ABSTRACT
The US public knows more about Eastern Europe and its quarrels than the British did about Czechoslovakia or its neighboring countries. A serious Western effort to break the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe, it is widely believed, would lead to World War III and thus to nuclear conflict. Nuclear war, instead of liberating the Eastern Europeans, would destroy them, and millions of others. Eastern Europe therefore represents a worse violation of democratic standards than do other Communist governments in the sense that the gap between the governments that exist in Eastern Europe and those that would exist if the people of the region were free to choose is wider than it is elsewhere. If Europe is central to Soviet-U.S. relations, the status of Eastern Europe is the heart of the conflict between them there. Freeing Eastern Europe from Soviet control would give the people of the region what they wanted—national independence—and would reduce the Soviet threat to Western Europe.
