Clinton C. Gardner: A Letter to Moscow

Clinton C. Gardner: A Letter to Moscow¹

Professor Nikolai Sivachev
History Department, Moscow University Moscow
117234, USSR

Norwich, Vermont March 7, 1980

Dear Nikolai,

I decided to write you immediately while our conversation of yesterday is still fresh in my mind. So few Americans or Russians ever have the chance to speak heart-to-heart that I think it serves some purpose to capture the spirit of our talk. And to say now some things which I think provided the “unspoken” background of what we said to each other.

First, what a remarkable coincidence that you needed a ride back to Dartmouth from the University of Vermont. And that Larry Radway of the Government Department was able to enlist me to give you the ride. You’re right in your comment about Larry being a doer. He showed a lot of courage when he invited you here after he met you in Moscow last summer. I can see why you took the bait. As a Student of American politics, the New Hampshire primaries “live” must have seemed irresistible.

Of course you too showed courage. As you said, your coming at a time of crisis like this represents a remarkable “statement” on [225] the part of your university that you would remain open. And not reply in kind to the Americans who are trying to end conversation between us. I think of the columnist William Safire, Nixon’s speech writer, who is falling all over himself with joy as he says, “Détente is dead. The Second Cold War is under way.”²

Second, what an equally amazing coincidence that your field as an historian is the U.S. New Deal, and that you have given special attention to the Civilian Conservation Corps. Because I had just finished writing a book in which the last chapter concerned an experimental camp within the CCC. A camp in which I myself was active, as Secretary, and through which I first met Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. As I explained to you, the book I’ve written is concerned with this work. In fact, I’m attaching Chapter 8 since it’s a better description of The Norwich Center’s concerns than the “working papers” I gave you yesterday.

That brings me to the third coincidence, because you turn out to be a member of the board of the USSR-USA Society in the Soviet Union. And on behalf of The Norwich Center I’d visited the society’s offices in Moscow in 1978. (Where, after our conversation, much to my surprise I was interviewed by Radio Moscow.)

Finally, the biggest coincidence is that my book is not so much “about Rosenstock-Huessy” as it is about the need to discover a “new language,” a non-ideological way of thinking and speaking which might help us bridge the Communist-Western communications gap. In fact, I address myself particularly to that part of the gap which opens between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. When the book itself is published, I’ll send you a copy, since in many ways it was always addressed as much to you as to any potential American reader. I think you’ll find it a continuation of that long conversation we had in my Saab as we drove down Interstate 89.

As you will see, while my book concentrates on a proposed new method for the social sciences and a new vision of their role, it necessarily takes a very informal approach to these subjects. Necessarily because, having no academic credentials, it seemed better to present both Rosenstock-Huessy and my own extrapolations [226] from his work as a “memoir.” That’s why I decided to add this letter to you as a sort of postscript and summing up of the book.

Now, to continue our conversation, I thought you dealt very frankly with the question of the Afghanistan invasion in your interview with The Valley News. There you said, for the Soviets it was “a matter of having more secure borders,” to avoid “antiSoviet, hostile influences from the U.S., China and Pakistan.” You added that American officials and people “really do not appreciate how important for us it has been to have secure borders.” Since I’d read your views on this current crisis, it didn’t seem important to bring them up in our conversation.

But this mention of Afghanistan does bring up the larger problem of maintaining U.S.-Soviet dialogue now and in the future. We should be grateful to you, Nikolai, that you didn’t give up on that project. In face of the Cold War noises coming out of Washington in January and February, you said, “No, I’ll go ahead just the same.”

This question of whether we stay open to each other, or give up, was dramatized for me by Vermont’s Senator Leahy in January. It was at a small, informal meeting in a Norwich home. Discussing his backing of SALT II, Leahy said that, despite the present stall in the SALT talks, we’d better start talking with the Russians again. If we didn’t come to any effective arms limitation agreements with them, he said, nuclear war would no longer be merely possible but “probable” before the end of this century. None of us at the meeting had any comment on that, so we returned to discussing such problems as that some people were getting “short” cords when they bought wood.

After the meeting broke up I began to think what lemmings we (and the Russians) are. Leahy had just said that, unless a rather doubtful thing happens, he and we will probably all be incinerated. But none of us felt that there was anything we could do about that. So we urged our senator to look into the question of short cords. By 2000 we were probably going to be burned up like that wood and blown into pieces at the same time - along with [227] most of the Europeans and the Russians. But we can’t even comment on this “end of the world”; it’s almost as if it didn’t concern us.

A flashback to a TV discussion in January will help me get closer to the point. On “Washington Week in Review,” one of the sanest shows on the tube, a group of national reporters was asked by the moderator if there were any possibility of nuclear weapons “coming into play” should the Russians take military action in Iran or otherwise threaten Middle Eastern oil. “Why, yes,” one of them replied in a casual tone, “it looks like a real possibility.” Then the discussion turned to gold prices or something equally weighty.

What I’m leading up to is not that the reporter or our group in Norwich were especially guilty of “accepting” the “probability” of nuclear war - without comment. My point is more that both Russians and Americans - indeed all the nations - seem strangely “objective” about what is happening. Perhaps it’s like the “objectivity” of a rabbit paralyzed by seeing a snake.

A New Yorker editor got this same feeling from that TV show and the subsequent appearance of a Washington Post article saying “World War III” had already begun. At least “Notes and Comment” felt constrained to comment on “World War III” as follows:

The phrase is in quotes here because in the circumstances each element of it sounded wrong, for one reason or another. “World” was misleading, because by implication it left the impression that after World War III there would necessarily still be a world. “War” was inappropriate, because historically wars have been fought for war “aims,” but all imaginable war “aims” would be nullified in a nuclear outbreak; for example, the United States, it was suggested, might wage war to obtain supplies of oil, but of what use would the oil be without a nation to consume it? The numeral “III” was misleading, because it falsely suggested some similarity between nuclear “war” - a convulsion of meaningless destruction that would be over in half an hour - and World War I and World War II, which were actual wars, involving military campaigns and the like, and lasting several years each.”³

Now reading that helped me realize what was happening to [228] our consciousness today. It was being numbed by the “objective inevitability” of events. Even worse we were acting “innocent,” as if there were nothing we could do. Americans in particular (as expressed in that Washington Post article) have an “innocence” of what war, and especially world war, involves. Since you Russians lost almost three times as many souls as did the Jews in the holocaust of World War II, your sensitivity to avoiding war is, I suspect, much higher than ours. The U.S. lost some 300,000 soldiers, less than a quarter of 1 % of our population. You lost some 7,500,000 soldiers and at least again as many civilians, so over fifteen million were sacrificed, over 10 % of your population.

I use figures only because they point to experience. As I told you in the car, Buchenwald became a sort of center point for my life. Perhaps I’m shell-shocked from that and my other experience in World War II. Because the bland talk about “quite possibly” using nuclear weapons in the Middle East or the “probability” of a global holocaust by 2000 seems to upset me more than my friends. I can only guess that they manage to hide their “upset” better than I. I can’t really believe that Americans take as “pragmatic” and detached a view as they seem to. As if, since armament statistics seem to point that way, there probably will be a “World - War - III.”

My small historical contribution to overcoming “innocence” was made in 1945. It was my idea to have the Bürgermeister send civilian groups daily from Weimar to help bury the bodies and clean up Konzentrationslager Buchenwald. I still remember how Lagerältester Hans Aiden and his No. 2 man Walter Bartels, two communists since their youth, worked as a team with us to send over 15,000 prisoners home, and to bury over 2,000 dead. And how I found that lampshade which Ilse Koch had made from human skin. I kept it in my office to show political and military leaders who visited the camp.

It’s because that time was the “moment of truth” in my life that I don’t find Safire amusing when he jokes about détente being dead. As you and I know, detente was in serious trouble long. [229] before Afghanistan. Paul Nitze and the Committee on the Present Danger were only the leaders in a most successful 1977-78 effort, promoted by our military-industrial complex and given great media support, to revive the Cold War. Their super-hawk line was that the Soviet Union was planning to launch and “win” a nuclear war. One of those who most effectively countered that line was that old Russian expert George Kennan. As he put it, “I object to people who talk about war as though it were perfectly natural that if you could go to war, you would. Normally, people have gone to war for a purpose, and if they didn’t have a purpose, they didn’t do it. And I don’t see the purpose from the standpoint of the Soviet Government.”⁴

I’m sure you’re aware that for every Nitze there is a Kennan, and we can only hope that the Kennans will prevail. No, we can do better than that. We could expand exponentially the efforts we make at understanding each other. Couldn’t we go beyond cultural and tourist-style “exchange”? For example, the U.S. economist Kenneth Boulding, to whom I refer as a non-objectifying social scientist in my book, once made the following proposal:

If I were to nominate the activity which is now open to mankind and which would increase most dramatically the probability of his survival, I would nominate a massive intellectual effort in peace research - that is, in the application of the social sciences to the study of conflict systems and especially of conflict systems in their international aspect. ⁵

So far as I know, not much has resulted from that 1964 suggestion. But wouldn’t it make sense to have such peace research undertaken as a joint effort by Soviet, American, and other social scientists? Recently Boulding has served as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and his wife Elise is now Chairman of Dartmouth’s Sociology Department. They have a home in Hanover, so one day soon I’ll have to ask them what, indeed, has been done on peace research.⁶

While it’s too centralized a model, I think, for such a project, the experience of the US-USSR Trade and Economic Council is suggestive. I’ve visited its offices in Moscow and New York. Here [230] is a large, continuing and effective organization operated on a trans-national basis with joint membership on its board of citizens from the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. It’s the primary organization promoting trade between our two countries. Board members have included presidents of major U .S. corporations and of leading Soviet trade organizations.

As I told you, I believe that Rosenstock-Huessy’s contribution to social science, particularly his historical interpretation of the Russian revolution as an integral and necessary part of Western history, seems relevant to that “massive intellectual effort” which Boulding proposed. Bas Leenman conveys what I mean when he writes in an introductory note to Out of Revolution:

*We all know that we are in a common need for a universal future. But how many people know that the creation of a universal future depends on the creation of a mutual past? . . . . This book . . . creates the common political past that enables an American to become more than an American, without losing his own history; it enables a Communist to become more than a Communist, without giving up his attachment to revolution-in-permanence, it enables outspoken nations to recognize each other’s history as steps forward on one and the same way.”⁷

Nikolai, as a student of American history, and particularly of the New Deal, you must know, as well as Bas and I, what that means. I remember the excitement in your voice as you talked of meeting one of the last living great New Dealers, Rex Tugwell, in California a few years ago. And of your meeting Mrs. Roosevelt when you were a student at Columbia in 1960-61.

Of course when we met in Burlington you assumed I must be on the Dartmouth faculty, but as I explained, I had been a businessman. The Russian connection came from one of my second loves, the “lost career,” the academic or diplomat I might have become if I’d continued to pursue the Russian studies I’d begun in 1947-48.

I had studied in Paris at L’École des Langues Orientales where many U.S. Soviet experts had learned their Russian. My reading of Berdyaev and Soloviev at that time had given me an insight which has stayed like a banner before me. Briefly expressed, it is the realization that the ideological confrontation between Russia and the West has much deeper roots than the Russian revolution. Those roots, which created one type of Christian consciousness in the East and a different one in the West, date from the great schism of the Christian church in 1054.

In that light, communism has properly been called a “Christian heresy.” In other words, we may never be able to achieve military détente, or any degree of ideological détente, until we delve more deeply into the “psycho-history” of both sides - to see if our ultimate conflict is not “theological”! Is it just “communism” which raises the hackles of a Senator Helms? Or are the two armed camps, which threaten to destroy the world should they clash, in fact the representatives of Western vs. Eastern Christendom?

“Atheist communists - materialists,” the battle cry goes out.

Heretics! But might not any good Russian, Communist or not, be as sickened by the Western heresy: a crass consumer society, more materialist than theirs? And worse, one which often seems to have abandoned belief in a common goal for all mankind. I’ve made some negative remarks about Solzhenitsyn in my book, but here he bears me out.

Communism, the common good, must seem to most young Russians a new and more honest “religion” and “science” of man than the old mythological religion which they believe lies at the heart of Western ideology. Their rejection of capitalism, then, is of a piece with their rejection of religion, which appears to them to sanction a reactionary status quo.

Those are themes I develop in my book. I try to say that Russia. and the West must come to see that their differences are only different replies to the same imperative, an imperative established in Year Zero of our era. If we could come to understand this, we might turn from crusades against each other to the common task of building the great planetary society which must arise in the third millennium. The removal of the “religious” animus that divides our two camps would go far toward removing the threat of a nuclear war, [231] that sword of Damocles that hangs over the race.

Spaceship Earth, as Barbara Ward has called our planet, lives under the imperative of one destination - or it has no destiny. In Rosenstock-Huessy’s formulation, there have been three great topics on the human agenda. As the discovery that man was made in the image of God was the topic of the first millennium after Christ, and the discovery of the earth the topic of the second, so must the discovery of one spirit for all mankind be the topic of the third. This is what he meant by creation of the Great Society as heiress of State and Church. It means the establishment of peace after a millennium of war.

As I put it in my book, peace is what is created as the times and spaces of the world are made whole, what religion calls holy. Not only truth but also peace is the objective of all living, creative speech. Law in the past and prophecy in the future both make peace. Prayer inside and the word shared in the world both make peace.

So I won’t end this letter with “sincerely yours” but

Peace, Nikolai

Clint