To the Editor:
In a previous letter [November 1980] I stated that Foreign Policy had refused to publish a criticism by me of an article by Dimitri K. Simes, “The Anti-Soviet Brigade,” which appeared in the magazine’s Winter 1979/80 issue. To Mr. Simes’s article itself I devoted, in my letter to COMMENTARY, only half a paragraph in which I characterized the article as blatant apologetics for Soviet policies. Now Mr. Simes has written an elaborate answer [COMMENTARY, January 1981] to my reference to his article.
The situation is grotesque: I am not allowed to criticize Mr. Simes in Foreign Policy, while Mr. Simes is allowed to attack, in COMMENTARY, my reference to his article without answering my specific criticisms.
“Nothing in the article would justify” my characterization of it, Mr. Simes contends in his COMMENTARY letter, for (according to him) he says there that “appreciation of the seriousness of the Soviet challenge ‘is not only entirely legitimate but probably long overdue.’” But if one turns to his text in Foreign Policy, one finds (p. 39):
Thus, two factors are behind the shift to an alarmist view of the Soviet Union in the United States. Their appreciation is not only entirely legitimate but probably long overdue.
In other words, what is overdue in Mr. Simes’s opinion is not an appreciation of the Soviet challenge itself but an appreciation of the factors behind the alarmist (!) view of the Soviet regime which some in the United States hold. In his reply to me he has not simply distorted what he originally wrote but has changed its meaning to the opposite.
To disprove my characterization of his article, Mr. Simes also quotes from it what is “uncomplimentary about the Kremlin’s behavior,” in his opinion. (Well, hardly anyone in the West is only complimentary about the “Kremlin’s behavior.”) Yet many of these admissions are intended by Mr. Simes solely to show that the trends of the past continue into the present, and therefore do not constitute an argument against “détente.” Thus, “Soviet diplomacy of force is also hardly a new development, as the citizens of Czechoslovakia and Hungary can attest,” Mr. Simes reassures his readers in Foreign Policy:
Nor have Soviet domestic controls been significantly tightened up in the 1970’s. The harshness of punishment has not become more severe. The number of Soviet Jews who have been allowed to emigrate has reached unprecedented levels.
What is the moral?
If many Americans feel cheated by détente, the Russians are not responsible for their illusions. Euphoria in the United States was not of Soviet making. On the contrary, the Soviet leadership, despite all the champagne drinking and exchange of pleasantries with President Nixon and Kissinger, was remarkably frank from the first days of détente about what the new relationship was not.
Since Mr. Simes nevertheless concludes, quoting an allegedly unreported dictum by Henry Kissinger, that “détente [must] remain an imperative,” to which there is “no credible alternative,” surely Mr. Simes’s reassurances above are apologetics for Soviet policies.
Mr. Simes contends that his article appeared before the massive flow of Soviet troops into Afghanistan on December 24, 1979, though the article itself is misleading: Mr. Simes writes that Marshal Matvey Zakharov once did in the 1973 war against Israel what “General Ivan Pavlovsky is currently doing in Afghanistan.” Had it been clear from the article that Mr. Simes intended to defend as détente the Soviet war in Afghanistan under General Pavlovsky only until the massive roll-in of Soviet troops occurred, I would have gladly specified this.
To demonstrate his attitude after December 24, 1979, Mr. Simes cites in his COMMENTARY letter some remarks he made in the Washington Post Magazine last July, as quoted in a column by Rudy Maxa. On July 6, Rudy Maxa wrote about Mr. Simes:
His well-enunciated views of America’s relations with his homeland-most recently in an essay in Foreign Policy magazine—have sometimes irritated other émigrés and hard-line Americans who prefer to portray the Soviet Union as a power-hungry, predatory bear. Simes contends the Soviet Union is “essentially another superpower looking for a place under the sun, as uncomfortable as that may be to some Americans.”
I would regard this description of Mr. Simes’s attitude, six months after the massive Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, as coinciding (in everything except terminology) with my stated view of Mr. Simes’s article in Foreign Policy.
On July 13, another column by Rudy Maxa quoted Mr. Simes as saying “America’s reaction to the invasion of Afghanistan only reinforced Moscow’s feeling that the U.S. is hostile”; so, to “hurt the Soviets where it really counts,” Mr. Simes proposes in particular “a genuine solution of the Palestinian problem.” (!) This is like proposing to punish a shark by throwing it into the ocean.
As a Soviet political émigré I requested space from Foreign Policy because Mr. Simes attacks Soviet political émigrés. Mr. Simes now says that he has “done nothing of the sort.” Yet his article does include in the ranks of the “anti-Soviet brigade,” the target of his attack, “the increasingly vocal and influential community of Soviet political émigrés” (p. 33). No exception or reservation of any kind is made.
Finally, it is disingenuous of Mr. Simes to complain that “instead of addressing our substantive differences, Mr. Navrozov resorts to distortions.” How can I address “our substantive differences” and how can the public judge which of us “resorts to distortions,” if Foreign Policy gives space to Mr. Simes only?
Lev Navrozov
New York City
