Chapter IV of this book contains a section headed "Why Peaceful Coexistence Is Not Possible in Ideology." That sentence is the reason to read it. Everything else here — the survey of American propaganda machinery, the chapters on the crisis of bourgeois thought, the long historical excursus on propaganda from Philip of Macedon to the Nuremberg trial — is arranged around that proposition, and the proposition itself was Soviet state doctrine at the exact moment the Soviet state was signing agreements with Richard Nixon. Arbatov's task was to explain why the two things were not in contradiction. He performs it with unusual clarity, and in performing it he sets out, more plainly than most Soviet writers of the period dared, what détente was permitted to cover and what it was not.
The book was written before the détente it defends. Arbatov says so in his first sentence: "The Russian language edition of this book was brought out in the autumn of 1970." The English edition of 1973 reproduces that text with a new Author's Note bringing it up to date, and the update is where the political function shows. The Note is organised around the 24th Congress of the CPSU and its Peace Programme; it welcomes the USSR–FRG and Polish–FRG treaties; and it records that "President Richard M. Nixon's visit to Moscow and the treaties and agreements that were signed as a result of the talks are a considerable contribution not only towards improving the relations between the two countries but also towards strengthening world peace and security." Then, having said all that, it closes the door: "far from dying down, the ideological struggle remains acute in spite of the relaxation of international tension." And: "The ideological front, the battle for people's minds, remains one of the principal bridgeheads of that struggle." A Progress Publishers title in English is an export product, and one can read the commission off the page. Western readers were to be reassured that the Soviet Union meant the treaties, and simultaneously informed that no ideological concession accompanied them.
The book tells you nothing about who wrote it. The Author's Note is signed "G. Arbatov" and that is the whole of the biography the volume supplies — no institute, no title, no affiliation. This matters, because the author was not a jobbing propagandist. Georgi Arbatov had founded the Institute of the USA and Canada of the Academy of Sciences in 1967 and directed it for nearly thirty years; he sat on the Central Committee; he advised Brezhnev and, later, Gorbachev; and he was among the very small number of Soviet officials who dealt continuously and directly with the American political establishment. He set out his own account of that career two decades later in The System: An Insider's Life in Soviet Politics (Times Books, 1992). None of this is in the book. A reader in 1973 encountering "G. Arbatov" would have had no way of knowing that the anonymous-sounding author of a Progress paperback was one of the architects of the policy the paperback was defending, and the anonymity is itself a small piece of the design: the argument is presented as scholarship rather than as doctrine, which is what made it useful.
Take the scholarship seriously first, because a good deal of it holds.
Chapter III, on imperialism's propaganda machine, is a survey of real institutions doing real things, assembled from American and West German sources that any reader could check. Arbatov is right that the Free Europe Committee, formally a private charity soliciting donations from individuals and Boy Scout troops, was nothing of the kind, and he quotes American authors on the point: "The Free Europe Committee has never opened its books to public scrutiny." He is right that "there is no doubt that its overall direction is in the hands of the US State Department and the CIA." He is right about the scale — Radio Free Europe's Munich operation, the relay station in Portugal, Radio Liberty broadcasting in seventeen languages of the peoples of the USSR with "a staff of some 1,000" — and right that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which he identifies as an organisation that "specialises in propaganda for intellectuals in Western Europe, Asia and Latin America," belonged in the same category of deniable state instrument. He is right that the CIA and USIA commissioned and secretly subsidised books and articles, and he quotes American journalism on the specific cases. And he correctly cites Senator Fulbright, in the New York Times of 21 February 1972, saying that the radios "should be given an opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of cold war relics." All of this was true. Most of it had been forced into the open in the United States between 1966 and 1971, by Ramparts, by the New York Times, and by Senator Clifford Case's disclosure of the CIA's funding of the two radios. Arbatov's account of Western covert propaganda is not Soviet invention, and a reader who assumes it must be will be corrected.
What is odd is how much weaker his documentation is than the case allowed. He writes that the CIA's direction of the Free Europe Committee admits of "no doubt" and that its financing is "no secret" — but his footnotes go to Robert T. Holt's 1958 study, to a 1958 Reader's Digest article, and to a 1950 Daily Worker. On the Congress for Cultural Freedom he says only that it was a screen; he does not mention the CIA at all, though the exposure was six years old and had wrecked Encounter. He asserts where he could have proved. The most plausible explanation is that the book's Russian text was fixed in 1970 and only lightly amended, but the effect on a sceptical reader is unfortunate: the strongest evidence for his thesis is missing from the chapter that most needed it.
His larger indictment also lands. "Modern anti-communism is thus a mammoth ideological and political 'enterprise'," he writes, "and constitutes one of the foundations of the policies and ideology of imperialism. For its personnel, resources, capital investments and scale of activity it is the largest ideological 'enterprise' in the history of capitalism." As a description of the institutional weight of American anti-communism in 1970 — the funded institutes, the professionalised émigré organisations, the endowed chairs, the men who made careers of it — this is not caricature. He is on similarly firm ground when he observes that anti-communism served domestically as a licence to attack liberals and trade unionists who were not communists at all, and that the American Communist Party was far too small to account for the scale of the campaign mounted against it.
Now the doctrine, which is where the book turns.
Arbatov's formulation is careful and it is not evasive. Peaceful coexistence, he argues, is a form of the class struggle, not a suspension of it — he quotes the 23rd Congress to that effect — and since the two systems "compete for the support of the peoples, the war of ideas is inevitable." He rejects three alternatives by name: "ideological unity," the convergence theory, and an "ideological armistice," which he calls a project fit only for "people who do not understand the essence of the social processes taking place in the world." He records the decisive ruling: the demands for ideological concessions "were categorically rejected by the CC CPSU at its plenary meeting in April 1968, which underscored that peaceful coexistence in ideology was unacceptable." And he states the principle without softening: "There neither is nor can be room for compromise between the bourgeois and the proletarian world outlook."
Read as a statement about relations between states, this is defensible and even obvious. Nobody supposed that the SALT agreements obliged Moscow to stop publishing Lenin or Washington to stop publishing Hayek. Arbatov makes the reasonable version of the case at length, and makes it well: that ideological difference is not what causes wars, that "the stumbling-block on the path to disarmament is not any difference in ideology but the reluctance of the influential monopolies to part with the profits they are deriving from the arms race," that the United States and Tsarist Russia coexisted for a century across an ideological chasm.
But the doctrine does not stay between states, and Arbatov does not pretend that it does. The Conclusion says it outright: the ideological struggle operates "both on the international scene, and within society," where it "is a major independent form of the class struggle that requires special efforts." Chapter III spells out what those efforts are at home. Defence against imperialist psychological warfare, he writes, "demands the creation of a kind of immunity against these intrigues. This immunity is built up by the ideological tempering and firmness of the people, by vigilance, by unshakable class positions on the part of all workers of the ideological front." That is the whole argument in miniature, and its domestic consequence follows without a further step. If the ideological front cannot be relaxed while state relations relax; if vigilance is the mechanism of defence; and if disagreement inside the country is by construction an opening for an adversary who is known to be seeking exactly such openings — then a Soviet citizen who dissents is not a citizen with a wrong opinion. He is a breach in the perimeter. Arbatov never says this. He does not have to; the architecture says it for him.
What the book does not contain is therefore the most informative thing about it. In roughly 111,000 words on the war of ideas, published by the state that was at that moment prosecuting its critics, there is no discussion of any Soviet citizen who disagreed with the Soviet government. Not one is named. The word "dissident" occurs exactly once, in quotation marks, and refers to the repression of dissenters in capitalist countries at the turn of the twentieth century. Samizdat is not mentioned. The Chronicle of Current Events, then in its fifth year, is not mentioned. Censorship appears repeatedly and always as somebody else's practice — the book's one general remark on it is a parenthesis noting "the censorship (which exists in one form or another even in the most democratic bourgeois countries)," as though the institution were a bourgeois peculiarity. Glavlit does not appear. And the word "Stalin" does not appear in this book a single time. The Terror is reached only through the formula that "the dogmatic, stagnant trends, springing from the personality cult, and manifestations of subjectivism have been surmounted" — a sentence that converts the execution of most of Lenin's Central Committee into a methodological problem, now solved.
The sharpest of these silences concerns jamming. Arbatov devotes many pages to Radio Liberty's transmitters and their wattage; the only occurrence of the word "jamming" in the entire book is in a footnote about British black propaganda against Nazi Germany in the Second World War. The USSR was jamming Western broadcasts as he wrote. Radio Liberty was jammed without interruption from its founding; jamming of the Voice of America and the BBC was suspended in 1973, as a gesture toward the European security conference, and resumed after the invasion of Afghanistan. Against that background one sentence in Chapter IV deserves to be read twice, because it is the finest thing in the book and its author cannot have meant it as it reads: "The interest that people take in what is happening in the world cannot be killed in the same way that our planet cannot be partitioned into sealed compartments by erecting barriers that would be impenetrable to the gaze and to words." He wrote that about the West's inability to keep socialist ideas out. It is an exact description of what his own government was spending a fortune attempting.
The same chapter contains the book's most consequential passage, and it is the one that would matter within two years. Arbatov attacks the Western campaign for the free flow of information — "This is the purpose of the 'freedom of information' demanded by the imperialist powers, notably by the USA" — and argues that it serves commercial domination by the American wire services and that "the drive for unrestricted 'freedom of information' abroad pursues the aim of facilitating espionage under the guise of news gathering." He then reports, accurately and with evident approval, that when Article 19 of the Universal Declaration was debated, "the US delegation flatly refused to add the words 'within limits not threatening the security of states'." He is right about the history and right that American enthusiasm for open information was not disinterested. But he has also, in 1973, written the Soviet brief against Basket Three of the Helsinki Final Act two years before Moscow signed it — the human-rights and information provisions that Soviet citizens would promptly cite against their own government, and for citing which they would go to camps. The theoretical groundwork for treating that appeal as hostile foreign activity is laid here, in advance.
On the specific historical record the book's falsifications are conventional and compact. 1956 in Hungary appears as "the assistance rendered to the working people of Hungary during the 1956 counter-revolutionary uprising"; Czechoslovakia in August 1968 receives the formula "the fraternal internationalist assistance to the Czechoslovak people," a phrase for an invasion by five armies against a communist party leadership that had asked for nothing of the kind. Both are listed, without irony, as proofs that the Soviet Union prevents imperialism from "exporting counter-revolution." Trotsky is named once in the entire volume, and inaccurately: the advocacy of a "revolutionary war" against the bourgeoisie of other countries in 1918 is attributed to "the 'Left' Communists and the Trotskyites" jointly. The revolutionary-war position in 1918 was Bukharin's and the Left Communists'; Trotsky's position at Brest-Litovsk was the quite different "neither war nor peace"; and Lenin's opponents in that argument were not "Trotskyites," a category that did not yet exist. The amalgam is small but it is characteristic — it merges two opposed positions into one heresy so that a single refutation can dispose of both.
And there is Orwell, whom the book meets twice. Both mentions are to the novel, not to a date: the volume is a first printing of 1973 and nothing in it postdates 1972. Arbatov classifies 1984 among "outright anti-communist concoctions," alongside Zamyatin's We, and adds a footnote arguing that "with all the anti-Soviet calumny contained in books like 1984, the disgusting processes described in them are reminiscent of capitalism," citing Adlai Stevenson on American informers. As a point about McCarthyism the observation is not silly. As criticism of Orwell it is a refusal to read: the book is dismissed in a subordinate clause by an author who has just finished explaining that the ideological front must never be relaxed, that vigilance is the citizen's duty, and that the free flow of information is a hostile operation.
The reply was made at the time, and it was not a defence of the CIA. In the weeks after the Moscow summit that Arbatov's Author's Note celebrates, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International issued a statement, dated 31 May 1972 and printed in Intercontinental Press on 12 June 1972 as "On the Betrayal of the Vietnamese at the Moscow Summit Meeting," observing that "the Kremlin chieftains clinked champagne glasses with war criminal Nixon" while Haiphong was being mined. The argument was pressed through the following year: a statement in Intercontinental Press of 15 January 1973 held that "the main cause of this isolation is the conservative policy of peaceful coexistence followed by the Moscow and Peking bureaucracies," and one of 5 February 1973 that "by arranging Nixon's visits to Moscow and Peking in 1972, these bureaucrats helped him to weaken the American antiwar movement." After the October war, a statement in the issue of 5 November 1973 concluded that "the policy of socalled peaceful coexistence can lead only to partial compromises between the interests of American imperialism and the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy." The charge was not that Moscow had been too friendly with Washington. It was that coexistence between the two states had been purchased with the interests of a revolution neither of them controlled — precisely the cost Arbatov's chapter is constructed to argue does not exist.
On the domestic half the same current answered in the register this book makes impossible. Writing on Soviet democracy in Intercontinental Press of 13 September 1976, Ernest Mandel set out both halves of the position in three sentences: "I completely reject Sakharov's current political position." "I unconditionally support his right to advocate these views freely and openly in the Soviet Union." "As Rosa Luxemburg put it so cogently, democracy is always freedom for dissenters." That distinction — between defeating an opponent's ideas and disabling him — is the one Arbatov's doctrine cannot make, because a doctrine under which the ideological front is a front, and citizens are its defensive perimeter, has no vocabulary for a disagreement that is merely a disagreement.
Read for what it is, this remains a valuable book: a lucid, well-sourced, internally consistent statement of what the Soviet leadership believed it was doing in 1973, written by a man who helped decide it, for an audience abroad whose reassurance was part of the policy. Its account of Western covert propaganda is largely accurate and should not be dismissed. Its account of the ideological struggle is accurate too — accurate about itself, which is rarer. Arbatov explains, in public and in English, why the relaxation of tension between states would not be allowed to reach the people living inside one of them. He offers it as a reason for confidence. It reads now as a warrant.