Dangerous Relations: The Soviet Union in World Politics, 1970-1982

Abstract

Adam B. Ulam, Director of the Russian Research Center and Gurney Professor of History and Political Science at Harvard University, the author of many books on the Soviet Union including the magisterial Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Policy 1917-1973, has again come out with a first-rate, well-documented analytical history of American-Soviet relations from 1970 to 1982. It could also have been subtitled the rise and temporary fall of detente. At the time of writing this review, it appears that the Reagan administration is very eager to go to a summit meeting-hence the qualifying adjective temporary. In other words, it is history that is most relevant to the policy of the mid-eighties. As usual, Professor Ulam is superb in plausibly reconstructing the motives of the top Soviet foreign policymakers, as, for instance, in summarizing the speech that Brezhnev may have made in defense of detente with the United States. (Incidentally, Brezhnev's remarks to the April 1973 plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union have not been published to date; the closest documentation in the public domain is a British intelligence report on Brezhnev's explanations to Eastern European leaders, in which he defended detente as a temporary tactic to enable the USSR to negotiate with the U.S. from a position of strength in about twelve to fifteen years, i.e. in the mid-1980s. See New York Times, September 17, 1973, p. 2.) If this reviewer has one quibble with the book, it is with its author's tendency not to bring up and explore the controversial and usually dark underside of Soviet-American relations. Granted Professor Ulam's argument (in the thoughtful introductory chapter) that the U.S. should have been more forceful in defending Eastern Europe against Soviet satellization in 1944-47 (pp. 17f.), this reviewer still suspects that it was more than tenacious, well-informed American diplomacy (p. 21) that persuaded Stalin to desist from replicating his East European methods and taking over Iran in 1946. President Truman's 1955-56 and Dean Acheson's 1969 memoirs are not very enlightening on that subject. But there is President Truman's syndicated article in the New York Times of August 25,1957 (Section 1, p. 23) which states: The Soviet Union persisted in its occupation [of Azerbaijan in northern Iran] until I personally saw to it that Stalin was informed that I had given orders to our military chiefs to prepare for the movement of our ground, sea and air forces. There is also Senator Henry Jackson's recollection of President Truman telling him that at the height of the Iranian crisis he called in then Ambassador Gromyko and presented him with a forty-eight hour ultimatum: leave Iran or suffer another Hiroshima. We are going to drop it on you, Jackson quoted Truman as