190
PARTISAN REVIEW
them. The Congress was essentially a Western enterprise, and attempts to
expand its activities to Asia were bound to fail.
I tried to persuade Josselson to launch a journal in London devoted to
the study of Soviet and East European culture.
It
was an uphill struggle.
Josselson was dubious of the need for such a publication. At long last we
reached a compromise, and I received permission to bring out a few hun–
dred copies of a sixteen-page monthly documentary newsletter. George
Lichtheim helped me, as did Jane Degras, the Russian expert of Chatham
House, the Royal Institution of International Affairs. She was a warm–
hearted, impulsive, tough lady, and perhaps the best editor I have ever
known. In the 1920s she had worked for the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute
in Moscow, and her name was respected by everyone. We had neither an
editorial office nor a secretary. The newsletter was put together in my
wife's and my small Hampstead apartment. After a few months,
Soviet
Culture
became
Soviet Survey.
It
grew from sixteen, to thirty-two, to sixty,
and more pages. After a year or so it came out bimonthly and then quar–
terly. Josselson had not yet accepted the publication as a permanent
fixture, and more than once its future was in jeopardy. But neither was
there any great desire to discontinue it, and thus
Survey
became a journal
of history, sociology, and politics of some consequence. It continued to
appear for almost a quarter of a century after I left it.
My association with the Congress lasted up to 1964-65, when my
interests shifted to other directions. Soviet affairs had become much less
exciting. I must have felt instinctively that the intellectual confrontation
was over. Until 1965, my wife Naomi and I visited the Soviet Union
every year; after that we did not return for twenty years.
It
is true that the
Soviet Union was steadily gaining in military strength. But my interests
were not in the strategic-military field, and while I continued to follow
the great confrontation from afar, I was even more interested in other as–
pects of contemporary history and modem culture. My involvement with
the Congress had lasted for about ten years, yet I was never a full-time
employee, and while I participated at some of its conferences, I never
belonged to the inner circle. My knowledge of its decision-making was
only secondhand. Still, I experienced the excitement of those early years,
the feeling of being involved in an enterprise in which I wholeheartedly
believed and which, given the imperfections of all human endeavors,
seems to me in retrospect to have been eminently worthwhile.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom undoubtedly played a part in the
ideological confrontation between Communism and the West, but the
scope of its impact
will
be known only after we have full access to the
Soviet and East European archives. Thousands of studies have been writ–
ten in the West about the political and military aspects of the Cold War,
