U.S.-Soviet Relations in the Era of Détente. by Richard PipesReview by: Walter C. Clemens, Jr.Slavic Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring, 1983), pp. 117-118Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2497460 .

Accessed: 17/06/2014 22:22

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Slavic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.189 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:22:30 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Reviews 117

their disposal or opposed to them, and the cross-purposes which set the different communist parties against each other. The twenty-one chapters are brief and terse but filled with interesting information. In a compelling narrative, they cover the Russian Revolution and the Comintern, war-time resistance movements and postwar settlements, and the diversity of communism in Western Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

The red thread going through this story is the clash between the internationalism of Marxist theory and the fact that in practice national power considerations take prece- dence. Internationalism, the author argues, was a "sound ideological premise"; yet her book shows that it was an illusion. The belief that the experience and organization of the Russian Bolsheviks were relevant to all other communist parties was an illusion that resulted from the internationalism of Marxist theory, and the author traces the failure of the Comintern to this illusion. The idea that a single strategy or policy could be valid for all communist parties proved to be equally illusory. These conceptions were shown to be invalid because "in place of a small united class of proletarians the industrial age produced a large mass of differentiated working classes whose only point of reference was the national entity. Thus, alienation . . . did not arise from being an exploited, inter- national class, but from being deprived of national status."

The book is based on a wide array of sources ranging over a broad political spectrum. The author carefully presents various interpretations in the many instances where not all the evidence is available, but she does not hesitate to offer her own hypotheses, at times bold ones.

Narkiewicz lists Bernstein, Lenin, Tito, Mao, and Castro as the chief innovators who "revised" Marxism; if she omitted Stalin, that may be because she considered him a practitioner rather than a theorist. But I would also have added Kautsky and other theorists of the Second International (Plekhanov, Mehring, Zetkin) because, in retro- spect, their orthodox Marxism appears to have been a misunderstanding of what Engels and Marx meant. Again, her history of Marxism concentrates attention on the adjust- ments to national power needs. It neglects the fact that these were also adjustments to national culture; hence she does not recognize that the orthodox Marxism of the old German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was a Prussian version of the original ideology. I am well aware that this is a highly personal observation, and it is not meant to detract from my appreciation of this scholarly and informative book.

Lerner's book is a freshman introduction to the history of socialism and communism, from Rousseau to the present. It has no discernible focus. The treatment is superficial and episodic, dealing with personalities and events without explaining the aim of policies or the essence of ideas. The treatment is unbalanced. Incidental figures and events are stressed while major ones are slighted. There are numerous errors of fact and several names are repeatedly misspelled. Together with stylistic lapses, these flaws suggest both sloppy editing and infirm knowledge. It is an unsatisfactory text.

ALFRED G. MEYER

University of Michigan

U.S.-SOVIET RELATIONS IN THE ERA OF DETENTE. By Richard Pipes. Boul- der, Colo.: Westview Press, 1981. xviii, 227 pp. $25.00, cloth. $10.00, paper.

Few other specialists on Russian affairs with the obvious exception of George F. Kennan have had so large a role in rationalizing changing United States policies toward the Soviet Union as Richard Pipes. The articles in this collection (plus George Urban's interview with him in Encounter) were all published in the 1970s before Pipes became the senior Soviet specialist on President Reagan's National Security Council.

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.189 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:22:30 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

118 Slavic Review

These essays are stimulating but impressionistic; erudite, especially the footnotes, but often inaccurate. Here are a few cases of factual error: (1) The Councils of Ferrara and Florence are dated a century too late; (2) Russia is charged with having "initiated" the dismemberment of China in 1896, even though Britain had already begun this process in 1842, and Japan tore away several more pieces in 1895; (3) the Kremlin is said to have broken the U.S. monopoly on nuclear retaliation "in 1957 when the Soviets launched the Sputnik" rather than when the Kremlin acquired intercontinental bombers in 1954 and 1955 or deployed ICBMs in the late 1950s; (4) Egypt's "defection" from the Soviet camp is placed after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war rather than before, when Sadat evicted Soviet armed forces in 1972.

The above instances are not particularly germane to Pipes's main theses: that the Soviet leaders believe they could fight and win a nuclear war, and that they come from a tradition which makes "compromise" in the American sense unthinkable. But the evidence which Pipes adduces for these contentions is marshaled with a similar disdain for scholarly precision. Thus, Pipes wrote in 1977 that the Soviet Union then possessed a "considerably larger arsenal" of "strategic nuclear weapons" than "we," although U.S. government estimates - then and now - credit the United States with nearly twice as many strategic nuclear warheads at that time as the USSR. Like his erstwhile colleagues on the Committee on the Present Danger, Pipes often treats delivery vehicles as weapons and usually counts the former and not the latter, though weapons are more decisive in war. As to Moscow's putative "pre-emptive strategy" of the 1970s, Pipes argues the theoretical value of shooting first and claims that his interpretation of Soviet doctrine is validated by the writings of the ("pro-Soviet") English physicist P. M. S. Blacket in the late 1940s and the Dinerstein-Garthoff analyses of Soviet strategic writings in the late 1950s - which proved "prescient." He also cites some Soviet military texts to prove that Clausewitz still thrives in Moscow, even though more authoritative Kremlin pronounce- ments cast doubt on this view.

The perils - for scholarship and even for international security - of manipulating history for political action are here writ large.

WALTER C. CLEMENS, JR. Boston University

SOVIET-AMERICAN RELATIONS IN ASIA, 1945-1954. By Russell D. Buhite. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981. xiii, 254 pp. Map. $14.95.

Russell Buhite, a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, has written a lucid and concise account of the Asian origins of the Cold War. For the casual reader, Soviet-American Relations in Asia, 1945-1954 provides a clear and reasoned interpreta- tion of an important period of postwar history. For those with a thorough knowledge of the topic, this book will be much less valuable. It is straightforward and traditional and offers no really new evidence or interpretations.

In discussing United States policy toward China, Buhite argues that Roosevelt's strategy of seeking to win Stalin's support for a united, noncommunist China by making concessions in Manchuria was flawed. This strategy ignored the Soviet Union's ideologi- cally inspired preference for the Chinese Communists, a preference that grew as Chiang Kai-shek's political and military situation deteriorated steadily. Buhite rejects the view that the Soviets would have been willing to accept a Kuomintang-ruled China in order to retain the privileges they had gained in Manchuria. Stalin would not have abandoned Mao, he argues, and the Chinese Communists would have won the civil war even if he had. Buhite's analysis suggests that Roosevelt erred, but what Buhite does not say is what

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.189 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:22:30 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions