The Thaw

Russia is now bent on thawing out the cold war. Last week the U.S.S.R. slowed down the Sovietization of their half of Germany. In Korea, the lines of peace were being drawn on maps while the war went bloodily on. In Vienna, the Russians relaxed their iron hand. In Belgrade, they made overtures to the heretic, Tito. They even confessed that in postwar policy they had made some "mistakes." All along the globecircling seam where the West and Communism rub together abrasively, the stagnant air of cold war began to stir with Kremlin gestures of concession, of adjustment, even of retreat (see below).

The new sequence of actions creates a new diplomatic atmosphere, requiring new diplomatic responses. Whatever their motives, the Kremlin's new bosses acted with suppleness and skill. In his last years, Joseph Stalin's stubborn inflexibility had actually served the West: his intransigeance over Germany drew West Germany to the West; his Korean invasion bestirred the West to rearm; his willfulness drove out Tito. Stalin's successors, without any evident change in aims, have brought some mobility and subtlety back to the Kremlin.

"The tactics of Leninism are smoothness and ability to maneuver," said a recent issue of Moscow's Communist, the party's highbrow journal. "One of the main demands of correct tactical leadership is always to find a link in the chain of events by seizure of which it is possible to take the whole chain into the hand."

The maneuvering was carefully planned, and showed a cunning recognition of ways to achieve substantial effects in the West with means--a dismantled frontier gate, the freeing of a William Oatis--which neither cost them much nor relaxed their grip on power. It was all neatly timed: the French were fumbling in disorder; Sir Winston Churchill talked nostalgically of "a new Locarno"; the U.S. Administration, still trying to come to grips with the realities of responsibility, was pinned between the belief that it must seize the initiative from Moscow and the fear that it is not smart enough to avoid falling into a Communist trap.

So far it has been Western strategy to talk about what deeds the Communists must perform to be entitled to a Big Four conference, all the while avoiding any hard thought about what might be said or done at such a meeting. The hard fact is that, in the year 1953, no Western statesman, and certainly no U.S. President, can make any secret swap with the Russians without severe public scrutiny: Potsdam and Yalta, the wartime era of heady bargaining and private mapmaking, are past.

One example of Russia's current shrewdness: some of the concessions which the West might demand in the name of Germany and Austria were freely given by the Communists last week to the Germans and Austrians themselves, so that the West might not claim credit for extracting the concessions. In this way, Russia stands to win a spurious credit abroad for unilaterally relaxing the cold war. The West has yet to find a way to counter it.

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