Friendship with Russia

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 369, 19 July 1946, Page 5

Friendship with Russia

ten words spoken in friendship may carry further than ten. pages of recrimination and suspicion, we reprint a report from New York of a recent meeting between Russian and American editors. There is some repetition in the story, and most readers will find some gaps; but gaps sometimes mean more than filled spaces. They certainly mean something in this case, though care should be observed in filling them in. It would be criminal to assume that what the Russians said about the liberty of the press was not said honestly, or that they had their tongues ‘in their cheeks when they said that "everyone (in Russia) can go and see what he wants to see." When the Russians wish to deceive they have better ways of doing it than that, and it is far more likely in this case that they were as sincere as a London or New-York editor would be who assured them that ()* the general principle that

he was independent of his advertisers. .The most important fact was that the Russians attended at all; arrived as guests and stayed as friends. But the most significant thing after that was the obvious difficulty both sides had in accepting what was said at its face value. In their desire to say things that the Americans would understand the Russians fell back on emotionalism; though it was certainly not a hollow trick. But they just bewildered the Americans when they complained of the unfriendliness of the American press, of the reluctance of the Western powers to go.on attacking Fascism, and on top of that maintained that America was fairly presented to the readers of newspapers in Leningrad and Moscow. Friendship is difficult to establish unless the same words used by different people mean the same thing; and it would therefore be foolish to exaggerate what was achieved at this conference. , But nations are some distance on the way to friendship the moment they meet --and a little farther on the way when they awake to the fact that they can be in contact physically and worlds apart in thought and speech.