Real War by Richard Nixon

government of Moscow, thousands of Russians swarmed around us shouting “Mir y druzhba” —“Peace and friendship.” Schoolchildren stopped our car as we traveled through the Ural Mountains and threw flowers into it, shouting “Friendship.” My Russian host told me that friendship was the first word in English that Russian children were taught in school. The people wanted friendship; the leaders, however, made no bones about the fact that they wanted something different. As Khrushchev put it coldly, “Your grandchildren will live under communism.”
    After our visit to Moscow we went to Poland. Over 200,000 cheering Poles gave us a tumultuous welcome, shouting “Niech zyje Ameryka” —“Long live America.” Polish soldiers clapped and held up the “V” sign. In Moscow Khrushchev had bitterly assailed the Captive Nations resolution that had just been passed by Congress. The Polish people were vividly demonstrating why, and the Kremlin leaders must also have had doubts about the loyalty of those within the Soviet Union itself.
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    In 1972 I became the first U.S. President to visit the Soviet Union. Leonid Brezhnev was different from Khrushchev. Brezhnev’s humor was earthy whereas Khrushchev’s had been vulgar. Brezhnev wore tailored shirts with French cuffs insteadof the plain-sleeved shirts Khrushchev preferred. He sat in the back seat of a limousine rather than the front seat with the chauffeur as Khrushchev had done. He was outwardly cordial while Khrushchev had been blustery and aggressive. But though the players had changed, the game remained the same. Brezhnev’s goals were the same as Khrushchev’s: the increase of Soviet power, the extension of Soviet control, and the expansion of communism throughout the world. He did not have the obvious inferiority complex that Khrushchev had had because, from a position of overwhelming inferiority thirteen years before, the Soviet Union had now virtually caught up with the United States in military power. But catching up was not enough for Brezhnev. He wanted unquestioned superiority. Neither Brezhnev nor his predecessors engaged in negotiation to achieve peace as an end in itself. Rather they sought peace so that they could use it to extend communist domination without war in all areas of the world.
    This time Mrs. Nixon and I stayed in a splendid apartment once used by the Tsars of Imperial Russia. Now even more than in 1959 our Soviet hosts emphasized the glories of Imperial Russia’s past rather than communism’s achievements in the present. Both in 1972 and again in 1974, when I returned to Moscow, I was a guest at musical performances in the ornate, gilded splendor of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, where I sat with the Soviet leaders in the Imperial Box. Premier Alexei Kosygin confided to me that he preferred the Bolshoi to the sterile, modernistic new auditorium that had been built within the Kremlin walls. The Soviet leaders clearly were still dedicated communists but it seemed that they had also become more Russian.
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    My views have changed since that time fifty years ago when I first saw Russia through the eyes of Tolstoy, and Russia itself has changed since Tolstoy’s time. But understanding the Soviet challenge requires an understanding of how Russia has not changed as well as how it has. The answer to many puzzles of Soviet behavior lies not in the stars, but in the Tsars. Their bodies lie buried in Kremlin vaults, and their spirits live on in the Kremlin halls.
    In many respects the revolution that brought the communiststo power in Russia was less a change from the tsarist ways than it was a refinement and reinforcement of those ways. Russia has never not been an expansionist power. Nor, except for a few brief months in 1917, has it ever not been either an authoritarian or a totalitarian state. There simply is no