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Dancers & Wrestlers. The Iron Curtain has also been raised a perceptible inch, and foreign diplomats can move deeper into the countryside. Newsmen are still largely unwelcome, but other delegations are streaming in by the hundreds. They include Greek dancers, Swiss doctors, Italian film makers, British agronomists, Indian economists, Danish exporters, Israeli women, Egyptian wrestlers. Delegations from India, Ceylon, Indonesia and Burma (headed by the Agriculture Minister himself) wandered admiringly through Moscow's huge agricultural exhibition.
Unlike the past, the guest lists have not been confined to comrades and sympathizers, but include skeptics and outright critics. Ex-Prime Minister Attlee's British Labor Party delegation was the biggest catch; but there have also been Japanese industrialists, a couple of U.S. Congressmen, Maine's Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith (see RADIO & TV). An official British parliamentary delegation that included the Duke of Wellington and all shades of M.P.s has just returned home. Georgy Malenkov told them: "We believe that the most realistic policy is that of peaceful coexistence—it must be either that or war." "We should fight with ideas, not weapons," Vasily Kuznetzov told British M.P. Christopher Mayhew with some ambiguity. "We want to end capitalism. But we do not impose our ideas."
To all who would listen, the Russians have kept up another siren song: there could be lots of trade if only the Americans did not insist on an embargo. Britons, Germans, Japanese, French and Danes listened wistfully.
Abroad, the Kremlin's new men have made adjustments, some trivial, some substantial. They sent Russian diplomats back to the diplomatic cocktail parties in Berlin, released swatches of German war prisoners from Russian prisons (the Germans estimate they still hold 138,000). They relaxed pressure on Iran, dropped their demand for the return of Kars and Ardahan from Turkey, resumed relations with Yugoslavia. They arranged for Air France to fly a Soviet-Paris service. They took their places in UNESCO and ILO, which they had previously boycotted.
Deceptive Docility. Coexistence, in the specific Communist meaning, is a far cry from what the ordinary man understands by peace. To the Communists it means a period of deceptive docility while gathering strength for a new assault.
As such, "peaceful coexistence" is a snare that impresses only the impressionable. The Russians still have the largest army in the world, and their Chinese allies have vowed to build the second largest. By ideology, the Communists are committed to the defeat of the West; they are dedicated men, and they have the H-bomb. On fundamentals they have not retreated one jot—on Germany, on Austria, on the satellites and the slave labor camps. Communist papers still spread hate of the U.S. while their diplomats talk placatingly.