• In general, a very human approach to enemies was to break off or restrict communication with them for a variety of reasons. As his human psychiatrist counterpart, Jerome Frank, wrote in Sanity and Survival in the Nuclear Age:

"Since an enemy is untrustworthy, if we let him communicate with us, he may trick us, learn things about us that we do not want him to know, or reveal some good features that might undermine our will to resist him Any increase in communication is therefore resisted by both parties For example, in 1959, the Senate Internal Security Commit.ee vigorously objected to Soviet-American cultural exchanges 'Soviet hoaxers are playing us. .for suckers'; 'This is a poisonous propaganda offensive which, if successful, could well be a prelude to sudder, military attack At virtually the same time the Chairman of the USSR State Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries accused the United States and other Western countries of regarding the exchange program as a Trojan Horse' whose stomach could be filled with anti-Soviet material What, the Martian might wonder, would have been the effects if the visits had taken place? Here the evidence is clear and consistent. And, in retrospect, at least to a sociologist, the consistency is not surprising. The two societies are sufficiently different that the only slightly varying political and social perspectives of foreign observers from a specific country are irrelevant to their conclusions. He would find first that:

• Americans of liberal and left inclinations are typically turned off, disillusioned, or discouraged to see the intellectual suffocation of Russian life. Western observers feel themselves in a profoundly different and strange civilization," as one U.S. Ambassador put it.

At the same time, observers from those political circles most concerned about Russian strength have seen, immediately, both the internal weaknesses and the fear of war which so dramatically characterize that civilization. No one returns from Russia thinking the Russians are "ten feet tall."

For example, in 1839, DeCustine's reaction was simple. He said he went to Russia "to find arguments against representative government and came back a partisan of constitutions." His deep understanding of the differences between Western and Russian civilization was summed up in his statement: "I do not blame the Russians for being what they are, I blame them for pretending to be what we are."

In 1937, the French sympathizer with the Soviet revolution, Andre Gide, returned to observe that "Three years ago I declared my admiration, my love for the USSR." But he returned complaining that "in the USSR, everybody knows beforehand, once and for all, that on any and every subject there can be only one opinion...'

In 1948, a Soviet bureaucrat with whom John Steinbeck had to deal was quoted as saying:

"We are very tired of people who come here and are violently pro-Russian and who go back to the United States and become violently anti-Russian. We have had considerable experience with that kind."

In 1970, a journalist couple, Delia and Ferdinand Kuhn, wrote: "Looking back on our journey, we were more troubled by the closed secretive nature of Soviet society than anything else we saw or heard."

Of course, by looking among those who, in the 20s and 30s, were most devoted to the Soviet revolution and/or most unwilling to say in public what they felt (and often said later) one can cull statements that suggest the Russian intourist structure somehow "took people in." Thus a recent book "Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, 1928-1978"* der.des statements made in communist states by the far left. In fact, these observers were often deeply affected also, as their later statements and positions often revealed But, of course, political officials are not, in any case, "political pilgrims." Their specialty, as politicians, is sizing people up and, normally, they are far more reliable in their person-to-person impressions than they are in interpreting written material.

But even with intellectuals, a key summary of the effect of Soviet-American academic exchanges by Rob F. Byrnes found that the academics returned "more criticar of the Soviet system than when they arrived" but their views were less abstract and doctrinaire" and "more realistic and humanistic" than they would have been. One of the principal consequences of the exchange programs, it was concluded, had been "the humanizing of Western observers, who had been paralyzed by great slogans and written generalities."

And what of Russian strength? In 1964, Isaac Dov Levine concluded his book "I Rediscover Russia" by say. ing: "So, as I bade farewell to Russia and to her anguish ed, gifted people who for fifty years have known nothing but grief and privation, my mind went back to Khruschev's portentious boast that Communism would bury us. That boast, against the realities of the poverty-stricken land, seemed like a grim piece of buffoonery.

In 1976, Robert Kaiser reviewed his three years in Moscow as foreign correspondent at the Washington Post and concluded that the Russians are "less formidable than we have imagined, more vulnerable and more nervous. Their ambitions, I think, are less grand than even their own words suggest." After summarizing their inability to compete technologically and economically, Kaiser says:

"And this is the country which has frightened us for nearly 60 years, which convinced us to invest billions in an arms race without end, which established itself as the second super-power and a threat to peace in the minds of several generations of western statement. That this has been possible, given their egregious weaknesses, is a great tribute to the men who have ruled the Soviet Union. But it is also a tribute to our own foolishness....In other words, we have given the Russians more than their due credit for military prowess, and ignored their failings in economic and technological development, social organization and the rest. We have defined strength and power in purely military terms-the terms most favorable to the Soviet Union-and