The hidden facts behind the Cold War: how the Dartmouth Conference worked behind the scenes to achieve harmony in East-West relations -Yuri Shafranik relates his experiences…
Breaking Barriers in United States-Russia Relations: The Power and Promise of Citizen Diplomacy by Philip D. Stewart (Pub. Kettering Foundation). Foreword by Yuri Shafranik; contributions from Irina Zvyagelskaya, Vitaly Naumkin and Elie Peltz.
The dark and fearful days of the Cold War can only be remembered by our very senior generation. Countless movies and spy novels have been produced with it as a backdrop to a succession of plots, and of course, a lot of licence has been taken in the creative process often at the cost of historical fact.
It was the famous British journalist and Animal Farm author George Orwell (the pen name of Eric Blair) who first used the expression “cold war.” It appeared in a provocatively frightening newspaper article in 1945 when Orwell made a prediction about a nuclear stalemate between “two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds.” The term was then used two years later by the American financier and adviser to US President Harry S. Truman, Bernard Baruch, in a speech at the State House in Columbia, South Carolina, when Baruch was describing the then existing relationship between America and the Soviet Union.
However, putting things into context, Baruch’s speech started off as an attack on his own country’s disruptive unions and existing labour problems — but then he vented: “Let us not be deceived. We are today in the midst of a cold war. Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home. Let us never forget this. Our unrest is the heart of their success. The peace of the world is the hope and the goal of our political system; it is the despair and defeat of those who stand against us. We can depend only on ourselves.”
A war without fighting or bloodshed
Like a baton in a race, Baruch’s use of “cold war” was quickly grabbed and carried forward by the country’s media who hailed it as a relevant description of the worrying post WW2 situation between the US and the Soviet Union. It was seen as a war without physical conflict, with not a drop of blood being shed, but it was certainly deemed a battle of wits, mutual suspicion and nerves. History acknowledges this as a trigger point in creating a decade of hysteria mixed with paranoia among the American populace, often fanned by expressions like “reds under the bed.”
Millions of Americans were truly convinced that their country had been infiltrated by thousands of Soviet agents and communist allegiant US citizens were everywhere — in their workplaces, shopping in locals malls, even living right next door. That these troubled defectors were among them, secretly and covertly making their plans to topple the government. That the American Dream was in peril. Step forward McCarthyism, which actually destroyed the lives and careers of countless decent Americans.
Ask your average man or woman in the street what they knew of the Cold War and they’d invariably describe a period of fear of nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union in which the world would end in Armageddon proportions. Ask them what they knew of the Dartmouth Conference and no doubt you’d get a blank response. Which is why, in terms of context and the highlighting of facts about East-West relations at the time, Philip Stewart’s new book Breaking Barriers in United States-Russia Relations: The Power and Promise of Citizen Diplomacy is a welcome dialogue on the history of the time. The publication, available on Amazon Kindle, has a foreword by Yuri Shafranik.
The Dartmouth Conference, as it became known, first took place in the autumn of 1960 when the Cold War was at its height. Why it came about, well, there are volumes of authoritative work which can explain this. But even when there was mistrust and conflict between the world’s two major powers, a coming together of prominent people from then the Soviet Union and America took place with the ardent backing of both US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev.
Six decades of bilateral dialogue
Today, 60 years later, the Dartmouth Conference is established as the longest continuous bilateral dialogue between prominent citizens of the former Soviet Union and now Russia and the US. For well over half a century the Dartmouth Conference has brought together these notables for no-punches-pulled discussions and subsequent action on a full range of matters affecting the relationship of the two superpowers. Naturally, these issues have prominently included political and economic considerations, arms control and the role of the US and Russia in the handling of conflicts outside their borders but nevertheless affecting world stability.
Philip Stewart, the author of this new book, has every authority to write knowledgeably on the history of the Conference. He himself has been involved in organising 120 of the 148 sessions of the Dartmouth Conference over its six decades existence. In his book, Stewart recalls how the annual talks have broadened international policy options, tackled world crises, and all the time evolving into a relentless, organic body of the wise and prudent in relations between the civil communities in both the US and Russia — with the ultimate goal of building a more peaceful world.
Like Stewart, Yuri Shafranik is well placed and qualified to explore and recount the modern evolution of Dartmouth, which he does with relish in the foreword to this book. It makes for fascinating reading. Co-chair of the Russian delegation to the Dartmouth Conference since 2014, Shafranik first engaged with his US counterparts way back in 1992. He was one of the initiators and — as he describes it — “engines” in the Gore-Chernomydrin Commission almost 30 years ago. In his foreword to the book, Yuri Shafranik looks back on his involvement with Dartmouth over nearly three decades.
Imperfection of the international mechanisms created after WWII
“Human civilisation is still not able to get rid of conflict. The history of the 20th century provides clear evidence of the imperfection of the international mechanisms created after World War Two (the United Security Council, international treaties on disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation, and others) aimed at preventing wars, localising conflicts, and resolving acute crises that spontaneously arise against the background of interstate or ethno-religious contradictions,” he writes.
“The uniqueness of the Dartmouth dialogue as an instrument of public diplomacy to assist the governments of the USSR and the United States in resolving acute conflicts, perhaps, lies in the fact that it was created during the Cuban Missile Crisis, only 15 years after the establishment of the UN Security Council, and is still functioning today. And according to the leaders of both countries, it continues to be an effective tool.”
Yuri Shafranik continues: “Accepting an offer in 2014 from representatives of Russia’s highest authorities to lead a dialogue with American colleagues in the military, economic, and humanitarian fields, I was guided by my positive experience as one of the leaders of the successful Russian-American interaction in the framework of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, as well as my continued optimism about the possibility of restoring co-operation with the most important world power, the United States.”
Shafranik refers to how the burden of responsibility was “pressed” by the fact that Yevgeny Primakov and Henry Kissinger, unique in world history and universally recognised patriarchs of world politics who joined the “Club of Sages” of the United Nations, undertook to patronise the forced resuscitation of Dartmouth at a new dangerous stage of the crisis in Russian-American relations.
“I was inspired by the fact that, on the American side, the Conference was co-chaired by the late Harold Saunders, whose memory we cherish. Saunders was an outstanding diplomat, recognised in international political, diplomatic, expert, and academic circles, a former Assistant Secretary of State, and one of the architects of the Camp David Accords in the Middle East, which radically changed the mosaic of this region. I consider it an honour to meet and work with the current American co-chairs, represented by well-known intellectuals of national and international diplomacy and politics: former US Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, David Mathews, and former US ambassador to Russia, Jim Collins.”
Optimism for the ‘New’ Dartmouth
Yuri Shafranik’s has many years of successful collaboration, now as co-chair with Vitaly Naumkin. Naumkin is a world-famous scientist and academician, and of course a Dartmouth veteran. A highly experienced expert in the field of resolving local crises in different parts of the world. He praised his colleague for supporting his optimism about the possibility of achieving the goals set by what’s being hailed as the New Dartmouth.
As one of the supporters of the renaissance of full-scale political-economic relations between Russia and the US which, in the 1990s, and immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Shafranik identified this as the most important stabilising element in the context of the emergence of a new Russia. To this end, he adds: “I remain sincere in my efforts to promote the restart of Russian-American relations for the benefit of our two peoples. It is necessary to preserve and deepen the existing co-operation in the fields of medicine, science, education, culture, and business and to create greater mutual understanding in the field of military-political relations. I think that the international community is also not interested in maintaining the continuing crisis in the interaction of our countries in the military and political spheres since global security and strategic stability directly depend on this. Disarmament is the antithesis of the arms race, which is fraught with the potential for uncontrolled descent to a catastrophic nuclear point of no return.”
New relationship ‘more open and sustainable’
In summing up in his introduction to the book, Yuri Shafranik expresses his wish to achieve a long-term “standby” in the work of Dartmouth as the result of a new relationship between Russia and the US — not devoid of competition, but more open and sustainable. He concludes: “I think that this is not far off, but today’s political realities require active work from the Dartmouth Conference, including carefully considered initiatives and recommendations. It has already produced positive results in terms of establishing interaction during a number of bloody conflicts that affect the fate of tens of millions of refugees and internally displaced people. The governments of both countries highly appreciated the successful work on reanimating co-operation in countering international terrorism, as well as in such humanitarian areas as maternal and child health and oncology, cardiac surgery, and education. The mechanism launched in 2019 to mobilise religious organisations in both countries to counter pseudo-religious extremist interpretations of Islam and Christianity is particularly important. The participants in the Dartmouth Conference do not yet have any reason to reduce their activity, and I hope that in the near future we will be able to achieve even greater efficiency on the path we have chosen.”
Shafranik acknowledges Phil Stewart for his “constantly generated energy and tremendous efficiency that have been necessary both during the half-century of his participation in all sessions” and for writing a book that will become not only a description of the work of the Dartmouth dialogue but also “a historical document that testifies to the ability of a small group of people, united by a common goal, to achieve breakthroughs in situations where misunderstandings and contradictions between politicians, like powerful cyclones, can bring the world to the brink of disaster.”
