Peace Offensive

Moscow continued to talk peace, peace, peace.

In the Kremlin, Deputy Foreign Minister Jacob Malik, who in June gave the cue for the Korean truce talks (TIME, July 2), received a delegation of British Quakers. Would Russia promise, the Quakers asked Malik, not to fire up revolutions in the West, provided the West stayed away from the Iron Curtain? Malik replied, by quoting his boss Stalin in a 1936 interview: "To attempt to export revolution is nonsense. Without the desire within a country, there will be no revolution."

Russia is ready, Malik said, "to enter into negotiations of a most businesslike character and with a view to agreement" with any power, on any issue. Russia is all for the "development of international trade, on a basis of equality." Russia desires more "cultural contacts" between Soviet and foreign citizens.

As for the U.N., Malik went on, Russia continues to support it, hopes that it may yet become "a reliable organ for the maintenance of peace," and feels that it should "carry out its charter obligation to free the coming generation from the scourge of war."

Malik's unctuous tone found its printed echo in News, the new English-language Soviet magazine, whose first issue arrived in the U.S. last week.

A well-printed fortnightly (subscription: $2 a year), News is aimed at "the public of the West." Proclaims its editor, M.M. Morozov: "This is the sacred truth. Everybody wants peace." Alexander Troyanovsky, first Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. (1933-38), writes a piece about "the two great countries [the U.S. and Russia, which] have a common boundary"--i.e., the Diomedes Islands off Alaska. Famed Soviet Historian Eugene Tarle sighs that "my mind can conceive no rational excuse for the highly strained relations that have arisen between the two great Anglo-Saxon powers and the Soviet Union."

Moscow's purpose was as transparent as vodka: to lure the West into relaxing. Warned Yugoslavia's Tito, out of his intimate knowledge of his old master: Moscow is trying to "make one feel that the U.S.S.R. has changed its line . . . Soviet foreign policy occasionally changes tactics, but there is never a basic change in its substance."

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