The Kremlin's Foreign Policy Since Stalin

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IN the months since Stalin's death the new leadership in the Kremlin has made serious efforts to break out of the East-West stalemate and has displayed an unaccustomed flexibility in wielding the almost disused weapons of diplomacy. It has brought its opponents, some reluctantly, some enthusiastically, to agree to participate in two major conferences, on Germany and on Korea. In so doing, it has chosen the terrain and the weapons for wreaking maximum damage against the vulnerable joints of the alliances which the West has shored up since 1948 against Soviet acts and threats of violence. As in the fable, the Soviet sun has suddenly taken to shining warmly; and the free-world wayfarer, having forgotten the north wind, is ready to throw away his cloak and bask in its rays.

Some of the first steps in carrying out the new Soviet line were little more than gestures. The decision to allow several Russian wives, married to American citizens, to leave Russia with their husbands makes no change, of course, in the unique Soviet law which, passed since their marriages, forbids Soviet citizens to marry foreigners. Except in the Kremlin, no one would consider this an act of grace. The Soviet "recommendation" to the Chinese Communist and North Korean Governments to exchange seriously ill and disabled prisoners-of-war could be regarded as an act of great generosity only by people who have unconsciously accepted the Soviet assumption that not only its own people but captured prisoners are the property of the captor, who has both the right and the duty to enslave them to his ideology. Moscow's intercession to secure the release of United Nations civilians illegally detained in Korea for almost three years would have been a routine action on the part of any Western Power. Yet each of these "gracious acts" held the headlines for many days, and, cumulatively, they have led many people to believe, as one analyst wrote recently, that the new Soviet leadership is "digging a tunnel of friendship to the West," and that the main obstacle to peace is that the West may not begin "digging from its end."