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The current round of SALT negotiations has taken place in an atmosphere of increasing cordiality between the two superpowers. Administration analysts believe that an important policy decision was made in the Kremlin last fall to ease the hard line that it had been following ever since the new President Carter began talking of human rights. The thaw was set back by Washington's sudden normalization of ties with Peking, but the Soviets apparently have recovered from that shock and now seem determined to improve relations with the U.S. The payoff expected by the Soviets is Senate ratification of SALT, an easing of restrictions on trade and a favorable climate for the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.
To meet Moscow's seeming willingness to make concessions, the Carter Administration has lately taken great pains to be conciliatory. Last week it moved quickly to knock down reports of a new Soviet missile, the SS-21, being deployed in Central Europe. Said a senior American official: "It's not all that terribly important." The White House pointedly made only a mild response to Soviet harassment of two Moscow correspondents for U.S. magazines, Robin Knight of U.S. News & World Report and Peter Hann of Business Week. Said a White House aide: "I can just picture some dumb flunky doing something counter to the main thrust of Soviet policy. If we can screw up that way, why can't they?"
After Moscow agreed to trade five dissidents for two KGB spies in U.S. hands, it was the Americans who recommended that the actual swap be quiet and informal. Following a moderate round of embracing and speechmaking, the dissidents went on their separate ways last week without the U.S. Government making much of a fuss over them. Alexander Ginzburg and Georgi Vins moved temporarily to Vermont, Ginzburg to the baronially fenced estate of exiled Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Cavendish and Vins to the home of Olin Robison, a fellow Baptist minister and president of Middlebury College. Mark Dymshits and Eduard Kuznetsov headed for Israel, while the fifth exile, Ukrainian Historian Valentyn Moroz, is considering teaching at Harvard.
On the Soviet side, the release of the dissidents was only part of the Kremlin's effort to appear benign.* The flow of Jewish emigration, which the U.S. Congress has made a precondition of the granting of most-favored-nation trading status to the Soviets, is swelling to record levels. Some Congressmen believe that the tough trade policy forced the Kremlin to ease its emigration policy. That view, however, is disputed by Administration specialists. They argue that by Unking freer trade with freer emigration Congress actually caused Moscow to clamp down on exit visas for about two years to demonstrate that it would not bow to U.S. pressure. The lesson now is over.