It has become evident that nationalism is more powerful than ideology and that a national Communist state is going to respond to its own national purposes and interests and not become the subservient instrument of Moscow.

Our efforts, it seems to me, must be to make it possible for national Communist states to develop and not to follow the kind of policy we followed in Indochina which was to drive what might have been a national Communist state, and what may still develop as a national Communist state, into a position of dependence on either of the great Communist powers.

I would add that this same proposition, that nationalism is more powerful than ideology is, would seem to me the thing to keep in mind when considering the question that Congressman Hamilton raises. I think one can probably understand more about Soviet Russia expansionism-that is not a word I like particularly-if one considers it in terms not of Soviet communism but of Russia and the historic objectives of Russia, regardless of the system of ideology or ownership that may prevail in Russia.

What the Soviet Union is condueting today is a rather limited foreign policy, not limited from the point of view of the Czechoslovaks and the people in the Middle East but limited in contrast to our cliches about "world conquest." It is based on the efforts to achieve certain strategic objectives which the czars also sought.

One can understand more of this phenomenon if one looks at this as an ancient, historical, traditional Russian policy than if one looks at it as a Communist policy.

This doesn't mean, however, if we were to take the position that, "Well, their objectives are limited to the historic objectives of Imperial Russia"-this doesn't say that that relieves us of the necessity to do anything, because in any of these situations limited policies may become unlimited unless there is some prospect of counteraction. Mr. HAMILTON. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. ROSENTHAL. Congressman Buchanan.

Mr. BUCHANAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

If I may presume to add a thought to the gentleman from Indiana's first question as to what we need to avoid in strategy and policy, it would seem to me that what we need the most would be historians who are interested in what the facts are and in telling it like it is.

I certainly hope you gentlemen can and will perform that service. I think it is at least of as much importance as the mistakes we may make here in government or the assessments we make.

Toward that end, I must confess, Mr. Chairman, to a certain credibility gap when American foreign policy is tied to our concerns about capitalism or reactions to the abolition of the profit system in the Soviet Union, in that you Democrats have been running the country for most of the time and I don't see any overwhelming evidence of any great concern on the part of this Government toward the survival capitalism at home or abroad in either domestic or foreign policy. Now, having done my bit as a Republican, I would say, Mr. Chairman, I want to ask two questions only.

I will preface my questions with this: To many ordinary Americans, whether or not we can do all we would like to do about it, and it seems pretty apparent we can't, it seems legitimate to have some concern for

freedom and self-determination in the world and some reaction to totalitarianism. It would seem that the record might reflect a little of that concern during and since World War II.

I have read and reread Dr. Fleming's very moving account of what happened to the Russians during World War II. I know what he has said is true. Many of us feel great concern for what the Russian people have suffered, both from war and from a repressive, totalitarian government, and what other captive peoples of the Soviet Union have also suffered from these things, and what the captive nations of Eastern Europe have also suffered from these things.

But I wonder if you would outline for me first of all the Soviet Union's role in World War II from the beginning. From the outset of World War II, can anyone tell me from the beginning the Soviet Union's role in World War II.

Mr. SCHLESINGER. The military or political role?

Mr. BUCHANAN. From the beginning of her involvement in World War II.

Mr. FLEMING. Well, of course, the Soviets worked for years to try to come to terms with the Western democracies during the appeasement period, to ward off Hitler's ambitions.

But the appeasers distrusted the Soviets too deeply. They wouldn't come to terms with them until the Russians had finally made terms with Hitler himself and we had the Hitler-Soviet truce which was sadly abortive from the Russian standpoint when Hitler turned and invaded them massively with everything he had.

Stalin just couldn't believe it, but it did happen. Then after that, of course, was the massive Russian effort to try to save themselves, which was successful and which did bring Russia out of the war not only as a great European power but as a potential world power. That proved to be one of the decisive things of all world history. It was not expected at all.

The military men in the United States, in Britain, in Japan, as noted just lately, and elsewhere, all gave the Russians about 6 weeks to live when Hitler attacked them in 1941, or 3 months at the most. Nobody gave them more than 3 months.

But they did take all that he could hurl and then finally threw him back; that was the climatic fact and result of World War II which we are hardly used to yet.

But now I think we have finally had to accept it and will have to settle down on the basis of parity with the Soviet Union in what appears to be an excellent prospect of living in peace together, also with China, all of which I rejoice in very much, indeed. That is the way the whole thing should end.

Mr. BUCHANAN. Dr. Fleming, you are a wonderful evangelist. I wonder, though, about the beginning of the Russian involvement in World War II. I have visited Leningrad and have seen films of what was then called Stalingrad and share this great admiration for this wonderful achievement of the Russians. But what about the beginning? Mr. ULAM. May I say something? The beginning of World War II is 1939, and there is no question it was triggered off by the MolotovRibbentrop agreement in September 1939 which left Hitler free to attack Poland and then, of course, to conduct his campaign in the West.

On Stalin's part, the basis for the agreement was simply the conviction that a long-lasting war, and he expected it to be long lasting in view of the exaggerated notion everyone had about the French Army and the potential of the West-the long lasting war was the best solution, that even an alliance with the West, which he could have had, would not have been in his interests because Hitler would have attacked the East and before the war ended large parts of the Soviet Union would be occupied.

So the basis of Stalin's policy until the summer of 1940 when France collapsed was simply the belief that he could settle down, increase Russia's military potential and strength, and it would be a period of some 4 or 5 years. France and England collapsed on the Continent in 1940. Then the danger faced the Soviets because Stalin made this tremendous miscalculation.

We do know, and we have the documents on the Soviet side, that he still believed from the summer of 1940 on that the best chance for the Soviet Union was still to appease Germany as much as possible. One week before the war began, Hitler's attack on Russia in 1941, an official Soviet communique described all the rumors of the forthcoming attack, which they had come by from British intelligence and other diplomatic sources, as completely groundless.

They had very solid evidence from their own intelligence sources. I believe, at one point, the Soviet Ambassador in Berlin complained that between April and June 1941, there were something like 200 overflights of the Soviet territory by German military aircraft.

In view of all that, Stalin not only did not expect the war but also, and there has been spelled out in Soviet historical scholarship, was so frightened of giving any provocation to the Germans that he did not take appropriate measures for cencentration of Soviet troops on the frontier.

So the collapse of the Russian Army in July and August 1941 was very largely caused by Stalin's own policy on this count.

It also might be added that, of course, it was a general assumption in the West in view of the performance of the Germans, in view of the purges of the Soviet Army in the 1930's which stripped it of practically all the high-ranking commanders and liquidated something like three-fourths of the officers above the battalion level, that the Russians would not be able to resist Hitler very long.

Anyway, one expert who shared that opinion was evidently Stalin himself, who we are told by Khrushchev had what amounted to a nervous breakdown upon the news of Hitler's attack in June, and evidently did not recover sufficiently to speak to his own people until July 3, when he gave his famous speech.

That, briefly, is the Soviet posture between 1939 and 1941.

Mr. BUCHANAN. Thank you.

Exactly when and how did Lenin and the Bolsheviks come to power

in Russia at the outset ?

Mr. ULAM. I must say that I wrote a rather lengthy book on the subject. I think it is extremely difficult for me to even try to think of possible answers within a few moments.

Mr. BUCHANAN. Was it as the leaders of a successful revolutionary force which defeated the White Russians and their Western helpers and emerged as the leadership of this victorious revolutionary movement?

Is that how they came to power?

Mr. ULAM. No. They came to power after the effects of a long and disastrous war, lack of any confidence in leadership, and then as the successor to the Kerensky government, and then they sort of rode to power on the wave of anarchy, and because they endorsed slogans which carried weight with the mass of dissatisfied soldiers, sailors, and workers in the big cities, namely for immediate peace, which was to be general, by the way, not a unilateral peace with Germany as they had to do it afterward; for the distribution of land, and for several other slogans of the kind which didn't have anything socialistic or communistic about them, but which were simply designed to carry the greatest weight and appeal in the situation. They took over power formally by an armed coup d'etat which was practically frosting on the cake, following the collapse of the Kerensky regime. They were not at that time, nor were they in 1918, the majority party because in the elections, which were fairly free elections, which were held when the Bolshevik Revolution was going on, as a matter of fact, in 1917, another socialist party got a great majority of votes and the constituent assembly in 1918 had to be chased out by the Bolsheviks.

Then, of course, followed 3 years of an excruciating domestic war with struggles in the west, the south, the north, foreign intervention, and the emergence of the Bolsheviks from that ordeal, was very largely due to the fact that they had had a few months breather by making peace with the Germans in 1918, and then undoubtedly due to their superior tactical ability, better organization, and the genius of Lenin. Mr. BUCHANAN. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. ROSENTHAL. Professor Schlesinger, you suggested on page 6 that each superpower "persevered in corroborating the worst fears of the others."

Is it possible, in your view, that if a hearing of this kind of historians took place today in the Soviet Union that their historians might say exactly the same thing?

If policymakers today have to disagree, could historians together conclude that, whatever the origins of the cold war in the mid-forties, both great superpowers participated in what you called the absolutization and institutionalization of the cold war.

If we made mistakes, and everyone here apparently agrees that the one mistake everybody made was inflammatory rhetoric, but taking that aside, did they make the same kind of mistakes we made?

Mr. SCHLESINGER. I would say absolutization and institutionalization of the cold war were inherent of the Soviet system, a system based on the infallibility of a body of dogma, a body of dogma which required the capitalist world to be their deadly enemies: whereas absolutization and institutionalization was not inherent in American society, which is a far more pragmatic, pluralistic and diverse society, and where the existence of debate and so on had for a while a restraining and tempering effect.

Mr. ROSENTHAL. I don't want to interrupt, but we never really have had useful debates in Congress on foreign affairs. Everyone here agrees that the war in Vietnam has been a sad misadventure.

You know, from your experience, that Congress has never had legitimate debates on these things. We have had misleading state

ments by several Presidents. I have in front of me a statement of April 27, 1949, where Senator Hickenlooper asked Secretary Acheson: "In other words, are we going to be expected to send substantial numbers of troops over there as a more or less permanent contribution to the development of these countries' capacity to resist?" This had to do with NATO.

His answer was: "The answer to that question, Senator, is a clear and absolute no.”

In other words, (a) we have never had legitimate debate; (b) we have been misled by the executive branch.

So it seems to me that while they have had a closed society and their dogma has been fixed as if in concrete, and we have had a pluralistic, or, to use your words, open society, in reality we deceive ourselves by saying that we have had legitimate debate.

Mr. SCHLESINGER. I think our debate has been often ineffectual. I think Dean Acheson would still agree with that statement and say that 20 years isn't forever. "More or less permanent" is strong language. But I agree, in general, and I think the recent response of Congress to the ineffectuality of past debate has been extremely important. I might note two disagreements, one with Mr. Ulam's contention that we should have pursued a harsher negotiating policy during the war. I think had we done this our position would have been far more ambiguous in the eyes of the world.

I think one of the things which accounts for the wide amount of support that U.S. policy enjoyed in the forties and fifties was the impression that we had gone very, very far, indeed, on the assumption that the wartime collaboration would continue after the war.

Mr. ROSENTHAL. Let's take a pragmatic view of this proposition. We were, in fact, very strong in terms of industrial production, armies, and the Soviets were very weak at the end of the war in reality, in terms of industrial production, and their devastated land.

Maybe there is some validity in the view that if we pressed harder the East European situation that developed 20 years later might not have developed.

Mr. SCHLESINGER. I doubt it very much. Again, this is a problem of putting yourself in the other fellow's position. My guess would be that, had we pressed harder, this would not have altered the Soviet determination to have a "friendly" Eastern Europe, by which they meant an Eastern Europe under their total domination, and would have confirmed their conviction of the rightness of the Leninist dogma.

In any case, the effect on the world between the Soviet Union and the United States would have been quite disastrous.

As I say, the moral, political, and military support we enjoyed for the containment policy through the Korean war largely sprang from the fact that the general impression was that we had made an effort, and the effort had been rebuffed by the Soviet Union, and we would have thrown that away.

Mr. ROSENTHAL. In those early postwar years the American right in this country suggested that we should have pressed harder, that we had the physical capacity to do that, and that we could have eliminated Soviet influence from East and Central Europe.

Mr. SCHLESINGER. My impression about the American right is that a good deal of it was in fact opposed to the Truman doctrine, opposed to