534 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
their bugbear since a.d. 1849, when her military intervention in support
of a Hapsburg Imperial Government at bay had enabled the Emperor
Francis Joseph to put down a Magyar national insurrection with which
he had been finding himself unable to cope unaided. After the Austro-
Hungarian Ausgleich of a.d. 1867 Russia had come to figure in Magyar,
as in Czech, imaginations as the champion of Panslavism; and, when
invading Russian armies had arrived in Hungary in a.d. 1945 as the
champions of Communism instead, this had not, of course, mollified
the Magyars' by that time traditional Russophobia.
Nor could the Russians look forward to offsetting their general
unpopularity in Eastern Europe by establishing an advanced post for
Communism in Eastern Germany; for, in East German as well as West
German minds, the Russian regime was bound to be abhorrent on
account of its association with the partition of Germany, like Korea,
between a Russian and an American hemisphere and with the annexa-
tion of Germany's eastern marches to Poland as far west as the Oder-
Neisse Line. In the feelings of all Germans under all regimes after the
Second World War, the Soviet Zone of Germany and the German
territory annexed to Poland might be expected to fuse together into
a monumental Germania Irredenta.
Thus, in a world that had been partitioned between the Soviet Union
and the United States in a.d. 1947, either Power's hold on important
portions of its provisional domain was decidedly precarious; this ele-
ment of uncertainty made the current Russo-Ainerican Balance of
Power unstable; this instability was inimical to the statesmen's task of
keeping the peace until mutually alien societies, which the progress
of Technology had suddenly brought into close quarters with one
another, should have had time to become better acquainted; and, though
the length of time required for allowing this psychological adjustment
to work itself out seemed unlikely to be of the order of magnitude of
the six centuries for which the Romano-Iranian frontier had endured
after the Augustan detente of 23-20 b.c., it was nevertheless evident
that a long period of precarious peace would be needed before there
could be any practical possibility of placing this peace on the surer
foundation of a genuinely good understanding between the Russian and
the Western camp.
In the Western peoples' experience, in their intercourse with one
another, the key to collective friendships between nations had been
individual friendships between human beings whose personal compre-
hension of one another and goodwill towards one another had spun
a network of human links across the psychological barriers set up by
politico-military frontiers. In the light of this Western experience the
Soviet Union's Western allies had taken the initiative, before the close
of the Second World War, in proposing arrangements on a large scale
for the promotion of personal intercourse between her nationals and
theirs—especially in the promising form of an interchange of students.
In the Westerners' belief it was not their fault that these overtures
had not met with any response on the Russian side. They deplored the
Soviet Government's evident unwillingness to let its subjects take