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p In 1979 the University of Chicago Press published Russia and the United States. US-Soviet Relations from the Soviet Point of View. A mass market edition appeared in 1980. The authors were Professor Nikolai Sivachev of Moscow State University and myself. The book had a long history: the publisher had requested us to write a book back in 1971, eight years before it was finally published. The delay was considerable, due in part to technical difficulties—the translation, the shuttling of the manuscript and proofs between Chicago and Moscow, work schedules at Moscow University Publishing House—but largely, I must confess, to my conviction that there was nothing urgent about the task.

p It took Professor Sivachev, a frequent visitor to the United States, considerable time and effort to make me realize that a Soviet view of the problem in English was really a matter of some urgency. I refused to hurry in the mistaken belief that at least among American historians there were enough people who knew Russian and thus had no need of crutches—works of Soviet historians translated into English. Since in the Soviet Union it goes without saying that anyone majoring in history must have a working knowledge of two (better three) foreign languages, I thought that was also true of the United States. But my extrapolation was wrong. As the U.S. historian John Lewis Gaddis said about the book, ’American readers rarely get opportunities’ to get acquainted with books by Soviet authors because ’Soviet scholarly writings do not often appear in translation and Americans do not often learn Russian.’^^1^^ Anyway, the 300-page book was finally published in the United States.

p From the outset, Professor Sivachev and myself decided we would write the book exactly as we would have for a Soviet publisher, presenting the average Soviet approach 257 to the issue. As Nikolai Sivachev remarked in his interview to The New York Times, ’we did not set out to please the American reader, nor did the University of Chicago Press asked us to. On the contrary, they recommended that we should feel free to present our own views. I think it would be unfair to the reader in the United States for me to write one way for Soviet publications and another for an American publisher.’^^2^^

p To be quite frank, I did not set much store by that book. It was a general survey, and many of approximately 20 titles I had published in the Soviet Union were much more thorough than my part of the book in question. I was therefore amazed at the veritable deluge of reviews that appeared in the West from the spring of 1979 to the summer of 1980: scores of them, and offering different assessments. I believe it would be pertinent to discuss them here, because they have a direct bearing on the book CIA Target—U.S.S.R., offered in English by Progress Publishers. We concluded our book Russia and the United States. US-Soviet Relations from the Soviet Point of View ( Professor Sivachev dealt with the period from the late 18th century to September 1, 1939, and myself, with that from the start of World War II to this day) by saying:

p ’We have looked back on the past, it is for the basic reason that history teaches us at least what we must not do, what we must avoid. We must avoid an arms race, first of all, and instead of accusations and counteraccusations learn more positive language. May the possibilities which in the recent past have been lost in the wind not be permitted to slip by during our time ... It has been the obvious truth that our two great nations share too much responsibility in international relations, in preserving world peace, to allow unscrupulous, irresponsible, and vested interest groups to distract them from fulfilling truly historical tasks.’^^3^^

The book presented our conclusions made on the strength of facts, not of moralizing or rhetoric. Let us now turn to the response it generated.

p First, about those who spared neither effort nor paper to serve ends that had little in common with a dispassionate and scholarly examination. The trick they all used 258 was giving a biased and crude interpretation of the book and pointing at those ’Messrs. Sivachev and Yakovlev’ who ’paint an unrelieved picture of a monstrous America bent on annihilating that bastion of Stalinist-Leninist-Marxist righteousness and human behavior, the U.S.S.R.’^^4^^ The Virginia Quarterly Review did not use much space to present that conclusion, but the Strategic Review castigated us in an article almost as long as the Afterword you are reading now. The review was written by Mose L. Harvey, Director of the Advanced International Studies Institute. I quote:

p ’This is an extraordinarily revealing book. It is also a chilling book. It was written by two Soviet academicians at the invitation of the University of Chicago Press as part of what it calls “a novel venture for both scholarship and publishing" involving “turning to a non-American scholar of distinction for a discussion of his country’s relations with America".

p ’The authors in their preface assert that “the decisive factor" that led up to their acceptance of the invitation to write the book “was the desire to take what part we could in overcoming the negative heritage of the cold war".

p ’Yet the book is itself an unmitigated exercise in cold war. There is no pretense of objectivity, no admission of any Soviet error, no concession of any American goodwill. And this is by representatives of a presumably new breed of Soviet intellectuals on whom so many Americans have staked such great faith as progenitors of a new order of enlightenment and reason in the U.S.S.R. . . .

p ’Presumably written to further detente, the book leaves no doubt that the detente that is at stake is one of strictly Soviet design. Over and over again the message is that good relations between the United States and the U.S.S.R. can be steeped only in U.S. acceptance of Soviet view-points, and only if and as the United States recognizes and bows to the “objective realities" of Soviet power.’^^5^^

p After reading this and many other similar reviews, Sivachev and myself felt flattered: it is not every day that ordinary professors are elevated to the rank of ‘politicians’ able to dictate the United States to ‘bow’. Then the London Survey, a weighty anticommunist quarterly, told us we had written the book on the instructions of some higher authority, because one simply did not speak one’s mind in the Soviet Union.

259

p The Survey made wisecracks about why it had taken so long to prepare the book: it was all because the supervisors found it difficult to draw up the formulas the authors were to insert in the book.

p It was all much simpler than the wits from the Survey made it look. I only make this point because the majority of the reviewers labored under the same misconception. As the Roanoke Times and World News put it, ’it is inconceivable that they (the authors—N. Y.) could have published a book of this sort without official Soviet government approval, and so one safely assumes that the opinions and interpretations contained in it have been very carefully screened by the Soviet Foreign Ministry.’^^6^^ The British International Affairs went even further: ’In the Soviet Union they (historians) face even more overt pressure to distort history: to avoid the wrath of GLAVLIT—Soviet censorship’ and therefore the book presented ’a fairly orthodox Soviet view’.^^7^^ The American Historical Review, the leading journal of U.S. historians, said: ’This book by two Soviet historians conveys what the Soviet government would like Americans to think the Russians think of those relations ... Moreover, the new Soviet venture in diplomatic history also differs from most previous ones by serving unabashedly the cause of detente as Moscow understands it. Laudable as that cause may be, it does not necessarily provide the correct inspiration for good history. To be sure, compared with the thesis-infested and cantankerous Soviet historiography of the past, Nikolai B. Sivachev & Nikolai N. Yakovlev’s opus is almost a model of restrained factual analysis. But still, the thesis comes first, and the facts are harnessed to fit into it.’^^8^^ The National Review thought the Soviet Foreign Ministry was not good enough and believed the book was ’supposedly the first account written of Russo-American relations to carry the imprimatur of the Kremlin’.^^9^^

p These quotations point to the Western belief, shared even in academic circles, that Soviet scholars are merely puppets whose strings are pulled by some mysterious higher authorities. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are no strings. As to the ominous censors, they could not possibly find anything to censor in any book like ours: Glavlit’s mission is to see that no state or military secrets appear in print. A book on diplomatic history written to 260 interpret materials that are open to any historian could hardly contain anything secret.

p Thomas Conway wrote his review for the Boston Sunday Globe, and his article was in keeping with the newspaper’s prestige. Of course, we could not agree with him on many points. For example, we did not recognize ourselves in his description of us as people who lack ’generosity for those who do not share the authors’ world view, who do not see things in as clear a light. While claiming that “condescension is inappropriate”, this unfortunate intellectual vice permeates and mars the entire work. When discussing American motives, leaders, or scholars they are consistently arrogant ... belligerent and snide. While they emphasize the need to “trust each other on the basis of equality and mutual respect”, the authors persistently evince a complete intolerance for opposing views.’ And so on and so forth in the same vein.

p Still, Mr. Conway has learned his lessons from studying at Columbia University Russian Institute and going on several study-tours of the Soviet Union. He rejects out of hand the notion that Soviet scholars have no faces of their own: ’An American reader should not prejudge this book as simply another dreary contribution to the rhetoric of Soviet propaganda. It is more than this. The book is an expression of a view of the world that is truly and strikingly different from an American one and it is important to understand that it is a theory of reality that is shared by most, if not all, Soviet intellectuals who study America and its foreign policy ... One must go further and understand that such a view of reality is sincerely and deeply held and that it is part of a larger belief system that gives the authors’ scholarly work coherence and meaning . . .

p ’In their minds the Soviet Union has always had noble purposes, it has always been consistently benevolent in its foreign policy and it has been innocent of causing any tensions or hostilities with the U.S. Aside from peace, all it has desired is to be treated “equally” in a businesslike and sober manner. Above all, the Soviet Union is a first-rate power, it will remain so, and it must be treated as such.

p ’While the authors portray the Soviets as justified and exemplary in all their actions, they see nothing but naked ambition in similar actions of the U.S. America has been responsible for all the tensions between the two nations. 261 It has been an aggressive and hostile power ... It is clear that whatever detente might mean to American scholars, to the authors it does not mean the dulling of the struggle of ideas.’^^10^^

We accept this evaluation, discounting several turns of phrase and often groundless emotion. That was what we wanted our book to say. Thomas Conway the scholar grasped our views, our convictions at which we arrived after studying the United States and not at the behest of some higher-ups. Incidentally, those in the West who picture us as puppets also recognize that we have written a professional book. Elementary logic upsets their claim: no one can become a professional in historiography on orders from above.

p Our book reflected not only the overall Soviet view of U.S. policy but also that of a group of perceptive American historians, usually called ‘revisionists’, who stepped into the limelight at the juncture of the 1960s and 1970s. Although they proceeded from different precepts and arrived at different conclusions, they proved that all the responsibility for the cold war rested with the United States. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., one of the intellectual pillars of the American establishment, seized on our book as another chance to get even with the ‘revisionists’, whom he had been fighting for almost 15 years. Professor Schlesinger wrote a lengthy and fulminating article. Placing us squarely among the ‘revisionists’, he called our book ’ egregious’ and appealed to law-abiding Americans to make their own conclusions about the way ’Sivachev and Yakovlev give the American revisionists a benign pat on the head . . . But the revisionists do not go far enough to satisfy Sivachev and Yakovlev, who present a benevolent and infallible Soviet Union, incapable of offense, miscalculation, or error, patently seeking peace against all manner of Western provocation.’ ^^11^^ The professor’s foray does not tie in with the claim that the U.S. academic community lives in a realm of pure reason and does not stoop to low politics.

p We believe—and we said as much in our book—(and naturally, Mr. Schlesinger is incensed by it) that the ’ revisionists’ have made a major contribution to the analysis of U.S. foreign policy motives. We have closely followed 262 and welcomed their work. The Sunday Oregonian, of course, went too far when it said that ’students of American foreign policy will find the text an echo of our own Cold War revisionists who fault the United States for the pernicious relations between the two countries’.^^12^^ It would be more accurate to say that their books and ours share the same realistic approach to U.S. foreign policy. We wrote that ’the “revisionists”, somewhat tardily, have agreed with the Soviet historians regarding who bears the responsibility for cold war and who is to blame that reasonable possibilities in American-Soviet relations were not realized’.^^13^^

p Let us not argue about who echoed whom. Let us return to Arthur Schlesinger. He needs no introduction. From time to time he worked for the government—for example, under President Kennedy. But his early years in the Office of Strategic Services poisoned him for life. It appears that the haughty intellectual has great affection for the intelligence operators and considers himself one of them, even though he does not wear the cloak-and-dagger uniform.

p It also appears that this passion of Schlesinger’s explains the policeman’s logic he demonstrated in his lengthy article and also the word ‘egregious’, widely used in the books extolling the American establishment and intelligence services.

p The amazing thing is that John Lewis Gaddis, a capable historian, said in reviewing our book that ’it provides evidence, simultaneously, of increasing sophistication in American studies inside the Soviet Union, and of the egregious shortcomings that still remain’. Another amazing thing is that Mr. Gaddis analyzes what the authors ’choose to emphasize or ignore’ because ’the most striking aspect of the book, though, is what it reveals about the preoccupations and anxieties of the current Kremlin leadership, which presumably passed on the “correctness” of the arguments advanced therein’. The Kremlin, of course, has nothing better to do than reading and endorsing what Sivachev and Yakovlev wrote.

p But Gaddis is a gifted scholar, and his works stand out in the American historiography of the 1970s. And yet he says this: ’Sivachev and Yakovlev seem oddly unaware that American revisionism on the origins of the Cold War of which they predictably approve, has not been much heard from in recent vears. No serious American scholar still 263 believes, as they do, that Truman dropped atomic bombs on Japan primarily to frighten the Russians.’ ^^14^^ If that were so, why then did Arthur Schlesinger tear himself away from the assembly line of commercial books to castigate us. How can one explain the remark made by M. Harvey: ’The discourse they (Sivachev and Yakovlev—N. Y.) have produced will doubtless be hailed by such revisionsts, since it both honors their views and offers new vistas for “that intellectual masochism" which Harvard historian Adam Ulam sees as the hallmark of the American revisionist cult.’ ^^15^^ That is a well-known viewpoint. Henry Kissinger made free with that expression in his memoirs and used it to describe anyone critical of Washington’s official course.

p Soviet historians are perfectly aware of what happened to some of the revisionists. We wondered at the remarkable way erstwhile critics were incorporated into the prevailing doctrine of American historiography, while some of their theses were used and not credited to their authors. That process, reminiscent of the one used to hammer together the ‘consensus’ of the 1950s, will be analyzed in the forthcoming book by the Soviet historian O. Stepanova.

p Mr. Gaddis’ remarks are, of course, understandable. So are all the forays against our book that linked us to the revisionists: the enfants terribles appeared tame, the ‘ consensus’ looked so touching, and then it turns out that their views are appreciated in the Soviet Union, and this is said in a book which, no matter how one berates it, has been described as sensible by American publishers. According to the Publishers Weekly, ’historians and scholars will find the book most valuable’^^16^^; the Library Journal said ’this book will be especially valuable for students of American diplomatic history and foreign policy’.^^17^^

p Or, according to Norma C. Noonan’s article in the respectable Perspective, ’Although works by Soviet authors on history and other social sciences are available in Russian and sometimes also in translation in the U.S., they are generally not widely read except by specialists. This book, published by a major American press, will no doubt have broader circulation and publicity than comparable works published in the U.S.S.R. . . . Clearly, this work belongs in every college library, because it is a sophisticated treatise and a major source on American foreign policy from a Soviet perspective. Students and scholars of U.S. history and 264 politics, as well as people who do business with the U.S.S.R., are the most likely audience for the book.’^^18^^

p Professor William Appleton Williams, president-elect of the Organization of American Historians and author of ’ revisionist’ classics, singled out what he considered the main thrust of the book. Having proved in passing that ’ revisionism’ was not at all dead, he aptly drew America’s attention to the way the book exposed the U.S. approach to the Soviet Union as unjust: ’Sivachev and Yakovlev raise significant issues. The question here involves the inherent contradiction—or double standard—exhibited by American leaders (and most intellectuals) in the following ways ...

p ’It is permissible for us to criticize, or apply pressure to change internal policy in the U.S.S.R., but it is unacceptable for them to do the same in the U.S.A. We can push Christianity, or to try to remove a foreign minister (Bullitt vs. Litvinov), but they must behave as perfect isolationists and virginal non-interventionists.

p ’It is perfectly within the rules for us to renege on economic commitments by playing word games: a credit is not a loan.

p ’It is wise for us to devise a sophisticated strategic plan, but fiendish for them to look out for their own interests.

p ’All of these matters clearly informed and affected Soviet perceptions of American policy. The authors develop their remark, “ideology was subordinated to real national interests”, as rather sophisticated dialectical argument: Western capitalism (led by Roosevelt) wanted to defeat the Axis at the least possible cost to itself. This produces, in the course of the remainder of the book, a subtle criticism of Roosevelt, Churchill and others. The West successfully avoided great losses only to emerge victorious with the Soviets claiming territory and influence in payment for death and devastation. Here we have a certain revision of the revisionists.

p ’And so we come to the consequences of letting the Russians defeat the Germans. It is eerie. We chose fewer casualties, and butter at home, only to awake from the dream of preserving the 19th century to the reality of capitalism on the defensive.

p ’So naturally we turned to the capital intensive solution: the atom bomb. The authors do an impressive bit of 265 work with Clark Clifford’s memo to Truman in September 1946, almost a year before the publication of Kennan’s “X” article: “Therefore, in order to maintain our strength at a level which will be effective in restraining the Soviet Union, the U.S. must be prepared to wage atomic and biological warfare.” ’

p Professor Williams has a distinct and remarkable style. He assumes that the reader is aware of the facts he cites. It is rarely that way, but the expert grasps it all right away. Professor Williams has somewhat sharpened our arguments and shifted their emphasis, but without losing sight of the crux of the matter. Today’s developments are rooted in the Second World War, and our book stressed that. To fail to see this means to understand nothing.

p The most heartening thing is that Professor Williams brought it home to those in the United States who are willing to see a class approach in our evaluation of Washington’s most recent moves against the U.S.S.R.:

p ’Make no mistake about it: Sivachev and Yakovlev are good. Of course, we learn to “bleep” the nonsense out of Russian rhethoric, just as we do with our own American spokespeople. But they do confront the issue of human rights in a way that keeps you up very late at night. It is not so much matter of food, shelter, and clothing against one-man-one-vote, as it is something they quote from Jack Green on the American revolution: “Every man was to have an equal opportunity to become more unequal.”

p ’Yes, it is deadly.

p ’Either we do better than the American Revolution and the Bolshevic Revolution or we will be preaching about human rights as we commit genocide.’^^19^^

p Professor Williams is right. That is precisely what we meant: the ’human rights’ campaign coming from the United States is an outrageous exercise in hypocrisy on the part of the propertied powers-that-be. Here is the quotation from our book he referred to among other things: ’We Soviet people are constantly told by various means—for example, by various radio “Voices”—that “dissidents” represent true aspirations of our country! We witness ever new “operations” by the Western mass media—“Solzhenitsyn”, “the issue of human rights”, etc. We are constantly taught to try to see a certain beacon of freedom that is to light the way for the whole world, especially for us, allegedly 266 steeped in vice and delusions. One needs, indeed, a strong sense of humor to tolerate this massive campaign.

p ’The greatest pundit, we are told, of course is Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In late 1976, the Novosti Press Publishing House published an essay by Nikolai Yakovlev, Living in Lie. It should be quoted at some length because this essay has direct bearing on the problems of our book. Having analyzed Solzhenitsyn’s major works, I, Professor Yakovlev, concluded . . . (See the last chapter of this book for the main points made in Living in Lie—N. Y.)

p ’Here we come to the last point—“freedom”, the meaning of “human rights”, all that is now being hotly debated in the West; and we, the Russians, are invited to draw salutary lessons from torrents of words. Recent celebrations of the United States bicentennial helped us all to realize the precise meaning of this high-sounding discussion. We never concealed the fact that our countries represent opposite socio-economic systems. The major difference is private property.’^^20^^ This was followed by Professor Green’s quotation about the American Revolution referred to in part by Professor Williams.

p We have always considered Professor Williams a man of boundless intellectual courage. This time he has also displayed considerable civic courage by pointing to the class aspect of our work. Our book was attacked in the United States often enough, but its critics were united not only in their outrage but also in their silence regarding our interpretation of the ’human rights’ campaign. The longest remarks on that issue were like this: The New York Times lengthy summary-review merely said that the authors ’call President Carter’s human rights program abrasive’^^21^^. We never used that word. That would have been putting it too mildly. The reviewers, quite verbose on other issues, were surprisingly close-mouthed about our assessment of that campaign. Only very few, very brief reviews noted in passing that we discussed that problem. For example, ’this unique study of Soviet-U.S. relations . . . concedes nothing to our campaign for human rights’^^22^^. Or, ’in their discussion of human rights, the authors charge the U.S. with interfering in Soviet internal affairs and thus jeopardizing peaceful coexistence and detente’.^^23^^

p It is perfectly clear why the issue was hushed up. Those in the United States who support the ‘dissidents’ are on 267 shaky ground and besides, the latter are hardly capable of winning widespread approval in the West. The New World Review, a progressive American publication, offered a competent analysis of the book and began it by going back to the October Revolution of 1917: ’Those groups, who are now, as then, incessantly preaching their warped version of “human rights" to the world while continuing to conduct their old policies of covert intervention, political doubletalk, and economic and military blackmail, and with the unspoken assumption—accepted, fortunately, by fewer and fewer foreigners and U.S. citizens—that the United States has a God-given right to set others straight, because the latter are not—allegedly—competent enough to do the job for themselves.

p ’The propaganda continues to din forth, but as Sivachev and Yakovlev remind us, the same patterns of response were evident sixty-two years ago. The vaunted “human rights" campaign with its saccharine solicitude for emigres and “dissidents”, no matter who and no matter how benighted and manipulated, was already in full swing at that time.

p ’Ignored then, as later, was the momentous, central reality of our era: that the real emigres and dissidents are the multiplying millions intent on leaving the capitalist system forever, whether their individually customized biographies are ever published or not; the true “dissidents” are not the vastly overpublicized minority of fortune-seekers, drop-outs and asserted celebrities, whose ready-made confessions of personal grievance and failure clutter the remainder shelves of the discount bookstores.’^^24^^

p Alan Wolfe, a member of the Nation’s editorial board, is a fascinated traveler in the capitalist jungle. A perceptive and shrewd scholar, he views American realities with sadness. A seeker after the truth and a political thinker, Dr. Wolfe is blessed with an insatiable curiosity, and our book has not escaped his attention. His colleagues should be grateful to him for most of his competent criticism and pertinent conclusions.

p ’The fact is that Russia and the United States comes closer to the truth in its perceptions of American-Soviet relations than any comparable “official” history in the United States could. The reason for this is simple: hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union has, from 268 the beginning, been more the responsibility of America than Russia. As a skeptic who views state power with inherent suspicion, I would like to be able to blame both countries equally for the frequent deterioration in their relationship ... Yet the historical record is overwhelming. While Russia has from time to time acted foolishly (and once or twice in adventurous fashion), the United States has been obstinate, hypocritical, aggressive, sanctimonious, untrustworthy and needlessly belligerent. The new-found “friendship” with China is just one more chapter in a long history of hostility toward the Soviet Union.

’In treating the sorry record of performance of the United States in these matters, Sivachev and Yakovlev try hard to find the right tone. Critical of the United States, they make an effort to restrain their indignation. Possessed of a fuller sense of the complexity of American politics than many Soviet specialists on America, they understand that alternatives were possible ... Conversant with the work of revisionist historians in the United States, they engage frequently in debates of considerable importance. Moreover, they have avoided being ponderous, and even, from time to time strike a humorous note ... Their book is entertaining to read, instructive and, in many respects, fascinating. They took on a most difficult assignment and performed it extremely well.’^^25^^

p The discussion in the United States of the Soviet survey of Soviet-American diplomatic relations, necessarily described here in detail, is far from reflecting all U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. The polemic touched on the traditional and respectable form of intergovernment relations, one that is studied by professional historians. Soviet historians have always stayed within the confines of that field.

p But the trends that emerged in the United States back in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt times have now grown so much that diplomatic historiography can no longer highlight all the aspects of relations between our two countries. U.S. foreign policy is increasingly resorting to psychological warfare and subversion—the techniques born in Washington during the war against the Axis powers. They have now been officially adopted as routine methods used 269 by the United States in its relations with the Soviet Union. This is even reflected in the structure of U.S. foreign policy leadership, comprising the State Department and the President’s Special Assistant for National Security, the man in charge of the U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence community.

p The dichotomy of methods—official diplomacy with its pious declarations and subversion aimed at overthrowing governments Washington dislikes—often gives rise to conflicts between those in charge of those two top government agencies. Such conflicts—for example, those that happened under Presidents Nixon and Carter—were not so much rooted in the personal qualities of the Secretary of State or the Special Assistant for National Security (despite speculation to that effect in the mass media) as in the controversy over priorities, over whether the desired result at a given moment should be achieved by diplomacy or subversion or a combination of the two, and if so, what should the ratio be, etc.

p Another question was whether the issue discussed was a ’crisis situation’; the positions of the competing colleagues depended on the answer to that question because, according to American mythology, the State Department takes care of maintaining traditional diplomatic relations, while the President’s Special Assistant for National Security steps to the fore in case of ‘crisis’. Henry Kissinger’s memoirs are interesting in this regard because they supplied the students of U.S. foreign policy with certain authoritative— although strictly limited—information about the way the entire mechanism operated. Dr. Kissinger was, of course, in a position to do so because he had held both these posts and had been an employee or a willing associate of military intelligence (G-2), the CIA and the FBI. His diplomatic pragmatism is rooted in the considerable personal experience he accumulated while working for the intelligence services and in his ‘theoretical’ penchant for rationalizing the unthinkable.

p Henry Kissinger’s symbiosys of diplomacy, and covert operations shows how greatly today’s U.S. foreign policy differs from, say, the pastoral 1950s. In those days, the U.S. journalist W. Bowart recalls, ’in the chill of the Cold War, few Americans remembered that John Foster Dulles had been pro-Nazi before Hitler invaded Poland. No one 270 thought, either, to question the fact that while John Foster Dulles was running the State Department, and therefore dealing with friendly governments, his brother Allen was running the CIA, which he once described as a State Department for dealing with unfriendly governments’.^^26^^

p That means both the State Department and the CIA are organic components of U.S. foreign policy, and so both American diplomacy and subversive activities should be examined accordingly, as an integral whole. Previously, Soviet historians avoided such an approach for the simple reason that Washington rarely admitted that the CIA was an official tool of U.S. foreign policy. Another reason was the understandable reluctance to probe into the unsavory dealings of U.S. cloak-and-dagger types. The book Professor Sivachev and myself wrote is a case in point: it deliberately avoided touching on that issue. Perhaps this was an example of the ‘restraint’ Alan Wolfe referred to. But we can no longer continue in that vein in view of the recent developments in U.S. foreign policy that clearly spell interference in the internal affairs of the Soviet Union.

That was why I wrote CIA Target—U.S.S.R., published in the Soviet Union in 1979. I believe it should be viewed in conjunction with the survey of U.S.-Soviet diplomatic relations Professor Sivachev and myself wrote for the American audience. The two books, I trust, will offer a balanced view of how Soviet historians assess Washington’s policy toward the Soviet Union.