SWITCH SEEN IN RUSSIAN POLICY

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28257, 20 April 1957, Page 11

SWITCH SEEN IN RUSSIAN POLICY

(Rec. 8 p.m.) WASHINGTON, April 18.

The Soviet leaders apparently had embarked on a new diplomatic and propaganda campaign aimed at improving Russian relations with* the West, John Hightower, diplomatic correspondent of the American Associated Press, wrote today. Some United States officials believed that this development reflected a basic policy decision made by the Moscow Government after last autumn’s crisis in Hungary and the Middle East, he said. According to this theory, the Soviet leaders were believed to have decided that their “deStalinisation” line, developed early last year, was right in spite of the upheaval which followed relaxation of Stalinist controls in Eastern Europe, and that they wanted to get a goodwill and

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peaceful co-existence. drive under way again. What such a decision could mean for Russia’s international behaviour on many issues was not yet clear, but experts in Washington assumed that it would serve Russia’s long-range purpose of developing Communist influence in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, and meanwhile trying to divide and disorganise the Western anti-Communist alliance. It might also mean that Marshal Bulganin and Mr Khrushchev eventually would be willing to do serious business with the Western Powers on issues where they might hope to gain advantage for Russian interests and relax EastWest tensions at small cost to themselves.

State Department officials were studying several developments which indicated to them that the new campaign has been launched. Russia’s role in the disarmament negotiations now in progress in London had been more constructive and serious than in most other recent years, according to official reports to Washington. On that basis, Mr Eisenhower told a press conference yesterday that the London negotiations held better prospects Cor, progress in disarmament than any other in recent times.

Mr Khrushchev at a reception in Moscow on Monday made a speech full of talk about co-exist-ence and competition with the West, and said. ‘‘We like them all” in reference to several countries of which he had been bitterly critical in the past, including France, Britain, and Israel. The Soviet Government was reported to have welcomed the decision of the United States last week to resume cultural exchanges with Russia. If all went well, the decision meant that more and more visitors would be exchanged between Russia and the United States. None of these incidents in itself was decisive, but taken together they indicated a developing pattern in Soviet policy which authorities in Washington found deeply interesting and probably very significant. It was only a little more than a year ago that the great deStalinisation campaign started. Moscow’s hold on the satellite countries war generally relaxed, leaders identified with Stalin fell from power, prisons were opened to release Stalinist victims, and much of the world gained the impression that a new kind of Sovietism was emerging. The process of decentralisation reached its peak in the early autumn when Poland bloodlessly and apparently successfully asserted its independence of Moscow domination.

But the riotous situation which developed in Hungary about the same time, and the ruthless Russian slaughter which ensued halted the trend, wrote Hightower. H