation of the world socialist system, the restoration and headlong upsurge of the Soviet Union's economic and defence might. It was precisely this growth in the might of the socialist world that sobered the rabid supporters of the cold war.

In the international diplomatic arena the period from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s was notable for the Soviet Union's particularly active struggle for peace in accordance with the foreign policy programme elaborated by the 20th Congress of the CPSU (1956). Throughout that time the USSR provided an example of benevolence and goodwill, carrying out several considerable reductions in its armed forces and proposing a concrete programme for universal and total disarmament.

It was at this stage that the struggle for the acceptance

of the principle of peaceful coexistence took on a new scale and importance: firstly, it was already being defended not by the Soviet Union alone, but by the whole community of socialist states, giving it extra strength; secondly, this campaign coincided with the rocket and nuclear arms race which was threatening the very existence of whole nations-and the realisation of this, undoubtedly, added to the strength of the worldwide peace movement, making many socio-political movements abroad and millions of people of goodwill on all continents ally themselves with the socialist countries in the struggle for peaceful coexistence. Suffice it to say that as early as 1951 the famous Stockholm Appeal to ban atomic weapons was signed by over 500 million people worldwide. By the late 1950s the international peace movement had grown still larger and, naturally, exerted a certain influence in questions of war and peace on the West's ruling circles.

The proposition formulated and confirmed in the materials of the Communist parties' congresses that a new world war was not utterly unavoidable and could be prevented by the joint efforts of the socialist community together with the non-socialist states following peaceful foreign policies, the international workers' movement, and other forces fighting for peace was of tremendous significance in the introduction of the principle of peaceful coexistence into the practice of international relations. The appearance of a real possibility of preventing the outbreak of another world war meant that the objective conditions for the triumph of the principles of the peaceful coexistence of states with differing social systems had been created and that furthermore this had become an objective necessity if human society was to develop. It was with all clarity that the peoples of the world were faced with the choice of either peaceful coexistence or catastrophic war. Naturally, the number of people and the politicians who expressed themselves in favour of peaceful coexistence grew with every passing day.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, fighting for

international recognition of the principle of peaceful coexistence, put the question more broadly, not seeing it as just a matter of excluding war from the relations between the socialist countries and the capitalist world. The new Programme adopted by the 22nd Congress of the CPSU in 1961 formulated in the following way what "the peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems" meant. This was "renunciation of war as a means of settling international disputes, and their solution by negotiation; equality, mutual understanding, and trust between countries; consideration for each other's interests; non-interference in internal affairs; recognition of the right of every people to solve all the problems of their country by themselves; strict respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries; promotion of economic and cultural co-operation on the basis of complete equality and mutual benefit".*

The policy of peaceful coexistence followed by the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries was actively supported by the Communist parties of other countries, progressive organisations, and all supporters of the peace movement. The Meeting of Representatives of the Communist and Workers' Parties held in Moscow in 1960 declared the struggle for the peaceful coexistence of states with differing social systems to be one of the main aims of the international communist and workers' movement.

The popularity and international acceptance of the principle of peaceful coexistence was objectively helped by the process of the disintegration of imperiajism's colonial system, which began after the Second World War, by the appearance on its ruins of new African and Asian states, and by the awakening to active political life of the multimillion masses of the so-called Third World. The newly independent states, naturally, turned to the experience of their ally, the USSR, and the whole socialist camp in elaborating the standards for their relations between themselves and with the outside world. Lenin's

* The Road to Communism, Moscow, 1962, pp. 505-506.

concept of peaceful coexistence exerted a great deal of influence on the elaboration of the five famous principles "pancha shila"---abstention from the threat or use of force, the settling of disagreements by peaceful means, non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, equality and self-determination of nations, and so on-which were widely supported at representative international forums of the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The Soviet Union's great successes in the economic, scientific and technological fields, its peaceful initiatives, and the tangible increase in Soviet society's international links all led to a marked change in the international climate in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, to rapid growth of friendly interest in the Soviet Union and in the theory and practice of socialism.

Just one example by way of illustration. 4 October 1957. The launching into space of the first Soviet sputnik. The Soviet sputnik caused a sensation abroad. In a matter of hours this Russian word entered the vocabularies of innumerable languages, found its way into newspaper headlines, and was broadcast into the ether. Even the usually restrained Austrians congratulated us, Soviet people, with unfeigned delight and amazement.

A few years later, on 12 April 1961, the world was shaken by an even greater sensation: the first man was in space-a Soviet citizen, Yuri Gagarin. "Sputnik", `` Gagarin'', "peaceful coexistence"-these words with every passing day grew in popularity worldwide.

The 1960s are sometimes called the decade of unused possibilities insofar as the relations between the socialist and the capitalist countries are concerned. This in the first place refers to Soviet-American relations. The breakdown of the cold war's concepts and psychology which began in the late 1950s took place in stops and starts in the American leadership. The Washington politicians who were beginning to realise the hopelessness of their former anti-communist military-strategic doctrines and the un-

avoidability of the recognition of the principles of peaceful coexistence with the USSR were opposed by the aggressive wing of the American leadership, by the military-- industrial complex, and by ultra-rightist forces. As a result, the United States' foreign policy line towards the USSR was marked in the 1960s by inconsistency and contradictoriness.

In May 1960 the US militarists undertook a deliberate provocation-they sent a U-2 spy plane into the USSR's air space. The plane was shot down by a Soviet rocket, but the provocation itself and the position taken on this matter by the US Government put a stop to the normalisation that had just set in in American-Soviet relations.

In the early 1960s the American leadership visibly gave way to the pressure of the militarists, considerably accelerating the arms race and making the attempt at armed intervention against revolutionary Cuba. This provoked the so-called Caribbean crisis (October 1962), the most dangerous moment since the Second World War and one that could have ended in thermonuclear warfare. All this had a strong sobering effect on the members of the US ruling circles. Washington afterwards began to try to ease the tension in American-Soviet relations and as a result it was possible in late 1963 to conclude the Moscow Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space and Under Water. This was the first important step towards restraining the nuclear arms race in the post-war period.

This trend towards detente was again halted by the West's actions, in the first place those of the American militarists. Lyndon Johnson, who had become President of the USA after John Kennedy's assassination, took the course of involving the USA ever more deeply in the Indochinese conflict and in 1965 sent a many-- thousandstrong American army to Vietnam. The years of American imperialism's armed aggression against the heroic people of Vietnam will always remain a black spot on America's conscience.

US leaders furthermore tried to depict the intervention in Indochina as a "peripheral conflict" which ought not to affect Soviet-American relations. Certain leading Americans even hinted that they would ``agree'' to peaceful coexistence if the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries ``forgot'' about Vietnam, ``sacrificed'' it for the sake of developing relations with the West and of international detente. The Soviet Union and the fraternal socialist countries understandably rejected this provocative approach. Basing themselves on the supreme Soviet foreign policy principle-that of proletarian internationalism-the leaders of the CPSU and of the Soviet state repeatedly declared that a cessation of the American aggression against the Vietnamese people was the indispensable condition for the normalisation of Soviet-American relations.

The development of normal relations between the socialist and capitalist states was also hindered by the aggravation of the international situation resulting from the war between Israel and Arab countries in 1967 when the imperialist countries openly sided with the Israeli aggressors. The events in Czechoslovakia in 1968 during which the West in accordance with its latest anti-communist doctrine of "building bridges" undertook an attempt to restore capitalism in that country by means of a "quiet counter-revolution" and to ``extract'' that country from the socialist community also exerted a negative influence on the normalisation of relations between East and West. All this, of course, could not but lead to Soviet-American relations, and the relations between the socialist and capitalist countries in general, remaining throughout the second half of the 1960s at practically a standstill.

The Main Trend

Meanwhile in those years, too, an unhaltable trend was becoming ever more apparent in the international arenathe trend towards world socialism consolidating its posi-

tions at the expense of those of the imperialist camp. In the field of economics this was most clearly seen in the headlong growth of socialism's share in the world economy. In volume of industrial production the Soviet Union overtook the FRG, Britain, and France taken together and by 1977 the country's output was about 80 per cent that of the USA.

Socialism's economic successes are particularly striking if one examines the countries which are members of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA). With a population of less than one-tenth of mankind (about 370 million), their share of world industrial production rose from 10.4 per cent in 1946 to 33 per cent in 1970, while by 1976 this had risen still further to reach

37.5 per cent.

In other words, per capita industrial production in the CMEA countries is over three times as great as the world average, while in total volume it is greater than that of the USA or of the West European Common Market. More important still, however, is that socialism is continuing to maintain its lead in economic growth rates; between 1950 and 1975 the volume of industrial production in the CMEA countries increased twelvefold. Between 1970 and 1976 their industrial production increased by 56 per cent, while in the developed capitalist countries the figure was a mere 17 per cent.

The ruling circles in the West could, of course, not but recognise the socialist countries' achievements in yet another field closely related with economics-the consoli^ ation of the military might and the defence capability of the socialist community. It was undeniably true in the 1970s, admitted President Nixon, that the Soviet Union possessed a mighty and modern strategic force that was close and in certain categories superior to the American one in numbers and technological and economic capacities.

It is all these changes that have forced the West to recognise the illogicality of an armed confrontation with the USSR and its allies and to build its relations with the

socialist countries on the basis of the principle of peaceful coexistence.

The political and ideological fields in the late 1960s saw a further strengthening of the unity of the fraternal socialist countries and of the world communist and workers' movement. The West's hope that there would be a "falling out" between some or other countries of the socialist community proved to be utterly unfounded; the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968-1969 demonstrated the unreality of plans to export counter-revolution to Eastern Europe. Neither were the imperialist strategists' hopes for the socialist community and the world communist movement being "undermined from within" as a result of the Chinese leadership's transition at that time to a policy of open hostility towards the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries to come true.

At the same time, the contradictions withL* the imperialist camp grew sharper. The United States, which had come out of the Second World War as the predominant force in the capitalist world and which produced almost half that world's total industrial output, has in the last few decades started to lose its dominant position, while its share in the world economy has begun to shrink visibly and competition between Western Europe and Japan has grown still more vicious. The currency crisis has turned out to be profound and chronic, economic slumps are occurring more frequently in the capitalist countries, the class struggle has grown more bitter, and the contradictions between imperialism and the national liberation movement have become more marked. The leading imperialist powers are feeling with ever greater force the negative consequences of the arms race. This has led to a situation in which even within these states' ruling classes voices are to be heard ever more often speaking out in favour of a radical review of those countries' relations with the socialist ones.

The aggravation of the general crisis of capitalism in the 1960s is another sign of the worsening of the crisis

within bourgeois society. For the USA the 1960s will be remembered as the period of that country's defeat in Vietnam, the period of inflation, of climbing crime rates, of worsening conditions in the towns, and of the worst civil disturbances of the century. The events of those years are fresh in the minds of many: the rise of the Black people's movement, mass demonstrations against the aggression in Vietnam, students' demonstrations fired upon.

The two main trends of the post-war period thus affected each other. The first was the steady strengthening of the positions of socialism which, as Lenin foresaw, turned into an international force able to exert "a decisive influence upon world politics as a whole"/^^1^^' The second trend was the aggravation of the general crisis of capitalism, the weakening of its international and domestic positions leading to the creation of a fundamentally new situation in the world arena in which it has become possible to achieve recognition by the West of the principle of the peaceful coexistence of states with differing social systems.

II

THE PEACE PROGRAMME IN ACTION

There are moments in international relations when changes that have slowly and quietly built up suddenly lead to a sharp qualitative shift, to a rapid change in the pattern of international life. Such a sudden shift has been taking place right before our eyes since the early 1970s, although, as has been shown above, the preparations for it were gradual and took place over the whole of the postwar period.

The new historical stage in the struggle for the peaceful coexistence of states belonging to two opposite world systems was opened, as has already been said, by the 24th Congress of the CPSU which was held in the spring of 1971. It was this congress that put forward the soundly based programme for the struggle for peace and international security-a complex of foreign policy measures of unprecedented scale and significance involving all the most important trends in the struggle for detente and the acceptance of the principle of peaceful coexistence. I would like here to quote in full the short section of the CC CPSU's Report to the 24th Party Congress presented by the General Secretary of the Central Commitee; this section later came to be called the Soviet Peace Programme all the world over. Leonid Brezhnev anounced the following urgent tasks of the USSR's struggle for peace and international security:

``First.

``-To eliminate the hotbeds of war in Southeast Asia and in the Middle East and to promote a political settlement in these areas on the basis of respect for the legitimate rights of states and peoples subjected to aggression.

``-To give an immediate and firm rebuff to any acts of aggression and international arbitrariness. For this, full

* V. I. Lenin, "Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial Questions", Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 148.

use must also be made of the possibilities of the United Nations.

``-Repudiation of the threat or use of force in settling outstanding issues must become a law of international life. For its part, the Soviet Union invites the countries which accept this approach to conclude appropriate bilateral or regional treaties.

``Second.

``-To proceed from the final recognition of the territorial changes that took place in Europe as a result of the Second World War. To bring about a radical turn towards detente and peace on this continent. To ensure the convocation and success of an all-European conference.

``-To do everything to ensure collective security in Europe. We reaffirm the readiness expressed jointly by the participants in the defensive Warsaw Treaty to have a simultaneous annulment of this treaty and of the North Atlantic Alliance, or-as a first step-dismantling of their military organisations.

``Third.

``---To conclude treaties putting a ban on nuclear, chemical, and bacteriological weapons.

``---To work for an end to the testing of nuclear weapons, including underground tests, by everyone everywhere.

``---To promote the establishment of nuclear-free zones in various parts of the world.

``We stand for the nuclear disarmament of all states in possession of nuclear weapons, and for the convocation for these purposes of a conference of the five nuclear powers-the USSR, the USA, the PRC, France, and Britain.

``Fourth.

``-To invigorate the struggle to halt the race in all types of weapons. We favour the convocation of a world conference to consider disarmament questions to their full extent.

``-We stand for the dismantling of foreign military bases. We stand for a reduction of armed forces and arma-

ments in areas where the military confrontation is especially dangerous, above all in Central Europe.

``-We consider it advisable to work out measures reducing the probability of accidental outbreak or deliberate fabrication of armed incidents and their development into international crises, into war.

``The Soviet Union is prepared to negotiate agreements on reducing military expenditure, above all by the major powers.

``Fifth.

``-The UN decisions on the abolition of the remaining colonial regimes must be fully carried out. Manifestations of racism and apartheid must be universally condemned and boycotted.

``Sixth.

``The Soviet Union is prepared to expand relations of mutually advantageous co-operation in every sphere with states which for their part seek to do so. Our country is prepared to participate together with the other states concerned in settling problems like the conservation of the environment, development of power and other natural resources, development of transport and communications, prevention and eradication of the most dangerous and widespread diseases, and the exploration and development of outer space apd the world ocean.

``Such are the main features of the programme for the struggle for peace and international co-operation, for the freedom and independence of nations, which our Party has put forward."*

How the West reacted to this programme is interesting to recall. Literally every single bourgeois news agency and radio and television station carried reports on that same day, 30 March 1971, about the foreign policy section of the CC CPSU Report. Headlines such as "The Soviet Peace Programme", "Brezhnev's Six Points", "The Soviets Go Over to the Attack", and so on were front-paged. The progressive press instantly supported the USSR's new peace

* 24th Congress of the CPSU, Moscow, 1971, pp. 37-39.

proposals. As for the bourgeois newspapers, they for the first few days produced no long articles or commentaries about the Soviet proposals. They seemed to be in a state of some kind of shock, thunderstruck by the scale of these proposals and unable, as they had frequently done before, simply to pass them over in silence or label them as ``propaganda'', "a new manoeuvre of the Soviets", and so on. It was only two or three days later that the ``big'' bourgeois papers and journals carried articles in which their commentators attempted to analyse the CPSU Congress' foreign policy programme and that representatives of the Western countries' ministries of foreign affairs began to answer journalists' questions on the subject. Furthermore, the general tone of their reactions was identical: while on the one hand recognising the significance of the CPSU's and the Soviet state's new peace initiative, they took up skeptical positions and tried to demonstrate that the CPSU Congress' Programme was ``utopic'' and ``unreal'', asserting that it could not be implemented for decades at least. The commentators' opinion in general added up to the following: each of Brezhnev's six points is already a practically impossible programme; taken together they are totally unreal.

It is difficult to say what really lay behind this reaction-cold-war inertia preventing Western politicians and propagandists from seeing the new prospects brought by the 1970s for the reorganisation of international relations on the basis of peaceful coexistence and co-operation or the West's fear of finally losing the initiative in international affairs to socialism?

Only a few years have passed since that memorable spring. It would be hard to find in the whole of recent history another period so rich in important foreign policy actions. Furthermore, no one can today deny that world politics have developed in this time in precisely the direction outlined in the 24th CPSU Congress' Peace Programme and later developed at the 25th Congress of the Soviet Union's Communists.

To Eliminate the Hotbeds of War!

Let us look at the facts. The first point of the Peace Programme called for the elimination of hotbeds of war in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

For many years the most dangerous hotbed existed in Indochina. By the armed aggression it began in the mid1960s against the Vietnamese people, American imperialism hoped to suppress the national liberation movement in Southeast Asia and to test the strength of socialism's positions in that part of the world. To achieve this, they used the factor of the geographical separation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (now the Socialist Republic of Vietnam) from the ``continent'' made up by the countries of the socialist community and of the overwhelming and at first sight indubitable military superiority of the USA over the DRV's armed forces and the South Vietnamese patriots, and also of the "special positions" taken by the Chinese leadership who refused to join the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries in helping the Vietnamese people.

Imperialism, however, clearly underestimated the Vietnamese people's will for freedom and the force of the socialist countries' fraternal solidarity. The Soviet Union, true to its internationalist duty, gave heroic Vietnam the most aid. The Vietnamese patriots fought for their independence and freedom with Soviet weapons. The USSR did all it could to provide Vietnam with effective aid and support. It was from the Soviet Union that the Vietnamese people received everything they needed to repulse imperialist aggression. Soviet ships delivered tons of freight to ports in North Vietnam-weapons, ammunition, fuel, food-providing in all for two-thirds of the DRV's total freight. turnover. Thousands of Soviet specialists worked for the Republic's economy and, moreover, many thousands of Vietnamese were given professional and military training in various towns of the USSR.

I would like here to remark upon the difference in principle between Soviet aid to fraternal Vietnam and the

3---547

American ``participation'' in fhe Vietnam war. The USSR and the other socialist states helped the people of Vietnam at their request. In order to repulse the American aggressors and to defend the country's independence, we did not send our troops to Vietnam. The ``participation'' of the Americans was expressed by open armed aggression against the Vietnamese people, by the sending to Indochina of an immense expeditionary force, by the killing of hundreds of thousands of peaceful Vietnamese citizens, and by the bombing of towns and villages located many thousands of kilometres from the USA.

The mighty movement of solidarity with Vietnam that grew up in the socialist and developing countries and also in a number of capitalist states, including the USA, called for an increase in practical aid to the Vietnamese people and sharply condemned the imperialist aggression.

In the Soviet Union the movement for solidarity with Vietnam and for aiding our Vietnamese brothers became a truly national one. In July 1973 the Soviet Government resolved to consider the credits previously made available to fraternal Vietnam as gratuitous aid. Money for the Vietnam fund was collected throughout the Soviet Union and Soviet workers, office employees, pensioners, and young people went to do unpaid work on Saturdays and Sundays in order for the money thus earned to acquire and send the fighting nation the goods, medicines, and equipment it needed. The Soviet Union's factories adopted the slogan "Green Lights for Orders for Vietnam!". Soviet schoolchildren collected exercise books, pens, and brief- I cases for their fellows in far-off Indochina. Hundreds of reports about this solidarity which was expressed in the most varied ways were published in the Soviet press. One , example: when it was announced on the radio that Vietnamese children were in dire need of medicines, the schoolchildren of just one region of the Soviet Union rapidly collected 165 tons (!) of medicinal herbs which were immediately sent to the Vietnamese together with many tons of medicines made available by our country's medical •

institutions. The high spirit of internationalism typical of the Soviet people was displayed to the full in those years.

At the same time, the Soviet Union used all its influence in the international arena to help embattled Vietnam. General Secretary of the CC CPSU Leonid Brezhnev at his meetings with the President of the United States put for-x ward demands for the immediate cessation of the American aggression in Vietnam. The Soviet Union contributed greatly to the conclusion of the Paris Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam (January 1973). The Land of Soviets displayed a similar drive at the UN and at many international negotiations.

The victory of the Vietnamese people, the unification of the North and South of the country into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the victory of the People's Democratic Republic of Laos which has started on the building of socialism, and the achievement of total independence by the people of Kampuchea all contributed to the creation of a new situation in Indochina, the consolidation there of the trends towards strengthening peace and security for the nations of that part of the world, and the ending of the long and difficult period when that region was the most dangerous hotbed of war in the world.

In late 1975 a Vietnamese delegation led by First Secretary of the CC of the Communist Party of Vietnam Le Duan visited the Soviet Union and signed the Soviet-Vietnamese declaration, an agreement on economic aid for Vietnam, and a protocol for co-ordinating the economic plans of the two countries for 1976-1980. In accordance with these documents, the Soviet Union is providing Vietnam with a great deal of help in restoring and developing its economy and in creating and consolidating the economic basis of socialism there. Basing itself upon its unchanging line, upon the principles of socialist internationalism, and taking into account Vietnam's vital needs, the CC CPSU and the Soviet Government resolved to make available to Vietnam a large credit on easy terms to be used for aid in the development of its power industry, metallurgy, heavy engi-

neering, and other branches of industry, for the development of agriculture, and for raising the living standards of the Vietnamese people.

``On behalf of the Party, the government, and the Vietnamese people," said Comrade Le Duan in his speech at the 25th Congress of the CPSU, "we express sincere, deep-felt gratitude to the Communist Party, the USSR Government, and the Soviet people, to our dear Soviet brothers for their regarding support and assistance to the Vietnamese people as a command of the heart, as a matter of their conscience."""

the same time, the Soviet Union continued to provide Egypt and other Arab countries with a great deal of economic and military aid.

The adventuristic course followed by Israel since 1967, its refusal to return the occupied territories to the Arab countries, and its constant and self-assured sabre-rattling led in October 1973 to the largest ever outbreak of fighting in the whole of the Middle East's history. Military specialists assert that these battles were notable for the fact that more modern military equipment was used in them than at any time since the Second World War.

This time the military engagements were quite different from those of 1967. The Arab armies demonstrated a far greater fighting capacity and ability to make use of modern weapons. Egyptian troops successfully forced the Suet Canal and took up strong positions on its eastern bank, having considerably shaken the Israeli army which lost hundreds of tanks, planes, and so on. The political situation was also different: the Arab countries formed a united front, undertaking a number of joint diplomatic and economic actions (for example, introducing the embargo on Middle East oil deliveries to the USA and other allies of Israel, a certain reduction in the quantity of oil being extracted, and so on). The measures taken had quite serious consequences for the Western economy and this is understandable if one takes into account that in the course of 1973 alone the Arab countries were due to export about 800 million tons of oil.

During the October war of 1973 the Soviet Union, true to the line confirmed at the 24th Congress of the CPSU-to support the national liberation movements and to repulse imperialist aggression-aided the Arab peoples greatly both by its supplies of arms and its political and diplomatic support. It was with the USSR's support that the UN Security Council Resolution No. 338 of 22 October 1973 which bound Israel to agree to a ceasefire with the Arab countries was passed; soon afterwards, the Geneva Peace Conference on the Middle East was called.

The second most dangerous hotbed of war in the world after Indochina has for many years been the Middle East. In the last quarter century war has flared up there four times-in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973-endangering universal peace. All these outbreaks of fighting have had one main cause-the expansionism of Israel's ruling top brass, their desire to enlarge its territory at the expense of its Arab neighbours. Thus, in June 1967 Tel Aviv occupied over 60,000 square kilometres of the territories of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. It is clear that Israel could not have followed so barefaced a predatory policy had it not enjoyed the material aid and political support of international imperialism and Zionism.

I

The Soviet Union and the socialist states together with many of the developing countries waged an active diplomatic struggle for the adoption of such documents-within the UN, among other organisations-as would ensure a political solution of the Middle East crisis. As a result, on _t 22 November 1967 the famous Security Council Resolution No. 242 was adopted, calling for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from all the occupied Arab territories. At

* Our Friends Speak. Greetings to the 25th CPSU Congress, Moscow, 1976, p. 22.

As a result of the Arab peoples' armed struggle and of the support and aid of the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries it was possible to work out an agreement whereby the Israeli and Arab troops were divided by a buffer zone occupied by a UN Emergency Force. The Israeli army was obliged to withdraw deep into the Sinai Peninsula, while Egypt restored its sovereignty over both banks of the Suez Canal and measures were taken to reduce the number of troops and the quantity of military equipment deployed by the opposing armies. The agreement also stated that "neither Egypt nor Israel ... consider this to be the final peace agreement. It is only the first step towards the just and durable peace which will be established in keeping with Resolution 338 of the Security Council and within the framework of the Geneva Conference on the Middle East". In the spring of 1974 an agreement was also signed on the disengagement of the troops on the Syrian-Israeli front on the Golan Heights.

These agreements do not mean, it is true, that the Middle East hotbed of tension has finally been done away with-Israel continues to occupy large stretches of Arab territory. It is because of the counter-actions of Israel and of its imperialist backers that for the time being yet another key question in the Middle East is not being solved, that of the restoration of their lawful rights to the people of Palestine, including the right to form their own state. The attempts made in recent years to find a " partial solution" to the Middle East problem while avoiding the questions around which everything else revolves have not been crowned with success.

In these conditions the Soviet Union is continuing to stand by its principled position in relation to the normalisation of the situation in the Middle East. The main elements of this position were laid out again in March 1977 in the speech made by General Secretary of the CC CPSU Leonid Brezhnev at the Congress of the Trade Unions of the USSR. The Soviet Union considers that any final docu-

ment (or documents), concerning peace in the Middle East should be based on the principle that it is impermissible to acquire territories by means of war and that all the states of that region have the right to independent existence and to security. The inalienable rights of the Palestinian Arabs, including their right to self-- determination and to form their own state, should be ensured.

The withdrawal of Israeli troops from all the Arab territories occupied by them since 1967 should be provided for,- this could be done in stages, over several months. The frontiers between Israel and its Arab neighbours, which must be declared to be final and inviolable, should be clearly determined. With the agreement of the states in question demilitarised zones in which UN Emergency Force or observers could be sent for a specified period might be established on both sides of these frontiers.

The Soviet proposals envisage the cessation of the state of war in the Middle East from the moment Israeli troops have been completely withdrawn from the occupied Arab lands, the establishment of peaceful relations, and the acceptance by both sides of the obligation to respect each other's sovereignty, territorial integrity, and inviolability. The fulfilment of all these conditions for a peaceful settlement could be guaranteed by the UN Security Council or, perhaps, by individual powers such as, for example, the Soviet Union, the USA, France, and Britain.

All these proposals ought to be the subject of discussion at the Geneva Peace Conference on the Middle East. The Soviet Union, as co-chairman of this conference and a state located in the immediate vicinity of that region, is ready to play the most active role in reaching a settlement in the Middle East.

An even more negative consequence for the common Arab cause resulted from President Sadat's attempt to see "eye to eye" with Israel without taking his Arab allies into consideration. Sadat's visit to Jerusalem angered the Arab world and damaged Egypt's relations with a number of Arab countries. At the same time, Sadat, helped by the

USA and Israel, strove to make the Geneva Peace Conference on the Middle East unnecessary of working for negotiations on a separatist basis, although the majority of Arab countries as well as the Soviet Union which supports them would have liked to see a proper conference called. All this has still further complicated the situation in the Middle East and has made a generally acceptable solution more remote.

The experience of recent years confirms that only such a fundamental and all-round solution can turn the Middle East into an area of peace. If this is not done the possibility of a new outbreak of fighting in that part of the world or of a repetition of bloody events like those that recently took place in the Lebanon cannot be excluded. The world public is profoundly worried by such a prospect and attentively following the developments in the Middle East, supporting the just and all-encompassing proposals made by the USSR for the settlement of the Middle East question.

For a Radical Turn

Towards Detente and Peace

in Europe

One of the tasks put forward in the 24th CPSU Congress' Peace Programme is "to bring about a radical turn towards detente and peace" on the European continent. This has for centuries been the dream of the peoples of Europe. And for all those centuries the European continent has seen ever bloodier wars break out one after the other. Historians have calculated that of all the large and small wars mankind has gone through in its history half, that is to say over 7,000, took place in Europe.

Other figures, however, should be recalled if one is to have a complete picture: despite its relatively small sizea mere 10.5 million square kilometres, that is to say three times smaller than Africa and 4.5 times smaller than Asiathe European continent, including, of course, the European

part of the USSR, produces half the world's industrial output and disposes of immense material and cultural riches created over the centuries. Human blood, however, has been shed in large quantities all over this continent: the wars of the 19th century in Europe resulted in the deaths of six million people, while the two world wars of the 20th century, which also broke out in Europe, carried away 65 million human lives. Those who have travelled know that on no other continent can so great a number of sad memorials and common graves be found.

Twice in the life of a single generation it was precisely over its Western frontier, that is to say from Europe, that death and destruction remembered to this day by every Soviet family came to the Soviet Union.

The struggle for peace and security in Europe was seen by the CPSU as its most important foreign policy task from the very first days of the existence of the Soviet state. It was from as early as the 1920s that mutually profitable connections, co-operation between Soviet Russia and such West European countries as Germany, France, Britain, Italy, and others began to be organised. These countries were among the first to accord the USSR diplomatic recognition. This was to a considerable extent due to economic factors since, as Lenin pointed out, "the bourgeois governments are well aware that the economic life of Europe cannot be adjusted without Russia"*.

The main trends of the USSR's European policy were recorded in the first international treaties and agreements signed at the first international conferences in which the Land of Soviets participated. As CC CPSU Politburo member and USSR Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko pointed out in one of his speeches, during the conferences at Genoa and Rapallo the Party of Soviet Communists -in another situation and at a time when the balance of power was different-already then devoted priority atten-

* V. I. Lenin, "Interview with the Correspondent of The New York Herald", Collected Works, Vol. 42, p. 417.

tion to the situation in Europe, struggling for the implementation of Lenin's principle of the peaceful coexistence of states with differing social systems and for the strengthening of European security.

It was in the 1920s and 1930s that Soviet proposals for disarmament and collective security were put forward for the first time at international conferences held in Europe and with none other than European countries that the Soviet Union's first non-aggression and neutrality treaties were signed. It was in Europe, too, that the Soviet Union made its first attempts to create a regional collective security system-this was in the 1930s, that is to say, at the time when German nazism was preparing the Second World War.

Everyone remembers how an anti-Hitler coalition was formed during the war, proving that it was possible for states with differing social systems to be allies. The treaties, signed then between the USSR, Britain, France, and other European countries, and the resolutions of the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences, in which the USA also participated, created a real basis for post-war cooperation and the ensurance of security in Europe and worldwide.

However, the cold war in which West European imperialism joined to form a united anti-communist front together with the United States of America destroyed the tentative trend towards solid peace on the European continent. The year 1949 saw the formation of the aggressive North Atlantic Treaty Organisation-NATO; the remilitarisation of West Germany began; the economic and cultural links that had taken shape in the past were broken,- and all the USSR's proposals for disarmament and the creation of a European collective security system were rejected.

It was to take over two decades for this trend to begin developing again. It is now a generally recognised fact that the process of detente taking place today began at the end of the 1960s on none other than the European continent.

There are a number of reasons for this. The first and most important of these is that socialism has secured a sure and solid victory in Eastern Europe and that the majority of the world's socialist countries are in Europe. The total volume of their industrial production has for a long time already considerably exceeded that of Western Europe. The socialist states, joined in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, are carrying out a joint foreign policy that is exerting a decisive influence on international relations in Europe in a spirit of detente and co-operation. The defence might of the countries united in the Warsaw Treaty Organisation is a factor of no small importance and without a doubt sobers even the West's wildest hotheads, forcing them to abandon their mad plans to destroy socialism.

The realisation that an armed conflict would be disastrous on the thickly populated and relatively small European continent has without a doubt played a role in leading certain far-sighted figures in the ruling circles of the West European countries to agree in recent years to a review of the concepts of the cold war that turned Europe into a powder keg. The European continent is, in fact, literally ``stuffed'' with troops and weapons; millions of soldiers, thousands of tanks, and hundreds of NATO and Warsaw Treaty rockets face each other on its territory. Suffice it to say that the American army has 7,200 nuclear warheads in Europe. It is easy to imagine what will happen if all these weapons begin to ``speak'': millions of people will die and many European towns will disappear.

It cannot be said that Europe's peoples and public opinion there have only recently come to realise this truth. On the contrary, it is precisely in the European countries, which have the most organised working class and mass Communist parties in the West, that a widespread movement for peace developed after the war. The memory of two world wars which no person in his sound mind could wish to see repeated is still quite fresh in the minds of the majority of Europeans. And it is no coincidence that

precisely here, in Europe, there developed immediately after the Second World War an active movement for peace, the first mass organisations of supporters of peace were founded, their first international congresses held, such progressive organisations uniting the new generation as the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the International Union of Students were founded, and a start was made in organising the World Festivals of Youth and Students for Solidarity, Peace, and Friendship.

At this point one cannot but also mention some other reasons that pushed the European countries away from confrontation and towards normalising relations. These included the desire, natural for neighbours, to expand their economic co-operation, the historical closeness and intertwining of the fates of many European nations, and so on. All these reasons led the countries in the same direction as the main factor-a constant change in the balance of power on the European continent in favour of socialism and its policies of peace, security, and co-operation.

Under the influence of this and the other above-mentioned factors elements of realism began to appear in the policies formulated by certain West European leaders. The first in this respect was France's President, General de Gaulle, who much earlier than other Western leaders came to understand the pointlessness and danger of an armed confrontation between the two world systems. In his book Memoires d'espoir Charles de Gaulle stated that to start a world conflict in this day and age would be madness. "This being so, I consider it necessary for the Soviet Union to become an integral part of the organised co-- operation between states that I would like to see on the whole of our continent. This would guarantee the security of all between the Atlantic and the Urals."* Having soberly considered the changes that have taken place in Europe and understood the advantages of co-operating with the

socialist countries, de Gaulle set out to establish relations with the Soviet Union that were principally new for that time. His course was continued by President Georges Pompidou and by the late 1960s-early 1970s the two countries had already gained a certain amount of experience in cooperating in various fields. An important part was played in this by the Soviet-French summit meetings that soon became regular.

All this took place relatively recently, but today it is already strange to recall that France's course was at first met with fury and obstructed by the majority of other Western powers. From the other side of the Atlantic came calls to "punish the turncoat", British newspapers published caricatures showing the "Russian bear" suffocating the "French Marianne" in its arms, and NATO generals thundered about France "creating a breach" in the West's united anti-Soviet front-all the usual devices of those who lagged behind the times.

Meanwhile, the trend towards detente and co-operation was forging a path and attracting more and more new countries and West European political leaders.

New prospects also opened before Europe as a result of the important change in the relations between the USSR and the Federal Republic of Germany. Ever since the end of the war the Soviet Union together with its allies based themselves on the fact that the foundations of stable peace in Europe lay above all in the recognition of the inviolability of the European states' frontiers. For all those years, however, such a recognition did not suit the Western powers and in the first place the FRG where revanchist sentiments for the recreation of the "Reich within its 1937 frontiers" were strong.

Life itself confirmed the hopelessness of such pretensions. Willy Brandt who became Chancellor of the FRG in 1969 declared soon after taking up this post that the German people needed peace in the full meaning of that word both with the peoples of the Soviet Union and with those of Eastern Europe. In 1970 Brandt's government

* Charles de Gaulle, Memoires d'espoir, t. I, Le tenouveau 1958-- 1962, Paris, 1972, p. 183.-

displayed far-sightedness and considerable courage by concluding treaties with the USSR and Poland in which the inviolability of frontiers, including those between the German Democratic Republic and the FRG and the Western frontier of Poland was confirmed, thereby creating the preconditions for a favourable development of relations between the socialist countries and the FRG and an improvement of the situation in the whole of Europe.

The positive changes in France's and the FRG's policies were not the only examples illustrating the situation in Europe in the early 1970, although these were extremely important. What, briefly, has taken place in the relations between the Soviet Union and the countries of Western Europe since then?

Soviet-French relations have risen to new heights and have come to be seen as a model for relations between states belonging to the world's two opposing systems. Soviet-French summit meetings have been held regularly in recent years: Leonid Brezhnev and Georges Pompidou met in 1970, 1971, twice in 1973, and also in 1974. These meetings played an exceptionally important part in creating the current atmosphere of co-operation between the two countries and have invariably provided new impulses for developing practical links in the fields of economy, science, culture, and so on.

Of especial significance was the visit paid to France by General Secretary of the CC CPSU Leonid Brezhnev in October 1971 and his signing together with President Pompidou of the Principles of Co-operation Between the USSR and France. This historic document states that the two countries' policy of concord and co-operation based on their long tradition of friendship and suiting the aspirations and mutual interests of the peoples of the USSR and France is to form the permanent basis of their relations and to be a permanent factor in international life.

Certain organs of the Western press not for nothing called the Principles of Co-operation Between the USSR and France a charter for peaceful coexistence. This was

truly one of the first documents signed by the Soviet Union and an important capitalist power to have as its basis the concept of peaceful coexistence and to create a real basis for mutually profitable co-operation on a large scale.

Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who was elected President of France in 1974 after Georges Pompidou's death, continued the development of Soviet-French relations. In December 1974 Leonid Brezhnev had his first meeting with President Giscard d'Estaing, in the course of which the two leaders once again reaffirmed their belief in the policy of concord and co-operation followed by the Soviet Union and France from as early as 1966 and expressed themselves in favour of joint efforts to consolidate peace in Europe and the rest of the world. At a meeting in Rambouillet an agreement was signed between the USSR and France on economic co-operation for the period 1975-- 1979 envisaging the doubling and, if possible, the tripling of the trade turnover between the two countries as compared to the preceding five-year period.

The French President paid an official visit to the USSR in October 1975. The Declaration on the Further Development of Friendship and Co-operation Between the Soviet Union and France, a new step in these two states' efforts to contribute to the further improvement of the situation in Europe and the whole world, was greeted with great interest throughout the world after its signing in the Kremlin. In many countries the press pointed out that at the first meeting between the French and Soviet leaders since the European Conference the two countries had confirmed their desire to consolidate the result of that conference and more concretely to implement the points listed in the Final Act agreed upon in Helsinki.

Many projects in the field of economic, industrial, and scientific and technological links are now being successfully carried out, trade between the two countries is growing rapidly, and the ten-year programme for increasing co-operation in the economic and industrial fields is being

implemented. New agreements about co-operation in the sphere of the power industry, civil aviation and the aircraft industry, and tourism were also signed during the French President's last visit to Moscow.

That is how one of the USSR's most important European policy tasks is being implemented in practice: to develop and consolidate in the interests of Europe and of the whole world relations of co-operation with a state that stands out in the West as a pioneer in the normalisation of relations with the socialist countries. "The Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the entire Soviet people put a high value on friendly relations with France and the French people," said Leonid Brezhnev in one of his speeches. "The development of these relations in the political, economic, scientific, and cultural fields is one of the major trends of Soviet foreign policy.'"^^1^^"

It was the most important achievement of the early 1970s that the "knotty question of Germany", as the diplomats called it, was at last undone. By this is meant that a number of measures connected with the normalisation of relations between the socialist countries and the FRG, recognition by the West of the sovereignty of the GDR, and the solution of the problem of West Berlin were taken. The active efforts of the Soviet Union and the fraternal socialist countries, intensive diplomatic negotiations, and meetings between the Soviet and West German leaders led to the ratification in June 1972 of treaties between the Soviet Union and the FRG and between Poland and the FRG. A little earlier, in September 1971, representatives of the USSR, the USA, France, and Britain had signed a quadripartite agreement on West Berlin that eliminated a dangerous source of tension in the heart of Europe; this provided, in particular, that the Western sectors of Berlin, as before, were not a part of the Federal Republic of Germany and would not be governed by it in the future. This agreement constituted a strong blow

against those forces which had ever since the war come out with claims on West Berlin, making it a "frontline city" and an outpost for subversive activities against the GDR and the other socialist states.

The conclusion of all these treaties and agreements cleared the way for a new stage in Soviet-West German relations. Trade and economic, scientific and technological, and cultural links between the two countries began to develop rapidly. General Secretary of the CC CPSU Leonid Brezhnev's May 1973 visit to the FRG was of truly historic significance for Europe and, I dare say, for the whole world. And this was not just a matter of the new and important agreements signed in Bonn and giving real meaning to the relations between the two states in the fields of economy, culture, and science. The point was that two countries whose relations had for many years been affected by the heavy moral and political burden of the past were involved. The problem was, therefore, not only to accomplish a diplomatic, but also a psychological turn away from hostility towards normal relations of mutual understanding, respect, and co-operation. The whole world saw and took note of the outstanding personal contribution made by Leonid Brezhnev to the achievement of this profound change.

Shortly after Leonid Brezhnev's visit to the FRG yet another document of historic importance was signed-the June 1973 Treaty on the Bases of Relations Between the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany which put an end to the long period of open hostility and confrontation between the two German states and began their transition to normal relations. A treaty was then signed between Czechoslovakia and the FRG and diplomatic relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Hungary were established. In 1973 the GDR and the FRG became members of the United Nations, completing the list of political and international legal actions needed for the normalisation of relations between the socialist countries and the

L. I. Brezhnev, Following Lenin's Course, Moscow, 1975, p. 189.

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FRG and the solution of Europe's most difficult problem -that of Germany-on the basis of the recognition of the realities that had taken shape on the European continent since the Second World War. This was an important contribution to the implementation of the task set at the 24th Congress of the CPSU-to ensure a radical turn towards detente and peace in Europe.

Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's government continued the line of developing relations with the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries. In October 1974 Helmut Schmidt paid a visit to Moscow during which the two countries confirmed their belief in the policy of detente and co-operation and signed important documents and agreements to consolidate this line.

The efforts of the Soviet Union and of its allies to normalise relations and develop co-operation with such leading West European states as France and the FRG was accompanied by active foreign policy moves to improve links with the so-called small European countries. There are many such countries on the continent and their economic and political weight is quite considerable. The Soviet Union based itself in this matter on the fact that these countries stood to gain from detente and increased co-operation and could make themselves felt no less than the great powers.

Relations between the Soviet Union and its northern neighbour, friendly Finland, are developing extremely well. These relations are an example to all of the fruitfulness of the long and consistent implementation of a policy of peaceful coexistence. The Soviet Union also maintains traditionally friendly and stable links with Europe's neutral countries-Austria, Sweden, and Switzerland-and with such states as Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Luxembourg, and Iceland. The USSR has agreements on trade, scientific and technological, and cultural co-- operation with each of these countries.

One country-Britain-for a long time kept to the sidelines of the process of international detente. The ruling

class, the Conservative party, and the country's propaganda media greeted with poorly concealed hostility the Peace Programme put forward by the 24th Congress of the CPSU, tried to prevent its implementation and to complicate the situation in Europe, and even undertook so provocative an action as the expulsion of a large group of Soviet workers from London in autumn 1971. " Swimming against the current" like this soon threatened Britain with international isolation and, at the same time, exposed British Tories as opponents of peace and international security; Britain was finally obliged to run in order to "jump onto the bandwagon". When a Labour government came to power in 1974, it declared its readiness to develop constructive relations with the USSR and to contribute to the process of detente and co-operation.

In February 1975 Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson paid a visit to Moscow and negotiations between him and the Soviet leaders were held. As a result, important documents concerning the links between the two countries in the political, economic, and other fields were elaborated. Two long-term programmes-about the development of economic and industrial co-operation and about the development of co-operation in the field of science and technology-were signed.

The statement in the Joint Soviet-British Communique that the two countries undertook to further international detente was of great political import, as well as the Declaration on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons also signed then in Moscow. The results of the Soviet-British negotiations concerning bilateral relations and topical international problems were on the whole given high marks by the world press and by political circles. It had once again been proved that no state, if it was concerned about security and the expansion of international co-operation, could stand on the sidelines of the process of detente or omit to make its own contribution to it.

The positive phenomena in European life placed the question of a qualitatively new stage in detente-the col-

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lective elaboration and agreements of norms for peaceful coexistence and multilateral co-operation on the basis of realities as they had taken shape in Europe and in the interests of peace and the security of all the continent's peoples-on the agenda. It was precisely this aim that a European conference on security and co-operation, for which the socialist countries had long and consistently called was to achieve. This conference deserves a section to itself.

The Historic Helsinki Conference

It would be hard, I think, to find in the whole of recent history another international meeting so persistently called for and, at the same time, so hard to achieve. As far back as the 1954 Berlin meeting of the ministers of foreign affairs of the USSR, the USA, Britain, and France on the German problem the Soviet Union proposed a project for a "general European treaty of collective security in Europe" and in July of that same year it put forward a concrete proposal for the calling of an all-European Conference on this question. The problem of European security also occupied a central place at the Geneva meeting in summer 1955 of the heads of state of the four great powers at which, along with other questions, the problem of East-West contacts was discussed, to all intents and purposes for the first time since the war. The Soviet representatives even then spoke in favour of the expansion of contacts in the economic and cultural fields and in favour of more frequent exchanges of specialists, delegations, and public figures. The Western countries, however, acted in the spirit of the cold war and declined both the idea of a collective security treaty and the Soviet Union's concrete proposals concerning contacts.

In the following years the Soviet Union put forward new proposals for strengthening security in Europe. In July 1966 the Bucharest meeting of the Political Consultative Committee of the Warsaw Treaty states published the Declaration on Strengthening Peace and Security in Eu-

rope and expressed its readiness to take part in an allEuropean Conference which it was proposed to call at a time convenient to the countries involved.

The call to turn Europe into a continent of co-- operation, peace, and mutual understanding was supported by the April 1967 Conference of European Communist and Workers' Parties in Karlovy Vary (Czechoslovakia) and also by the June 1969 International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties held in Moscow.

By 1972 the majority of European states had responded positively to the proposal that a conference be called and had also accepted Finland's initiative concerning the holding in Helsinki of multilateral consultations on the matter. (These were held in the Finnish capital at the ambassadorial level in November 1972-June 1973.)

A number of years thus elapsed between the time when the socialist countries put forward concrete proposals for an all-European Conference and the time when practical preparations for it by means of multilateral consultations were started in Helsinki. It took so long, because certain large and influential forces in a number of countries of Western Europe and also in the United States of America came out against the calling of this conference: these were NATO's militarist circles, the leaders of the FRG's Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union opposition bloc, the majority of British conservatives, the representatives of the US military-industrial complex, Zionist organisations, and a number of American congressmen. Certain Western press organs tried to develop a propaganda campaign against the calling of the conference, played on the myth of the "Soviet military threat" in Europe, and found fault with the aims of the socialist countries which had put forward the idea of holding an all-European Conference.

The leadership of the People's Republic of China played its part in the ``orchestra'' of those hostile to the cause of detente. On the eve of the European Conference and even as it began its work the Chinese leaders redoubled

their invitations to Peking to those West European politicians who had spoken out against the conference. In their talks with the representatives of West European countries the Chinese leaders tried to frighten them with "Soviet hegemony in Europe" and strongly encouraged them to increase their military preparations. The Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Vice-Premier, and other Peking leaders made trips to Western Europe for the same purpose.

Despite all their efforts, however, detente's opponents were not able to torpedo the preparations for the conference, all the more so as these preparations corresponded to the most important political processes taking place in Europe and worldwide: the development of Soviet-French and Soviet-West German relations, the peaceful dialogue that had just begun between the USSR and the USA, and the general improvement of the international situation.

After long multilateral preparatory consultations in Helsinki, the first stage of the all-European Conference was finally held in July 1973. This was an outstanding event. The ministers of foreign affairs of the European states and of the USA and Canada gathered together for the first time in the continent's post-war history. The ministers ratified the final recommendations of the multilateral consultations, decided on the further agenda of the conference's work, and put forward their governments' views about the most important aspects of security and co-- operation in Europe.

In his speech at this forum the USSR's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andrei Gromyko, emphasised that from the point of view of the turn towards consolidating peace and reducing tension the all-European Conference was on the main road of the current evolution of the international situation. We would like Europe to be a region of peace, said the Minister, a continent whose inhabitants need never again fear aggression.

The USSR's Minister of Foreign Affairs explained the main principles on which, in the Soviet Government's opin-

ion, relations between the European states ought to be founded; these were at the same time laid out in the Soviet delegation's draft for a General Declaration on the Foundations of European Security and the Principles of Relations Between States in Europe. In his speech Andrei Gromyko devoted a great deal of space to the prospects for trade and economic and scientific and technological co-operation in Europe and also to cultural exchanges and contacts between the European countries' public figures, young people, and the representatives of similar professions. It was precisely such contacts that would create trust between the peoples of Europe, confirm the ideals of peace, equality, and good-neighbourliness in international relations, and put an end to the psychological consequences of the cold war and the practice of interfering in the internal affairs of other nations.

That the socialist countries' approach was constructive is testified to not only by the speeches mdde by their ministers of foreign affairs, but also by the fact that the delegations from the USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary, Poland contributed at the first stage in Helsinki concrete draft documents on every point on the conference's agenda. These were all designed to help expand co-operation between the participant states.

The conference's second, very responsible, difficult, and long stage (it lasted with intervals from August 1973 to July 1975) began in Geneva very soon after the foreign ministers had left Helsinki. It is sometimes asked why this second stage took so long: was it really not possible to draw up the text which was then signed by the leaders of the European states and of the USA and Canada sooner and with less difficulties?

The answer lies not at all in the length of the final document of the conference (a total of about 100 typewritten pages), but in the complete novelty of the problems which the participant states' delegations came up against in their efforts after a quarter century of confrontation to formulate the propositions on which relations

on European continent were to be rebuilt. It may be said that this was history's first collective experiment in elaborating norms to govern the mutual relations and cooperation of states with^^1^^ differing social systems under conditions of peaceful coexistence. These propositions furthermore touched on not just one, but all the most important spheres of international relations-politics, economics, and intellectual life-at once.

How did the four hundred diplomats who gathered in Geneva carry out their work in practice? In accordance with the agenda ratified by the ministers of foreign affairs, the following working organs of the conference were created: the Co-ordinating Committee-the leading organ composed of the heads of all the delegations, three commissions, and twelve subcommissions. Each of the commissions and subcommissions dealt with a particular set of problems: the principles to govern interstate relations ("the ten commandments" was what we negotiators called them jokingly between ourselves); co-operation in the field of trade, science, technology, and environmental protection; contacts in the field of culture, education, and information; the steps to be taken after the conference. All 35 participant states were represented in each of these working groups, that is to say all problems were discussed on a Europe-wide basis. During the first few months all the delegations described their own positions and contributed draft documents on the questions under discussion and then went on to the drawing up and editing of the text of the final document to be signed by the heads of state at the third, and main stage of the conference.

All the work was done on the basis of consensus, that is to say, of complete unanimity. This meant that no sentence or even word in the document was considered approved if even one delegate objected to it. This rule, although it not infrequently slowed down the work because it led to long searches for "common denominators" and because certain delegations abused it, at the same time ensured that the procedure was democratic, that all

countries, large and small, socialist and capitalist, received equal treatment and had their interests taken into account.

The amount of work done in Geneva was impressive: the various bodies of the conference met officially about 2,500 times (this figure excludes many thousands of unofficial as well as multilateral and bilateral meetings), contributed 4,700 documents, drafts, and proposals on every possible subject, and drew up the thirty-- thousandword text of the Final Act. Long discussions preceded all of these things.

It should also be said at this point that bilateral meetings between the leaders of the great powers during 1973-1975 were a great help to and speeded up the work of the diplomats in Geneva. Problems to do with the European Conference were invariably raised at the meetings in those years between CC CPSU General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and President Giscard d'Estaing of France, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of the FRG, Prime Minister Harold Wilson of Great Britain, US President Gerald Ford, and the leaders of other countries. Many important questions on which the success of the work in Geneva and also of the main stage of the conference in Helsinki would depend were discussed at these meetings.

At last the many-sided and painstaking work of the conference's bodies was completed by the drawing up of the draft document which was presented to the leaders of the participant states at the third and main stage of the conference in Helsinki.

Those who had the good fortune to be present in Helsinki's Finlandia Palace on 30 July-1 August 1975 and even those who watched the television broadcasts of this meeting could not have failed to feel that they were taking part in an event of universal importance. The ceremonial setting, the top political leaders, presidents, and prime ministers of 33 European countries, the United States of America, and Canada each rising up in turn to speak.

and the ceremony of the signing of the Final Act of the European Conference were all most impressive.

The conference's task was unprecedented in history: collectively to determine norms for the mutual relations between states with differing social systems which would ensure the further development and spread of detente and increase mutually profitable co-operation in the interests of all the nations of Europe.

This main aim of the European Conference was expressed in the very first sentences of the Final Act signed in Helsinki which say that the heads of state of the participant states were motivated by the political will to improve and intensify their relations and to contribute in Europe to peace, security, justice, and co-operation and determined to give full effect to the results of the conference and thus to broaden, deepen, and make continuing and lasting the process of detente.... These words contain the philosophy of the whole European Conference and of its results. To make the process of detente multilateral, dynamic, and lasting were tasks that had never before been set by the peoples and states of Europe or of any other part of the world. Furthermore, this task was not simply set by the European Conference, but also to a considerable extent solved thanks to the fact that this conference elaborated and agreed upon the basis of European security and drew up a co-operation programme that was acceptable to all the countries concerned.

The main points of the Final Act signed in Helsinki, its core, were the principles it laid out to govern relations between the states. The Soviet Union and its Communist Party may pride themselves on the fact that these principles are based on Lenin's conception of peaceful coexistence, a conception for which the Soviet people have fought with conviction and persistence ever since the Great October Socialist Revolution.

It is enough simply to glance at a list of the political principles approved in Helsinki in order to see that they touch upon the holy of holies of each state individually

and of all the conference's participant countries together. In the first section of the Final Act, called the Declaration on Principles Guiding Relations Between Participating States, the following norms are declared :

I. Sovereign equality, respect for the rights inherent in sovereignty;

II. Refraining from the threat or use of force;

III. Inviolability of frontiers;

IV. Territorial integrity of States; V. Peaceful settlement of disputes;

VI. Non-intervention in internal affairs;

VII. Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion, or belief;

VIII. Equal rights and self-determination of peoples; IX. Co-operation among States;

X. Fulfilment in good faith of obligations under international law.

``The participating States," it is said in the Final Act, "express their determination fully to respect and apply these principles, as set forth in the present Declaration. . . .''

The principles governing interstate relations promulgated in Helsinki are of great significance to the consolidation of peace and security in Europe. They reaffirm the already legally binding points which were previously included in bilateral interstate treaties and other documents signed in recent years between the Soviet Union and France, the USA, Great Britain, Italy, Canada, and also between other countries.

This code of principles was praised highly by the delegation leaders in their speeches in Helsinki's Finlandia Palace. The declaration of principles, said Finland's President Urho Kekkonen, describes the basic position of the whole European Conference. Although it is based on the principles and aims of the UN, this declaration goes further than the UN Charter inasmuch as it applies these principles to the concrete realities on the European continent, puts interstate relations on a qualitatively new level,

and makes such principles as that of sovereign equality and co-operation between states more accurate and meaningful.

US President Gerald Ford declared that the United States would contribute to the full implementation of the principles contained in the European Conference's declaration. The other heads of state taking part in the Helsinki meeting also made similar announcements.

When the results of the European Conference became known, the opponents of detente put forward the propagandistic thesis that the principles approved in Helsinki "contained nothing new", that they were not ``binding'', and that they were advantageous only to the East and not to the West.

Let us look more closely at these ``arguments''. Firstly, it should be noted that the Helsinki principles go a lot further than other international documents and declarations in their coverage of various aspects of interstate relations. So all-encompassing a complex of norms for interstate relations has never before been elaborated on any continent or indeed anywhere in the world. In this sense Europe, by its successful holding of the conference in Helsinki, made an important collective step towards consolidating its security.

As for the pessimistic comments about the allegedly "non-binding nature" of the Final Act of the European Conference, the following may be said in reply-, the great political significance and moral force of the points agreed upon in Helsinki derive both from the fact that they were officialised by the signatures of the heads of 35 states (and that in itself is unprecedented in history) and that all these leaders declared at the Finlandia Palace that their governments intended to implement the points contained in the Final Act and to be guided by them in their foreign policies. This was the maximum that could have been achieved at that stage of detente, a maximum that the peoples of Europe had only been able to dream about a few years previously.

All in all, the political principles agreed upon at the European Conference are designed to ensure what CC CPSU General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev in his speech in Helsinki called the right of the peoples of Europe to peace. The peoples have earned this right. I have already mentioned above how many wars have swept Europe throughout its history and how many millions of lives they took.

It is to the advantage of all states and peoples equally that there should be peace, security, and co-operation. The results of the European Conference mean that there are no winners and no losers, that no one gained and no one lost anything. It is a victory for good sense. Everybody won: the countries of the East and of the West, the peoples of the socialist and of the capitalist states, the members of alliances and the neutral states, small countries and large ones. It was a victory for all who value peace and security on our planet.

All the principles concerning interstate relations approved in Helsinki are of supreme importance. The European press, however, remembered the continent's historical experiences and made the most of the principle of the inviolability of frontiers. One only needs to glance at a political map of Europe with its multitude of crisscrossing and broken frontier lines in order to understand the significance of this problem on the continent: the majority of wars Europe has been through began precisely with territorial pretensions and the overrunning of frontier posts. Thus, it was precisely the recognition of the inviolability of Europe's post-war frontiers that made it possible a few years ago to ensure the decisive move towards detente, towards the normalisation of relations, and towards greater co-operation between the socialist and capitalist states of Europe. Helsinki was a new and most important collective step in this direction.

In its commentaries the world press also emphasised the significance of the principle of non-intervention in internal affairs. It is no secret that attempts to dictate to

other people what they should think about their way of life and to interfere in their internal affairs by subversive methods were for a long time the inseparable attributes of the cold war and of the "psychological war" which prevented the normalisation of interstate relations and poisoned the international atmosphere. The Final Act signed in Helsinki now defines such practices as impermissible. From the rostrum of the Finlandia Palace the head of the USSR's delegation reminded the delegates of the Soviet Union's invariable position on this questionthat no one can dictate to other nations how to manage their internal affairs or what laws they should pass. This must be done by the people of each state and by them alone. Any other approach to this stands on shaky foundations that endanger international co-operation.

In connection with the agreements reached on political questions at the European Conference, it should be kept in mind that the participants went further than merely promulgating a list of the principles to govern their mutual relations. The Final Act contains sections on how to implement some of these principles, on measures for building up trust, and on other aspects of security and disarmament. In particular, it provides for the signatory states to give a 21-day warning of any large military manoeuvres in which more than 25,000 troops are involved within 250 kilometres of the frontiers of another participant state, the mutual invitation of observers to such manoeuvres, advance warning of any large troop movements, and several other clauses.

It was previously unheard of in Europe for states to inform each other in advance of their intentions to carry out large military manoeuvres. The concentration and regrouping of large numbers of troops that take place during such manoeuvres can, especially when this happens near the frontiers of another state, give rise to a certain amount of anxiety if the neighbouring states do not know the aims of the exercise in advance. The signatory states have now agreed to inform each other in advance, on a

voluntary basis, and within the framework of precise pre-agreed criteria, of any large military manoeuvre.

The European Conference did not in fact examine disarmament questions per se, but the measures mentioned above together with other clauses of the Final Act concerning the general aspects of disarmament constitute an important step towards consolidating security on the European continent. This is the beginning of a qualitatively new level in building up trust between states, and the Soviet Union is in favour of advancing further down this path, of adding military detente to political detente.

One more aspect of the declaration of basic principles for interstate relations approved in Helsinki needs to be examined here.

For a long time certain influential forces in the imperialist camp refused to recognise the political, social, and territorial realities that took shape in Europe as a result of the Second World War and of post-war development. In brief, doubts were cast on the permanence of the victory of socialism in the countries of Eastern Europe, on the formation of a sovereign socialist state-the GDR---on German land, and territorial changes and frontiers were "not recognised". As I have already said above, the postwar imperialist doctrines of ``containing'' and "rolling back communism" to all intents and purposes sought the overthrow of the new system in the socialist countries of Europe, the severance of their alliance with the USSR, and the review of frontiers.

The signatures of the heads of the capitalist states of Western Europe, the USA, and Canada have been affixed to a document that declares the sovereign equality of all peoples, their right to choose their own future, the inviolability of the frontiers of all the states in Europe, and the principle of non-intervention in each other's internal affairs and this is now seen in the international arena as the summing up of the results of the Second World War and as a de facto recognition by the West of the social and territorial realities of post-war Europe.

The approval in Helsinki of a set of principles by which states bind themselves to be guided in their interrelations is thus of great and far-ranging significance. And this significance will grow the more fully and effectively these principles are implemented. In his speech in Helsinki Leonid Brezhnev said that "it is very important to proclaim correct and just principles of relations among nations. It is no less important to see that these principles are firmly rooted in present-day international relations, are put to practical use and made the law of international life not to be breached by anyone".* From the high rostrum of the European Conference the General Secretary of the CC CPSU once again declared that the Soviet Union's peaceful foreign policy was directed towards the consolidation of these principles in international relations.

One further point about the historic meeting in Helsinki ought also to be mentioned here. This is that, unlike many of the political forums of the past, the European Conference did not just determine the political norms for interstate relations in Europe under detente, but in many ways also contributed to the materialisation and meaningfulness of the detente process itself. The Final Act signed in Helsinki describes a wide and clear programme for the development of interstate contacts in the field of trade and industry, provides for certain joint projects, and defines the most promising spheres of scientific and technological co-operation, including environmental protection work; this was the first time that measures to increase contacts between institutions and people on a multilateral basis in the field of information, culture, and education were agreed upon. The implementation of these measures will make international life in Europe fuller, healthier, and more useful for all its peoples and each person individually.

Take, for example, so vitally important a field for each

state as international trade and economic links. In recent years these have grown rapidly in scale although here, too, there is still a great deal that could be done.

In the European Conference's Final Act the signatory states outlined a wide-ranging series of measures designed to increase trade and economic and scientific and technological co-operation such as: increasing contacts between trade organisations, firms, and banks; making commercial deals easier; exchanging needed information; expanding the material base of tourism; co-operation in personnel training; increasing international standardisation, and so on. It is pointed out that the participant states "will endeavour to reduce or progressively eliminate all kinds of obstacles to the development of trade", and to contribute to its steady growth, recognising "the beneficial effects which can result for the development of trade from the application of the most-favoured-nation treatment''.

A special section of the Final Act was devoted to industrial projects of interest to all. The most promising fields for the implementation of such large-scale joint projects are named as the exchange of electric power in Europe with the aim of making the most rational use of the capacity of power stations; co-operation in research on new energy sources and, in particular, in the field of atomic energy; the development of road networks and cooperation with the aim of creating a single shipping system in Europe; co-operation in the field of research into and the designing of equipment for freight shipment by various kinds of transport.

No less wide-ranging a programme is outlined in the Final Act in the field of interstate scientific and technological co-operation. The following most promising fields for such co-operation are listed: agriculture, power industry, transport technology, physics, chemistry, computer and telecommunications technology, medicine and public health, space research, and so on.

The Final Act also describes a special series of measures touching on so urgent a problem for the people of Europe

* L. I. Brezhnev, Following Lenin's Course, p. 580.

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and North America as environmental protection; this outlines measures for co-operation in the struggle against air, soil, and water pollution, the protection of the seas' ecology, nature protection and the organisation of nature reserves, improvements of the environment in inhabited areas, and so on. It can safely be asserted that these points in Helsinki's final document will affect the living conditions of each inhabitant not only of Europe, but of the whole planet.

Immense interest was aroused both in the countries that took part in the European Conference and in others by the resolutions passed in Helsinki in what is called the humanitarian field, that is to say, in the sphere of culture, education, and information. Since these questions occupy a special place in the present-day spiritual life of mankind and in the ideological struggle between the two world systems, we shall examine these in detail later. Here, though, I would like once again to emphasise the following: the whole complex of resolutions passed at the European Conference, including the political principles to govern interstate relations, trade and economic and scientific and technological co-operation, and the measures outlined for increasing humanitarian contacts make up a programme without precedent in the history of mankind for strengthening peace and co-operation between peoples and mark the beginning of a new stage in international detente.

The USSR and the USA: From Confrontation to Co-operation

It can without exaggeration be said that of all the problems of present-day international life Soviet-American relations arouse the most interest. This is quite understandable, since the whole of world politics has revolved around them in the post-war period.

There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, the two greatest powers possess vast economic and military poten-

tials: over half the world's industrial production and by far the most arms, especially nuclear missiles, are concentrated in their hands. From a political point of view the relations between Moscow and Washington affect literally every single international problem: if tension increases between them, people on every continent grow anxious; if, on the other hand, the skies clear, it becomes easier to arrange co-operation and to solve difficult questions, however far from Moscow or Washington these have come up.

Secondly, it is not only a question of the two great powers' might and of their immense influence on world affairs. No two other states in the world so fully exemplify the two opposing social systems-socialism and capitalism. The history of Soviet-American relations expresses in concentrated form the most important trend of the whole of world politics in the 20th century-the struggle between the two world systems in which the USSR and the USA represent both different classes and different and opposite ideologies.

Putting these factors side by side helps one to understand better why the history of Soviet-American relations covers such a wide spectrum: from extreme hostility to a course aiming for peaceful coexistence and mutually profitable co-operation.

One other point should also be emphasised here: the history of the relations between the two countries is composed in the main of long periods of mutual goodwill and co-operation. Despite the fact that we are geographically far apart, that we are politically different and that direct contacts between us are not so very intensive, our two countries have in the past frequently been allies when our paths crossed in the world arena.

As far back as 1780 when the American people was struggling for its independence, Russia came forward with the idea of armed neutrality which contributed to the isolation of the British colonialists and greatly helped the rebelling North American states.

Many years later, when the Civil War between North and South was raging in the USA, Russia sent two naval squadrons to the American shores and thereby contributed to the North's victory by preventing the colonial powers from intervening in the war.

In reviewing the history of Russian-American relations one cannot but agree with the conclusion once drawn by President John Kennedy who said that the fact that our two countries had never fought with one another was almost unique in the relations between the world's largest powers.

Of course, it would be wrong to draw an unconditional parallel between Russian-American relations in the past and Soviet-American relations after the Great October Socialist Revolution. Their character has changed, having taken on a clear class colouring, as, too, has their significance for the rest of the world. The USA's ruling class, seeing in socialism a mortal threat to its capitalist system, took up a patently hostile stand towards Soviet Russia.

The Western press and foreign political figures have recently started to expatiate about the positive change in Soviet-American relations being due to the fact that the USSR's leadership has supposedly changed its positions as regards the USA and has abandoned its former basic principles, mainly for the sake of the advantages to be derived from economic co-operation with that most developed country in the capitalist world. On the other hand, the United States of America, they say, was always in favour of co-operation of this kind, but the Soviet Union `` rebuffed'' it.

This bourgeois propaganda thesis turns the truth inside out, to put it mildly. To convince oneself of this one need only leaf through a history of Soviet-American relations or look at its first few pages.

1917. America's ruling class and the bourgeois press react with extreme hostility to the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia. In November 1917 the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch wrote that one good dose of buck-shot would

sweep the Bolsheviks off the face of the earth forever. The United States took part in the intervention and armed the whiteguard armies. At the same time, America's progressive people and its working class welcomed the birth of the new revolutionary society and organised a mighty movement under the slogan: "Hands off Soviet Russia!" This was the time when John Reed wrote his famous book Ten Days That Shook the World.

1918, May. Soviet Russia was beginning to transform itself and Lenin, considering it useful and necessary to broaden trade contacts with the capitalist countries, gave instructions for a plan for the development of economic relations with the USA to be drawn up. This plan, together with a list of American goods that Russia would have liked to get from the USA and also an offer of Soviet goods worth 3,000 million roubles, was sent to Washington through the head of the American Red Cross mission in Russia, Colonel Robins. The US Government rejected this offer.

1919, September. In his second letter to America's workers Lenin, foreseeing that there would be a "coexistence side by side of socialist and capitalist states""", made it clear that he considered it possible and necessary for Russia and the United States to co-operate with profit on both sides.

1920, Lenin answered an American correspondent's question about what the bases of peace with America were: "Let the American capitalists leave us alone. We shall not touch them. We are even ready to pay them in gold for any machinery ... useful to our transport and industries. We are ready to pay not only in gold, but in raw materials, too."**

* V. I. Lenin, "To the American Workers", Collected Works, Vol. 30, p. 39.

** V. I. Lenin, "In Reply to Questions Put by Karl Wiegand, Berlin Correspondent of Universal Service", Collected Works, Vol. 30, p. 365.

1921. The first ever contract was concluded between the People's Commissariat of Foreign Trade and an American company, the document being signed for the latter by Armand Hammer. The contract was for 65 million kilogrammes of American wheat to be sent to Soviet Russia in exchange for furs, leather, and suchlike. "This is a small path leading to the American `business' world," commented Lenin, "and this path should be made use of in every way."*

1924. The US Senate discussed the proposal that the USSR be accorded diplomatic recognition and resolved to set the matter aside until a radical change in the Soviet Union's socio-economic system took place.

As can be seen from the above, Lenin from the very first years of the Soviet state's existence formulated a principled course as regards the USA: we were ready to enter into mutually beneficial co-operation, in particular economic, on the basis of the principles of peaceful coexistence. At the same time, the United States' ruling circles determined their own course: hostility towards Soviet Russia, refusals to co-operate with it, and a policy of isolating and not recognising the world's first socialist state.

The United States, in fact, refused the Soviet Union diplomatic recognition for 16 years, a far longer time than any other capitalist state. In 1933 the new US President, Franklin Roosevelt, said half in serious, half in jest that his wife had seen in an American school a wall map on which there was an immense blank patch. In reply to her question, she was told that mentioning the country involved was not recommended since it was the Soviet Union. This incident, said Roosevelt, was one of the reasons that led him to ask Mikhail Kalinin to send representatives to Washington to discuss the establishment of diplomatic relations.

Franklin Roosevelt, evidently, needed the story of the

blank patch on the map in order to demonstrate the lack of foresight of the USA's former leaders who "shut out" a vast country with which it would have been not less to the United States' than to the Soviet Union's advantage to be linked since that was the time of the West's gravest economic crisis.

Finally, on 16 November 1933, diplomatic relations were established between the USSR and the USA. "I am convinced," the Chairman of the USSR Central Executive Committee, Mikhail Kalinin, emphasised at the time in an address to the American people, "that now all the artificial barriers to full and varied exchanges between the peoples of our two great countries have been removed, this will be very good not only for both of us, but will serve the cause of mankind's economic and cultural progress and the cause of consolidating universal peace.''

Active trade and economic and other contacts between the two countries developed in the period following the establishment of diplomatic relations between them. In the 1930s a fairly large number of American engineers helped the Soviet Union's workers to create a new technology and many Soviet scientists and specialists went to the United States for training. A military alliance took shape between the USSR and the USA during the Second World War and feelings of mutual sympathy grew stronger between the Soviet and American peoples. The victorious meeting on the Elbe has become a symbol of the friendship between the soldiers and peoples of our two countries.

The cold war that followed and lasted nearly a quarter century froze and poisoned Soviet-American relations. The administrations under Truman (1945-1952) and Eisenhower-Dulles (1952-1960) followed anti-communist policies and rejected the very possibility of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union. The next decade was to be called "the decade of lost opportunities" and saw Kennedy's and later Johnson's governments following inconsistent policies: on the one hand, they recognised the necessity for restructuring relations with the socialist countries on peace-

* V. I. Lenin, "To J. V. Stalin for Members of the RCP(B) CC Politbureau", Collected Works, Vol. 45, p. 559.

ful foundations and went so far as to conclude a certain number of agreements with the Soviet Union, while on the other, they continued the arms race, launched an aggression in Indochina, and so on.

The question of relations with the USSR was central during the US presidential elections of 1968. Those politicians who thought soberly called for the abandonment of the country's former and by then bankrupt anti-communist doctrines and for a return to realism, to a recognition of the change in the world balance of power in socialism's favour.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s such weighty factors as the Soviet-French rapprochement and the expansion of Soviet-West German relations contributed to the appearance of realist trends in the positions taken by the USA's ruling circles; the United States was in danger of falling behind its allies who were hurrying to begin a new chapter in the history of relations with the socialist world.

The Soviet Union, on its part, repeatedly declared its readiness to build relations with the United States of America that would be founded on the principles of peaceful coexistence and of mutually profitable co-operation in the interests of universal peace. "We proceed," it was said in the Report of the Central Committee to the 24th CPSU Congress, "from the assumption that it is possible to improve relations between the USSR and the USA. Our principled line with respect to the capitalist countries, including the USA, is consistently and fully to practise the principles of peaceful coexistence, to develop mutually advantageous ties, and to co-operate, with states prepared to do so, in strengthening peace, making our relations with them as stable as possible."*

A great deal of work was done through diplomatic channels after the Congress to discover spheres of possible agreement in the USSR's and the USA's positions. By May 1972, that is to say only a little over a year after the 24th Congress of the CPSU, the US President visited

Moscow-an event that was followed with great interest worldwide.

The May 1972 Moscow talks between the Soviet leaders and the US President were rightly called the most important event since the war by The New York Times. They resulted in the signing in the Kremlin of ten joint SovietAmerican documents; furthermore, each of these would at any other time have been greeted as a historic event.

It should be pointed out that although 40 years had passed since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the USSR and the USA, the links between the two countries had to all intents and purposes no basis in international law in the form of bilateral treaties of a principled nature. This situation once again demonstrated how insecure Soviet-American relations really were. From this point of view the signing in Moscow by the General Secretary of the CC CPSU and the US President of the Basic Principles of Mutual Relations Between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America was of exceptional significance. This document noted that the two sides would first "proceed from the common determination that in the nuclear age there is no alternative to conducting their mutual relations on the basis of peaceful coexistence. Differences in ideology and in the social systems of the USSR and the USA are not obstacles to the development of normal relations based on the principles of sovereignty, equality, noninterference in internal affairs and mutual advantage.''

This was the first time that the leading imperialist power had signed a document that fully accorded with the principles of peaceful coexistence-an immense historic victory for the Leninist conception of how mutual relations between states with differing socio-political systems should be conducted. This document was the main result of the 1972 Soviet-American summit talks.

The Basic Principles also contained other important points, in particular ones concerning the recognition of the two countries' security interests on the basis of equality and the renunciation of the use of or the threat to make use of

24th Congress of the CPSU, Moscow, 1971, p. 35.

force, and also articles on trade and economic, scientific and technological, cultural, and other links between the USSR and the USA. All these points were later expanded and concretised in other documents signed at the Moscow summit meeting: agreements on co-operation in peaceful space exploration and research (this envisaged, in particular, the Soyuz-Apollo joint space flight which was so brilliantly carried out in 1975), in the field of medicine and public health, in ocean shipping, in science and technology, and on joining forces in environmental protection. The above list is not complete; a number of other agreements were also signed at the same time.

Naturally, a meeting between the leaders of two such great powers as the USSR and the USA could not fail to touch also upon key international problems-the situation in Europe, Indochina, and the Middle East-and the level of agreement reached on these questions was of great significance in deepening the process of detente on a world scale.

A number of agreements concerning the trade and economic links between the USSR and the USA, the opening of the Soviet Trade Mission in Washington and the USA Commercial Office in Moscow, and the methods for financing trade and the granting by America of credits for the Soviet Union to pay for machines and equipment purchased in the USA were signed in 1972-1973, developing from the understandings reached earlier in Moscow. In early 1973 agreements were signed on the granting of long-term credits amounting to 225 million dollars for the USSR to purchase American equipment, in particular for the Kama Motor Works and some other enterprises. This was the first time in the history of Soviet-American relations that such agreements on the granting of long-term government credits had been signed. The ideas of peaceful coexistence and mutually profitable co-operation promulgated in the Basic Principles of Mutual Relations Between the USSR and the USA were beginning to acquire real meaning in the field of economics and trade,

The next important stage in Soviet-American relations was reached when General Secretary of the CC CPSU Leonid Brezhnev visited the USA in June 1973. Nine important agreements and three protocols concerning various aspects of the Soviet-American relations were signed during this visit, bringing the number of agreements signed by the USSR's and the USA's leaders in 1972-1973 to about 20, that is to say, more than were signed throughout the whole 40 years over which diplomatic relations existed between our two countries. This was a fact of prime importance, since these agreements established the spheres in which the two countries were to co-operate and the lines this co-operation was to take in the future.

During a third summit meeting held in June 1974 in Moscow, the Soviet and American leaders came to the conclusion that it was imperative that the main line charted in the documents signed in 1972-1973 be implemented.

New agreements were also signed on this occasion in the Kremlin on co-operation in the fields of public health, the power industry, and housing, and other types of construction. The most important document signed on this occasion was the 10-year Long-Term Agreement Between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America to Facilitate Economic, Industrial, and Technical Cooperation. It was pointed out that the prospects for a considerable increase in the turnover of Soviet-American trade were favourable and steps were outlined for increasing co-operation in space exploration, the development of promising means of transport, environmental protection, and in increasing cultural exchanges. Agreement was reached in principle on the opening of Consulates General-of the USSR in New York and of the USA in Kiev and it was decided that others would be opened in other cities by both sides in the future.

The immense significance of these successful negotiations and of the agreements concluded for both the Soviet and American peoples and the whole of mankind hardly

needs to be demonstrated. They not only present us all with direct advantages even today, but they also offer us the prospect of still wider peaceful co-operation tomorrow/

One aspect, and I think it is the hardest to measure by official agreements and treaties, of the relations that have taken shape between us needs to be treated on its own: I am referring to the psychological relations between our two peoples, relations that were for a long time-due to the cold war-hostile. Not so very long ago it was typical for America's propaganda-dazed citizens to feel fear and distrust with regards to the Soviet Union. The newspaper headlines screamed and sought to frighten people at the height of the cold war. Worried people would ask when and where the third world war would start. Edward Teller, the father of the American atomic bomb, assured the Americans that the construction of bomb shelters would save 99 per cent of the population if there was nuclear war. The above is how a well-known author describes the psychological state of'the USA's population during the cold war.

It is quite understandable that millions of Americans reacted guardedly to the steps being taken to normalise Soviet-American relations and to the news of the CC CPSU General Secretary's visit to the USA. On the day of his arrival, the Christian Science Monitor reported that many Americans brought up in the cold war spirit were shocked at the sight of the Red Flag with its hammer and sickle fluttering on the grey facade of the government building next to the White House.

But the new reality won. Intensive work to normalise Soviet-American relations and, most importantly, the practical results achieved by the USSR's and the USA's leaders began to change the psychological climate in both countries very quickly. The following example is indicative: during CC CPSU General Secretary Brezhnev's visit to the USA, a Harris poll came up with the result that 78 per cent of those questioned approved of Leonid Brezhnev's

visit to their country, while only 8 per cent expressed themselves against it. If one considers how deeply rooted the cold war psychology was in Americans and for how long they had been poisoned by it, the widespread approval in the country of the policy of detente was, according to Professor Fred Neal, an expert on international affairs, really amazing.

During his visit to the United States in June 1973 Leonid Brezhnev called for great care to be taken to protect and develop the young shoots of the good relations between the two peoples.

``To live in peace," he said on American television, "it is necessary to trust one another, and to trust-each must know the other better. We, in any case, want Americans to know, as fully as possible and truthfully, our way of life and our way of thinking."*

In order to achieve this aim, that is to say to improve our two peoples' mutual understanding, conditions todayafter the colossal political changes that have taken placeare far more favourable than they were a few years ago. The number of cultural, public, and youth links between the USSR and the USA is increasing with every passing year, tourism is developing, student exchanges are becoming more frequent, more and more exhibitions are organised, and so on. America's young people are displaying increasing interest in the Soviet Union. This was clearly testified to by the success of the exhibition about Soviet young people when it toured a number of major US cities: hundreds of thousands of young Americans of both sexes visited it. Hundreds of American Senators and Congressmen have come on informal or official visits to the Soviet Union in recent years. The first ever delegation from the USSR Supreme Soviet visited the United States in 1974, and in 1975 a delegation of American Senators and Congressmen came to the USSR. This growing two-way flow of people will, together with other political, economic, and

L. I. Brezhnev, Following Lenin's Course, p. 181.

cultural measures, gradually lead to the elimination of distrust and to a growth in our two peoples' understanding of each other.

The discussion connected with Richard Nixon's resignation and Gerald Ford's assumption of the presidency confirmed the seriousness of the changes towards favouring detente and improving Soviet-American relations that had taken place in the minds of most Americans in the last few years. Certain circles in the USA tried to use the situation that took shape then to cast doubts on the usefulness of the line towards increasing Soviet-American co-- operation and detente. The overwhelming majority of politicians and of the American people in general, however, expressed themselves decisively in favour of this course. A public opinion poll taken in the USA at that time included the following question: Should the US Government continue its policy of improving relations with the Soviet Union? Of those questioned 72 per cent answered ``yes'' and only 10 per cent ``no''.

The world press also correctly interpreted the fact that President Ford addressed a personal message to General Secretary of the CCCPSU Leonid Brezhnev the very day after he assumed the post of head of state and a few days later, addressing Congress, declared that the new administration would remain faithful to the line of improving Soviet-American relations. In the thermonuclear age. President Ford said, there can be no alternative to positive and peaceful relations between our two countries.

This declaration of President Ford's was widely supported on Capitol Hill. The House of Representatives passed a resolution in support of the continuation of the USA's foreign policy line. The Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs held a hearing on various aspects of the process of normalising relations between the USSR and the USA, and many influential Senators and politicians expressed themselves in favour of continuing this process. All this went to show that the new Washington Administration could feel easy about further increasing co-operation

and the mutual comprehension between our two great powers.

In November 1974 an important international event, the meeting between General Secretary of the CC CPSU Leonid Brezhnev and US President Ford, took place near Vladivostok. In the course of their wide-ranging and constructive exchange of views they confirmed that the Soviet Union and the United States were firm in their decision strictly and fully to implement the obligations they had previously taken upon themselves and to increase, without wasting time, the scale and intensity of their joint efforts in all ways to develop the process leading to constantly improving relations between the two countries and to make these changes irreversible. The agreement in principle on the matter of further strategic arms limitations achieved at this meeting was especially significant. All in all, the Vladivostok meeting showed that Soviet-American relations were, despite the leadership change in Washington, still good and that extremely important positive factors which would help consolidate peace worldwide had taken root in recent years.

That the Soviet Union and the United States continued the practice of holding summit meetings was of exceptional significance. It should be recalled that between the end of the Second World War and 1972 the leaders of the Soviet Union met with Presidents of the United States only five times: with Truman-at the Potsdam Conference in 1945; with Eisenhower-in Geneva in 1955 and at Camp David in 1959; with Kennedy-in Vienna in 1961; and with Johnson-in Glassboro in 1967. Because of the unrealistic stand taken by the USA's representatives all these meetings, except for the Potsdam one, produced minimal positive results.

Soviet-American summit meetings have become regular in recent years: in 1972-in Moscow; in 1973-in Washington and San Clemente; in 1974-in Moscow and the Crimea, and again that same year-near Vladivostok; and in 1975-in Helsinki at the Conference on Security and Co-

operation in Europe. All these meetings were of great significance both for Soviet-American relations and for international relations as a whole. Topical problems connected with the normalisation of the relations between the USSR and the USA, with the expansion of co-operation in a whole number of fields, with reducing the arms race, and with normalising the whole of the world situation were discussed and in many cases solved at these meetings. The very scale of these problems demanded that they be discussed precisely at the summit and the Soviet Union is in favour of continuing this practice which is now an important part of international detente.

In following the policy of improving relations and increasing mutually profitable business links with the United States, the Communist Party and the Government of the Soviet Union, of course, keep in mind that the USA was and remains the leading imperialist country and that its class aims are contrary to those of the socialist states. Neither must it be forgotten that the positions of reactionary groupings, which still think in the categories of the cold war and want to continue the arms race and slow down detente, are still very strong in the United States. All these forces played their negative roles in 1976-1977 when, at first using the presidential elections as an excuse and later the "lack of experience" of Carter's new Administration, American-Soviet relations were to all intents and purposes ``frozen'' and sometimes even deteriorated.

Indeed, as Leonid Brezhnev emphasised in one of his speeches, "We are not surprised at these attacks on the part of the enemies of peace. We shall continue to proceed along our own path. Our foreign policy is supported by the entire Soviet people and the vast majority of people throughout the world, because it serves the noble aims of strengthening peace and security and providing conditions for the free development of all nations and the social progress of all countries."""

III

THE 25th CONGRESS OF THE CPSU: FOR DISARMAMENT AND DETENTE

There is something symbolic in the fact that the 25th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was held between 24 February and 5 March 1976 and figuratively and in fact marked the Soviet people's entry into the last quarter of the 20th century. The 75 years of this century that had already gone by were ones of triumph for the ideas of Marx and Lenin, ones in which the wind of history ever more fully inflated the sails of the ship called Communism. The 25th Congress confirmed that this ship is the flagship of social progress and of the struggle for peace on earth.

Socialism and Peace Are Inseparable

The 1971-1975 Five-Year Plan saw the Soviet Union leap ahead, in a manner unprecedented in any of its previous five-year plans, in the creation of the material and technological and cultural basis of communism. The volume of industrial production increased by 43 per cent. The Soviet Union leads the world in its output of a number of important products-coal, iron ore, cement, and others, and to these are now added steel, oil, and mineral fertilisers. The country's economic and defence potential grew markedly, agricultural output, despite difficult weather conditions, went up, and a considerable rise in the people's material and cultural standard of living was achieved.

The standard of living in the Soviet Union deserves to be specially considered, because in the final count it is precisely its constant raising that is the Party's main task.

* L. I. Brezhnev, Following Lenin's Course, p. 416.

6-547

Here are a few eloquent figures. Between 1971 and 1975, 75 million people in the Soviet Union had their pay raised ; the incomes of another 40 million grew due to increases in the size of pensions, allowances, and grants; real per capita incomes went up by 24 per cent; 544 million square metres of housing were constructed; 56 million people had their living conditions improved. The above are only a few of the fruits of the Party's drive to improve the people's standard of living, a drive which directly depends on political conditions in the world and on the successes of the policy of peace and detente being followed by the Land of Soviets. This course will be pursued on an even greater scale in the Tenth Five-Year Plan that has just begun and beyond it.

The 25th Congress was informed that between 1976 and 1990 the Soviet Union would dispose of material and financial resources approximately twice as great as in the period between 1960 and 1975 thereby making it possible to solve grandiose socio-economic tasks. These include above all further increases in the well-being of Soviet people, improvements in their work and living conditions, considerable progress in culture, education, and public health-in other words, advances in everything that will contribute to making the socialist way of life better and to the allround development of the individual under socialism.

The immense growth in industrial production (by 1980 the USSR will already be producing approximately 1,380 million megawatt hours of electricity, 640 million tons of oil, 170 million tons of steel, and so on) will be used by the Soviet state in the first place to improve the people's standard of living still further. It is in addition planned to build another 550 million square metres of housing, to increase the real per capita incomes of the population by 20-22 per cent, to increase payments to the population from the social consumption funds by 28-30 per cent, and so on, by 1980. Already in 1976, shortly after the 25th Congress of the CPSU, a resolution was passed to increase the wages of yet another 31 million Soviet working people.

The Soviet socialist state has for a long time now ensured free education, health care, and social security for its citizens; for nearly 50 years there has been no unemployment here; and in the USSR rents, public transport, books, and so on are the cheapest in the world. The state expends vast amounts of money on satisfying the people's main requirements.

But peace is needed if all these socio-economic programmes are to be implemented. Just as all the country's current successes would have been much harder or, perhaps, even impossible to achieve had we not enjoyed the blessing of peace for the last thirty years, so, too, will the tempo and scale of the building of communism in this last quarter of the 20th century to no little extent depend on the international situation, on whether peace is consolidated, on whether we prevent hotbeds of conflict from flaring up and a new and ruinous leg of the arms race from starting.

All this, of course, concerns not only the Soviet Union, but also the whole of the socialist community. The congresses of the Communist parties of the fraternal socialist countries were held in late 1975-early 1976 and showed that during the last few years of detente they have achieved no small successes in developing their economies and cultures and in raising their standards of living. The total economic potential of the socialist community has continued to grow.

Between 1971 and 1975 the CMEA countries' national income rose on average by 36 per cent, while real per capita incomes rose by 29 per cent. These stunningly rapid rates are being preserved: in 1976 Poland's national income rose by 7.5 per cent, and Czechoslovakia's-by 4 per cent; real per capita incomes in the GDR rose by 4 per cent, and so on. The socialist community has now become the most dynamic economic force in the world. Between 1971 and 1976 the CMEA countries' industries developed at four times the speed of those in the developed capitalist countries. In 1975 the socialist community countries' industrial

6"

83

output was more than twice that of the Common Market countries. To the above it should be added that while in the last quarter century (1950-1975) the share of the leading capitalist states (the USA and its West European partners) in world industrial production has fallen from 65.4 to 41.4 per cent, the CMEA countries' share has risen over those same 25 years of peace from 17.5 to 37.5 per cent.

The drive to consolidate the material basis of world socialism and to increase economic co-operation still remains the main trend of the whole foreign policy activity of the Soviet state and of the fraternal socialist countries. Because of this the long-term comprehensive programme for socialist economic integration jointly approved by the CMEA countries is of especially great significance. This is raising the economic interaction of the socialist countries to an even higher level and leading to the joint development of natural resources for the common good, the joint construction of large industrial complexes designed to satisfy the requirements of all the participants in such endeavours, and to planned long-term co-operation between enterprises and even whole industrial branches in our countries. Trade between the socialist countries, which has already reached a very high level, is to grow even faster: between 1971 and 1975 the overall trade turnover between the CMEA countries doubled to reach a sum of over 70,000 million roubles in 1975. A new and large forward leap is to be made in the fraternal countries' trade and economic co-operation in the current five-year plan (1976-1980).

The close co-operation within the socialist community is not, of course, only of an economic nature, but also includes growing political, defence, and ideological cooperation. In recent years there have been regular multilateral and bilateral meetings of the leaders of the fraternal parties and states, important questions have been discussed within the framework of the Political Consultative Committee of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation, and co-operation has constantly increased between scientific,

economic, and cultural institutions, between the mass media, and so on.

All this is helping world socialism today to have a tremendous influence on the thoughts and feelings of hundreds of millions of people all over the world. The meaning of Lenin's prediction that given peace socialism would have a hundred times more influence on world affairs is becoming ever clearer. The future will without a doubt provide new testimonies to socialism's unlimited possibilities, to its historical superiority over capitalism.

The socialist countries are doing all that they possibly can in order for this future to be one of peace, in order for detente to grow stronger and for friendly co-operation between peoples to increase. This is in the interests of world socialism. "We make no secret of the fact," said Leonid Brezhnev at the 25th Congress of the CPSU, "that we see detente as the way to create more favourable conditions for peaceful socialist and communist construction. This only confirms that socialism and peace are indissoluble.'"^^1^^''

Proceeding from this idea, the Congress of the Soviet Union's Communists set the following as its prime foreign policy task for the forthcoming period: while constantly consolidating the unity of the fraternal socialist states and developing their all-round co-operation in the building of the new society, to increase their active joint contribution to strengthening peace.

As was yet again demonstrated by the last congresses of the fraternal socialist countries' Communist and workers' parties, this drive has their full support. "Our Party accords immense significance to strengthening co-- operation between the socialist states," declared First Secretary of the CC of the Polish United Workers' Party Edward Gierek. "The economic co-operation which we are furthering in the course of carrying out the programme for the socialist economic integration of the CMEA countries is making the socio-economic development of each of them

* Documents and Resolutions. XXVth Congress of the CPSU, p. 39.

easier and speeding it up. The Warsaw Treaty countries' political and defence union, by ensuring the security of our peoples, has, at the same time, become the basis for further activities directed towards detente and expanding peaceful relations between states with differing social systems.''

Socialism was born in 1917 with the word ``Peace'' on its lips, carried this word along with it throughout its existence, and today is at the vanguard of mankind's struggle for securing peace on earth.

cannons have invariably "begun to speak"; as a result mankind has been through over 14,000 large and small wars in which nearly 4,000 million human lives-or approximately the whole population of the world today-have been lost. In the two world wars unleashed by imperialism in this century over 60 million people were killed and another 110 million made cripples.

It is hard to imagine the scale of the material damage done to mankind by wars and by the arms race. In the Soviet Union, which suffered the greatest losses during the last war, the fascists destroyed 1,710 towns, burnt 72,000 villages, and reduced 32,000 factories to rubble.

The figures show that military expenditures are no less in peacetime than they are during wars. Excluding the cost of the two world wars, mankind has spent 7,500 billion dollars (in 1975 prices) since 1900 on armaments. The ruinous arms race has accelerated to unprecedented levels in the last thirty years. Military expenditures worldwide are now twice what they were in 1950. Approximately 7,000 billion dollars have been spent on defence since the Second World War. Over half this sum was spent by the United States of America.

Lenin once said that disarmament is the ideal of socialism. Probably, no other state in the world has ever defended with such consistency and in so principled a way the idea of disarmament as the Soviet Union. Continuing this general line, the 24th Congress of the CPSU in 1971 proposed in its Peace Programme a wide range of concrete measures designed to slow down the arms race.

What has actually been done to achieve these aims in the first half of the 1970s?

The problem of disarmament was one of the central themes at all the meetings between the General Secretary of the CC CPSU and US Presidents. At the first such meeting in Moscow in May 1972 two important documents were signed: the Treaty Between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America on the

A Task of the First Priority

What problem does the Soviet state consider as of prime importance, that its main foreign policy efforts should now be aimed at solving?

The central place in the programme of further struggle for peace and international co-operation promulgated by the 25th Party Congress is given to questions concerning the struggle to end the dangerous arms race and the transition to reducing arms stockpiles and to disarmament. This is a whole complex of measures that continues the Peace Programme put forward by the 24th Congress of the CPSU. Why, in fact, has the first place been given to the tasks of disarmament?

The Russian word for ``detente'' is "razryadka", the literal meaning of which is "the action of unloading a weapon". It is quite obvious that no profound or long-lasting detente will be possible if the arms race is not stopped, since the threat of armed confrontation which the arms race involves looms permanently over peaceful coexistence. Over the ages the majority of states have been guided in defence matters by the Latin proverb "Si vis pacem, para bellum"~"It you wish peace, prepare for war". The political concept according to which peace can only be kept by force, that is to say by means of an arms race, has done irreversible damage to human civilisation. Stockpiled

Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems and the Interim Agreement Between the Union o£ Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America on Certain Measures with Respect to the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. These two agreements for the first time set limits to the race in the most modern type of weapon-ballistic missiles.

The following year, during Leonid Brezhnev's visit to the United States, yet another document of immense importance was signed. This was the Agreement Between the USSR and the USA on the Prevention of Nuclear War. For more than a quarter century, from the time when American atomic bombs were dropped on two cities in Japan in 1945, killing hundreds of thousands of people, the black shadow of a possible nuclear war had hung over the world. And then the leaders of the two great powers possessing by far the greatest share of the world's nuclear stockpiles set their signatures to an obligation to do all that was in their power to prevent nuclear war.

Let us recall that Article I of the Soviet-American Agreement states that it is the aim of the USSR's and the USA's policy to eliminate the danger of nuclear war and of the use of nuclear weapons and that "accordingly, the Parties agree that they will act in such a manner as to prevent the development of situations capable of causing a dangerous exacerbation of their relations, as to avoid military confrontations, and as to exclude the outbreak of nuclear war between them and between either of the Parties and other countries". In the following articles the USSR and the USA undertake to refrain from threatening to use or using force against the other party, its allies, or third countries and to hold urgent consultations in the case of there being a risk of nuclear conflict in order to prevent it.

The Soviet-American Agreement met with a wide response on every continent: it was warmly welcomed by all peace-loving forces and by the majority of politicians, with the exception of the most aggressive circles in the West and also of Peking's propagandists with

their false thesis of a "nuclear plot between the superpowers''.

Leonid Brezhnev's November 1974 meeting with US President Ford in Vladivostok resulted in further progress along the main trend of Soviet-American negotiations-the question of limiting strategic offensive arms. Noting the value of the previous agreements in this field, the two leaders agreed to complete, before the expiry of the Interim Agreement Between the USSR and the USA on Certain Measures with Respect to the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, the elaboration of a new agreement that would last until the end of 1985. It was especially stipulated that the new agreement would be based on the principle of equality and equal security and that both sides would have the right to possess a certain total quantity (2,400 units each) of strategic weapons carriers, that is to say intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-borne ballistic missiles and strategic bombers, including 1,320 missiles with multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) each.

What did this agreement really amount to? It outlined, not just for a few years, but for more than a decade, a programme to lead our countries to a halt in the race in the most dangerous and expensive strategic weapons. Furthermore, the joint communique signed in Vladivostok by Leonid Brezhnev and Gerald Ford provided for negotiations to start not later than 1980-1981 on further arms limitations and a possible reduction of strategic weapons after 1985.

The news of the results achieved at the Vladivostok meeting was met with great satisfaction in the Soviet Union and the fraternal socialist countries, as well as by the general public worldwide. In Washington the White House declared that the USA had achieved the most important agreement with the Russians since the Second World War.

Even a bald list of the treaties and agreements concluded between the USSR and the USA demonstrates how much

work has been done by our two countries in that most difficult sphere of international relations-slowing down the arms race-in the first half of the 1970s.

And although the main burden of this work, for understandable reasons, falls on the shoulders of the Soviet Union and the United States, this field is not, of course, their monopoly: many other states are concerned about it and actively involved in it.

Other important negotiations have been or are being held: negotiations are taking place in Vienna on mutual troops and armaments reductions in Central Europe; in Geneva one of the bodies of the European Conference has worked out certain concrete steps to be taken in order to achieve military detente (I have already mentioned that an agreement was achieved on giving advance warning of military manoeuvres, and so on); and the Committee on Disarmament holds regular sittings in Geneva as well.

It is true that these negotiations do not always proceed smoothly and that they usually involve a long-drawn-out diplomatic struggle. This is understandable, since they are dealing with extremely important questions to do with the defence of states. The Vienna talks, for example, in which the Warsaw Treaty states, on the one hand, and the Western countries, on the other, have for several years already been struggling over precisely what troops and what types of weapon should be reduced in Central Europe, over what period, and so on are not proving to be easy.

The Soviet Union and the other socialist countries are working hard for disarmament within the framework of the United Nations. The socialist countries have put forward a whole series of concrete proposals and many of these have formed the basis of important UN resolutions. The agenda of the 31st General Assembly (1976) included about 20 questions connected with disarmament and many of these were proposed by the socialist countries.

At the same time, it should be recognised that all that has been done up to now in the field of disarmament constitutes only the first few steps. In fact, mankind has not

yet managed to stop the arms race or even to slow it down to any considerable extent. Mankind yearly wastes the astronomical sum of 300,000 million dollars on the arms race. Each year sees the creation of ever more destructive weapons and the growth of total stockpiles.

The Soviet Union has repeatedly pointed out to other countries and to the world public that this state of affairsthe development of political detente combined with a continuation of the arms race-cannot go on forever. The Soviet Union considers that the problem of disarmament and of the addition of military detente to political detente should now be the central question in international politics. This call of the times is now becoming real given the present conditions in the international arena. This is testified to, in particular, by the results of the European Conference in Helsinki at which the majority of participants unequivocally expressed themselves in favour of this. Speaking about the most vitally urgent tasks to be dealt with after the European Conference, Leonid Brezhnev emphasised in his speech in Helsinki that "uppermost in our mind is the task of ending the arms race and achieving tangible results in disarmament".*

It was on this basis that the Soviet Union advanced at the 25th Congress of the CPSU in early 1976 new and wide-ranging tasks and concrete proposals designed to promote arms limitations and disarmament.

The USSR's final aim in this field was and remains universal total disarmament. At the same time, Soviet diplomacy is doing all it possibly can to achieve progress on individual sections of the path leading to this target.

In brief, the complex of tasks in the field of disarmament advanced within the framework of the foreign policy programme of the 25th Congress of the CPSU includes the following:

-to achieve the conclusion of a new agreement between the USSR and the USA on the limitation of and reductions

* L. I. Brezhnev, Following Lenin's Course, p. 580.

in strategic weapons together with international treaties on the universal and total prohibition of atomic weapons tests, on the prohibition and destruction of chemical warfare weapons, on prohibiting the design of new forms and systems of mass destruction weapons, and also the manipulation of the environment for military and other hostile purposes;

-to activise the Vienna negotiations on troops and arms reductions in Central Europe and after the first steps have been taken in this direction to continue to work for military detente in that area;

to achieve the transition to a systematic reduction in military expenditures;

-to take steps to ensure that a World Disarmament Conference is called as soon as possible.

The above is the Soviet state's programme of struggle for peace and international security in the area that is most important today.

How much lies behind each line of this programme: It is logical that the first place in it should be occupied by the task of concluding a new agreement between the USSR and the USA on the limitation of and reductions in strategic offensive weapons. It is no secret that the Soviet Union and the United States together possess by far the greatest stocks of atomic weapons and of the means for delivering them. The active negotiations between the two countries (especially in 1972-1975), the Soviet-American treaties and agreements signed in those years, and the agreement in principle to hold further negotiations achieved by the General Secretary of the CC CPSU and the US President in late 1974 in Vladivostok have altogether created a solid basis for further and more decisive advances in the matter of slowing down the arms race.

The world public expected that after the "dead season" in these negotiations caused by the US presidential elections the new Washington Administration would move on to take serious and concrete steps in this direction. Against all expectations, however, US Secretary of State Cyrus

Vance's visit to Moscow in late March 1977 showed that the American side had set off in another direction. The proposals brought by Vance constituted to all intents and purposes an attempt to revise the Vladivostok agreement and to achieve unilateral advantages for the USA to the detriment of the Soviet Union's security. The propagandistic hue and cry following Vance's visit about the United States having supposedly put forward a "global disarmament programme" and Moscow having refused it gave good grounds to think that Washington was in fact striving not for progress in its negotiations with the USSR, but only for political gain. The Soviet Union, naturally, could not allow such a revision of the Vladivostok agreement, because it was damaging to its national security and constituted a dirty propaganda trick. The USSR insists that negotiations continue precisely on the basis of the Vladivostok agreement and such negotiations are now taking place. Moreover, the Soviet Union considers that after what was agreed on in Vladivostok is achieved, the USSR and the USA could go further. It is well known, for example, that the Soviet Union has proposed that the two countries mutually abandon their plans to create the new generation of Trident atomic-powered submarines and B-l heavy bombers and the corresponding Soviet submarines and bombers. Should the Soviet proposals be accepted the two countries would be able to economise thousands of millions of dollars and roubles, thus avoiding a new climb up the spiral of the arms race.

It is on the USA and the USSR that the implementation of the many proposals made concerning disarmament also most depends. These we examine below.

While the above most important problem of slowing down the strategic arms race is the business of the leading military powers-the USSR and the USA-although it is, of

course, of immense significance for the whole of mankind, many other tasks to do with stopping the arms and achieving disarmament are posed at the United Nations. At the 31st General Assembly (1976) the Soviet Union contributed a unique document: its Memorandum on Questions of Ending the Arms Race and Disarmament. This analyses the state of affairs in each branch of disarmament and describes the USSR's action programme and aims in this field. What are these aims?

Given that nuclear weapons present the greatest danger to mankind, the most important measure is to achieve total nuclear disarmament. The Soviet Union has always spoken out in favour of the prohibition of nuclear weapons, in favour of their exclusion from the arsenals of every state. As early as 1946 the USSR proposed that all nuclear weapons be destroyed and forbidden. Then and later, when the stockpiles of such weapons were still not very large, it would have been much simpler to reach an agreement on prohibiting and destroying them. This task has now become much more complicated, because nuclear weapons have grown into a vast variety of types and systems and immense stocks of them have been made. The Soviet Union considers, however, that this task can be solved even in the present-day conditions.

To achieve this it is above all necessary for the nuclear arms race to be stopped, that is to say, for an end to be put to the production of nuclear weapons, and to the design and building of new types of bomb. It is also necessary to begin reducing current nuclear weapons stockpiles by using the fissionable materials in them in peaceful branches of the economy. The final aim of this reduction should be the total liquidation of all types of nuclear weapon, both strategic and tactical, both offensive and defensive.

For one state possessing nuclear weapons to set about liquidating its stocks, while at the same time others continue to increase their arsenals is, obviously, out of the question. This means that all the nuclear powers must take

part simultaneously in nuclear disarmament. The Soviet Union has repeatedly announced its readiness at any time to start negotiations on these all-important questions with the other nuclear powers and does not object to the participation in these negotiations of the non-nuclear powers as well, since all the nations of the world stand to gain from them.

General Secretary of the CC CPSU and Chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet Leonid Brezhnev in his report on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution put forward a new and far-reaching proposal in this field, declaring that "today we are proposing a radical step: that agreement be reached on a simultaneous halt in the production of nuclear weapons by all states. This would apply to all such weaponswhether atomic, hydrogen, or neutron bombs or projectiles. At the same time, the nuclear powers could undertake to make a start on the gradual reduction of existing stockpiles of such weapons, and move towards their complete, total destruction. The energy of the atom for peaceful purposes exclusively-this is the call issued by the Soviet state, in the year of its sixtieth anniversary, to the governments and peoples of the world''.

The Soviet Union's final aim in this matter is to prevent the outbreak of a nuclear war. To add to the agreements on preventing the accidental or unsanctioned outbreak of nuclear war already signed between the Soviet Union and the USA, Great Britain, and France, the USSR proposed in the autumn of 1977 at the 32nd UN General Assembly a draft resolution on the prevention of nuclear war involving the following measures: restraint by the nuclear powers, the avoidance of confrontations, the conclusion between all the nuclear powers of accords to prevent the accidental or unsanctioned use of nuclear weapons, the conclusion of an agreement to withdraw nuclear-weapons-bearing ships from certain regions of the world's seas, and the association of all states which have not yet done so to the treaties concerning the non-use of nuclear weapons in the

specified spheres, and so on. All these proposals are right now being examined by the UN.

The most important question in this complex and one on which putting a stop on the arms race in many ways depends is the prohibition of all nuclear weapons tests. Such a measure would put an end to the making of qualitative improvements to nuclear weapons and would prevent the design of new types.

It should be said that certain achievements have been made in this direction. The 1963 Moscow Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Under Water restricted the sphere of possible nuclear tests and eliminated a dangerous source of radioactive pollution of the environment. Over 100 states have at present signed this treaty.

The task, however, has not been fully solved: firstly, not all the nuclear powers have as yet signed it (the exceptions being China and France; in fact, the former is to this day continuing to carry out nuclear test explosions in the atmosphere), and secondly, underground nuclear tests were not prohibited by it.

A new step was made in 1974 when the USSR and the USA signed the Treaty on the Limitation of Underground Nuclear Weapon Tests of a power of more than 150 kilotons. This treaty still further narrowed the possibilities for designing and building the most powerful and, therefore, most dangerous types of nuclear weapon and also restricted possible tests to a minimum.

Despite all this it has not as yet proved possible to solve the problem of putting a complete stop to nuclear tests. There still remains the urgent task of achieving an international agreement on the prohibition of absolutely all nuclear weapons tests for absolutely all states. The conditions for this were to all intents and purposes reached as a result of the conclusion in 1975 of the Treaty Between the USSR and the USA on Underground Nuclear Explosions for Peaceful Purposes. This treaty established norms for the carrying out of peaceful explosions that would

exclude the possibility of using them to improve nuclear weapons.

The Soviet Union in 1975 laid before the United Nations a Draft of the Treaty on the Complete and General Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons Tests. The Soviet draft treaty is worded in such a way that while outlawing all nuclear weapons tests it, at the same time, does not prohibit countries, whether they do or do not possess nuclear weapons, from using atomic power for peaceful purposes.

The Soviet initiative was widely supported and at the 30th General Assembly the delegations of 94 countries voted for it. The General Assembly called on all the states possessing nuclear weapons to enter into negotiations (in which the non-nuclear states, too, could join) in order to achieve an agreement on this question. However, as a result of the negative position taken by certain nuclear powers, these negotiations have not as yet begun.

In this situation the Soviet Union has once again come out in favour of totally prohibiting nuclear weapons tests so that these may be banned not only in the atmosphere, in space, and under water, but also underground. The Soviet Government has declared its readiness to conclude agreements on the declaration of a moratorium on nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes along with the prohibition of all nuclear weapons tests for a specified period. This important step by the USSR was widely approved and should clear the way to the conclusion of a treaty that mankind has long aspired to.

One other important task is closely connected to the problem described above: this is the problem of avoiding the further proliferation of nuclear weapons. It is quite obvious that the danger of nuclear war would grow immeasurably if states that do not at present possess nuclear weapons become involved in the process of building and stockpiling them. The most important part in this matter is played by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons which has been in force since the late 1960s and of which over 100 states are today signatories. The

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nuclear powers that have signed this treaty have engaged themselves not to hand over any nuclear weapon or any other explosive nuclear device to anyone whomsoever, while the states that do not possess nuclear weapons have engaged themselves not to produce and not to acquire such weapons or any nuclear devices. It is important that this treaty's coverage has now grown wider-a number of large states, including the FRG and Italy, have joined it. On the other hand, however, two (of the five) nuclear states-China and France-have not signed it. Certain nonnuclear states whose industrial and technological level of development is such that they could build their own nuclear weapons (these are called "near-nuclear states") have also declined to sign this treaty. These are the Republic of South Africa, Israel, Brazil, Argentina, and a number of other states.

A further threat is resulting from the fact that the commercial interests of certain Western countries sometimes prevail over political good sense. What I am referring to here is the nuclear export that is now growing so rapidly. The export of atomic equipment and materials is sometimes so great that the countries receiving them could set about producing their own nuclear weapons. Thus, in 1975 the FRG concluded an agreement about the construction in Brazil of eight major atomic power stations with an output capacity of 1,300,000 kilowatts each, and also of plants to enrich uranium and process radioactive fuel (this contract was worth 4,000 million dollars). In early 1976 France and Pakistan signed an agreement about the construction in Pakistan of a plant to process radioactive fuel (this deal was worth 150 million dollars). In May 1976 France concluded a contract to sell the Republic of South Africa a one-million kilowatt atomic power station. This decision caused a wave of protests worldwide, especially in Africa. The press also reported plans by the Western powers to build atomic power stations in Iran and in other countries and to supply them with nuclear equipment.

It should furthermore be kept in mind that plutonium, a fissionable material from which nuclear weapons can be made, is a by-product of the running of atomic power stations. Quite a few countries are already now producing plutonium in quantities sufficient to enable them to make their own atomic bombs; the nuclear export described above is increasing the number of these countries still further.

It is not difficult to imagine the danger that lies behind the prospect of the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the fact that such weapons could now be made in various parts of the world. Two examples will suffice here: Israel and Egypt, between whom armed conflicts that endangered universal peace have on more than one occasion flared up, have not signed the Treaty on the Non-- Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Who knows what might happen if these two countries possess nuclear weapons the next time there is a conflict between them? And what would the potential threat be if the racist Republic of South Africa came into possession of nuclear weapons?

The task of strengthening the regime whereby nuclear weapons do not proliferate is, therefore, exceptionally topical and occupies an important place in the Soviet programme of struggle for nuclear disarmament.

The Soviet Union is exerting every effort to ensure that this and the other nuclear disarmament tasks enumerated above are solved in the interests of mankind as rapidly as possible.

Another urgent problem is the matter of prohibiting and ensuring the destruction oi chemical weapons. Such weapons attack only living things and making use of them has always aroused the indignation of all peoples. Poisonous gases were used on a massive scale for the first time during the First World War-over a million soldiers were affected by them and 100,000 died. Military technology

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