The View Beyond the Cold War

In his address to American business leaders in Washington, Leonid Brezhnev presented a remarkably candid and winning rationale for the new Soviet attitude toward the U.S. Excerpts:

The old Russian merchants used to carry their goods to Persia and sell them there and buy Persian goods and bring them back to Russia. That was the basis for friendship, even in those days, between those two countries . . . Without trade no normal relations between any two countries are possible.

All [modern conditions] serve to raise interest in mutually advantageous exchanges, [which] mean trade and cooperation. And that feeling is growing in all countries of the world, but particularly among the big nations, such as the Soviet Union and the U.S.

The cold war put the brake on the development of relations between nations and slowed down the progress and advance of economic and scientific ties. I ask myself, was that a good period? Did it serve the interests of the people? And my answer to that is no, no, no and again no.

It was a war so cold that there came into being such means of warfare as atomic weapons, which must certainly cause us to start thinking, what are we preparing for--to destroy one another and to destroy our entire civilization, the product of thousands of years of man's efforts and labor, or should we endeavor to seek some other alternative?

We have certainly been prisoners of those old [cold war] trends, and to this day we have not been able fully to break those fetters and to come out into the open air, not only in the political field but in trade and economic ties.

Now, in the recent past it was impossible even to conceive of the possibility that one of our ministers could meet and talk to one of you . . . How could a representative of our socialist country, the country of Lenin, suddenly meet with a business executive of the U.S.?

It is my very firm belief that human reason and common sense will always be victorious over obscurantism. Before I left Moscow . . . I directed my criticism first and foremost against our own executives . . . for not being able to think big, for still being wary of large-scale developments in economic cooperation, although the Soviet Union is a country rich in resources. But at the same time, I also criticized you gentlemen for also being too cautious.

I say this on behalf of the Soviet Union and our leadership: We will certainly do all we can to help remove whatever difficulty you encounter on the way [to trade with Russia].

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