Soviet Power and Policy

REVIEWS SOVIEr POWER ANO POLJCY., FRANK H. UND~RHJl..L ln his b~ok on the Anatomy of Rmolution Professor Crane Brinton remarked that while passions still run high- ov~r the French Revolution they are .being cooled slowly by rhe increasing flood of printer's ink. Con-· side.ring what has ra~~n place in Fran.(:e during the last few years,- this remark seems to have be~n premature. And so far, printer's ink. only serves to feed the flames kindled by the Russian Revolution. We. ar~ unabl~ . to reach any agreed truth about the U.S.S.R. because our own sympatli.ie,s arc too deeply involved in the issues with1which judgme~t )s concerned. A . . great deal of writing about it after twenty-nv~ y~ars is still in the~srage of Burke and Tom Paine. The veil o( secrecy with which the-Soviet Union surrounds itself and, as we have recently be~n discovering, all. other·countries which come within its sphere of influence, also makes competent judgment very diffi~ult. The assiduous dishonesty of most.of its profession-· a1 propagandists in vVe~>tern -countries, the memb~rs of the. various nar.ional commu~ist parties and their r~uow travellers, is so exasperating that most" of us are turned against ic.· O.n the other hand we. have. just been fighting a great war in alliance with the U.S.S.R., and if we are not to drift inca another one against it we have to find some way of Jiving beside it on terms of tolerable amity. The root question is as to the direction in which Soviet communis·m has been moving under Stalin and is likely to move. Has the re.volutiofl entered its Thermidorean phase? Do the signs of r~vival-of Russian nar.ionalism and religi ~n mean that peace with -the bourgeois world is possible. and that StaJ'in will be content with ,;Socialism in one c~untry"? The Trotskyites, who measure all things by a Platonic Idea of Revolution laid up in Trotsky's· he~d} have long been denouncing the Sralinist regime as a betrayal of everything that.Lenin intended. Liberal socialists and sot.ialistic liberals either cend to agree with them that present-day Russia is a ruthless bureaucr.atic dictatorship, inherently as dangerous to our vVestern democracies as the to tab tarian regimes of Germany and I apan; or else they think that, given time while we outsiders heat most about the revived nat~onal.ism1 the teaching and propaganda of communism inside ·Russia goes on with renewed intensity now that victory approaches, The Russian citizen o"f the next ge~eration will look, back to the great victories as the fruit of communist leadership. Both men also have essenuaHy the same thing to say about the supposed religious revival. They point aut that under the new ·constitution religion ~s allowed freedom of worship but not freedom of propaganda, that everything the Church does can be done only with the help of equipment which it gets from the communist government) that it pays a price for its increased, freedom in being required to preach loyalty o( the most fervent kind, that support of ¢e Orthodox Church. is politically very valuable to Stalin in his dealings with Orthodox believers in the countries of eastern Europe and in his dealings with die Vatican. Both ·authors lead the r~ader inev1tably to G1~bon's cynical conclusion that to the magistrate all religions are equally useful. The tw~ also give much the samr: analysis of Soviet policy towards the acquisition of a 11 Security zane" in ~astern Europe1 an analy_sis w·hich has been· confirmed by events since the books were written- The. Soviet will require that Europe east of a line from Stettin to Triest~ be under governments friendly to herself; an9 the chief proof of that friendship will oe· that these governments carry out a social revolution sufficient to remove upper-class landowning, commercial, and military elements who form~d the nucleus of anti-Soviet forces before. 1939. The difference between the two is that Snow se~ms to imply that Moscow...