Part 10

A. Freedom of worship in the Soviet Union was never frankly and publicly prohibited; it was merely quietly strangled. Today its public restoration is a gesture toward the outside world and an effort to canalize even the religious energies sleeping in the hearts of the older people, into national defense. All the old shibboleths of religion and patriotism and nationalism and local pride and mystic faith in Holy Russia which for two decades had been banned have now been revived. In the supreme trial of war the Russian people have returned instinctively to the deep primitive traditions common to man everywhere. Their Bolshevik masters have apparently recognized the desirability of kindling fighting energy from any fuel, and have permitted a veritable carnival of emotions which a short while ago would have been condemned as “bourgeois” and “counterrevolutionary.” Who knows what further changes the war may bring?

Q. _American friends of the Soviet Union claim that her present resistance to the Germans entitles her now to our moral approval, and that we are obligated to give it to our “Ally.” Is this true?_

A. I am sure Stalin does not care for our moral approval. He would much rather have our material support. Those Americans who changed their views of the Soviet Union either when Stalin signed his pact with Hitler in August 1939, or when the Red Army attacked Finland, or when it marched into Poland, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia, or again when the Germans attacked Russia and the Red Army fought back--such observers only proved that their judgment of Stalin’s system was founded on mere day-to-day, surface events. When they approved of the Soviet Union it was for wrong reasons; when they disapproved it was for wrong reasons.

None of the events just named meant any change in the nature of the Soviet regime. If one approved of it today for resisting Germany, one ought to have approved of it in August 1939 for having signed up with Germany. Both acts had the same motive: the self-interest of the Stalin regime.

Whether we wish to extend our moral approval to the Stalin regime or not, we all owe profound gratitude and respect to the Russian people. It is said that every people gets the kind of government it deserves, but I do not think this has ever been true of the Russian people; they have never had as good a government as they deserved. Today they are demonstrating a spirit on the battlefield which places us forever in debt to them. Whatever his regime, the Russian soldier is giving his life to defeat the Germans and every sacrifice of a Russian life means the possible saving of an American life.

To the Russian people we owe our friendship as well as all our support. Our support can reach the Russian people only through their regime. Let us keep the distinction sharp and the supplies moving.

Q. _Aren’t we running a risk if we support the Russians?_

A. Yes, we are compelled to run a risk no matter what we do. The time when we could have made ourselves secure without risk is long past; our isolationists saw to that. Today we risk much if we support the Soviet Union, but we risk more if we do not. If we do not support her, we risk Hitler’s winning the resources of Russia. If we do support her, we risk two things, first, that after we have poured supplies and munitions, airplanes, gasoline, and guns into Russia, Stalin might capitulate and these war materials would fall into the hands of the Germans.

The other risk is that with our help the Red Army should not only hold the Germans but actually defeat them and invade and occupy Germany. I purposely draw this picture crudely. This is a small immediate risk, for the Red Army has not the offensive power to do it. But suppose the Red Army were able to hold the Germans for another year, the while Britain with the United States’ help grows strong enough in the air to obtain supremacy over the Luftwaffe on the Western Front. Suppose during this time, with the aid of shipments from the United States the Red Air Force recovers and also grows strong enough to dominate the Luftwaffe on the Eastern Front. It is then possible to imagine a time when the Germans, disintegrating from within, would begin to withdraw from the East and the Red Army begin to attack.

When once Germany begins to crumble, it is the conviction of all who know that brittle country that she will fall apart at once. It will be a miracle, indeed, if she finds a Hindenburg to lead her armies home and demobilize them in orderly fashion. It will be more of a miracle if a Prince Max of Baden can be found in Germany to apply for an armistice or negotiated peace.

The German Army will have been defeated, disrupted, demoralized. For a time there will be anarchy. Then all will depend upon which forces reach German territory and the German capital first, the Red Army or the armies of the West. If we have stayed out of the war, or have participated only as a naval and air power; if the Western Allies have conquered Germany on the sea and in the air, but have left the land to be conquered by the Red Army; then if the Red Army pushes into Germany before our forces can arrive, it will mean Communist revolution throughout Europe.

Why has the world not gone Communist long ago? It is because Communism, or its Soviet version, in the only country it was ever tried, had been a peacetime failure. Let us not argue the definition of Communism and whether we ought to call it State Capitalism. The world had made up its mind that the collectivist system as practiced by the Russians could not produce enough to make its population as well off as the people were even under old-fashioned, broken-down, rickety capitalism. Now, victory by the Red Army would be evidence that Russian Communism could do what Western capitalism could not do--defeat Hitler. The populations of Europe would count that power victorious whose land armies were on the spot to occupy the territory of the defeated. If the Red Army were to get there first, it would prove to millions of uncritical observers that the Soviet system had won, that it was a success to be emulated, and in the circumstances of disorder and unemployment which would prevail at the conclusion of the war, such a judgment could lead to continental upheaval.

Q. _How can we prevent this and at the same time see that Nazi Germany is defeated?_

A. Only by going to war against Germany now. Never since the war began have we had any stronger reasons for entering the war than now. We cannot afford to stay out and allow Hitler the possibility of winning the war by getting Russia. We cannot afford to stay out and allow the Bolshevik regime the possibility of winning the continent of Europe to Communism.

Q. _But can Stalin be trusted?_

A. Certainly not. His agreement with Churchill not to conclude a separate peace is worth even less than the solemn promise the French government made on March 28, 1940 to make no separate peace, just three months before it made a separate peace over the protest of its Ally, Britain.

Q. _Why do you say Stalin’s promise is worth even less than that?_

A. Because Bolsheviks, from whom the Nazis have copied their ethics, do not believe in keeping their word. I do not mean this frivolously or cynically. On page 323 of volume XVII of the collected works of Lenin, the father of Bolshevism wrote: “Morality is that which serves the destruction of the old exploiter’s society ... which creates a new society of communists. Communist morality is that which serves this struggle.... We do not believe in eternal morality and we expose the deceit of all legends about morality.” As the end justifies the means and the end is the State, so treaty breaking is justified when it serves the State. For a Bolshevik or a Nazi, one of the most absurd phrases in the Bible is the reference to the obviously bourgeois simpleton who sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not. For both Bolshevik and Nazi the theory is that individual honor must always be sacrificed if necessary to the State, and the State itself has no obligation of honor to any other State, or individual.

You may say that the only difference between a Bolshevik’s or Nazi’s breaking his word and a bourgeois’ doing the same is that the Bolshevik or Nazi would be proud of it and the bourgeois would not. True enough, and that makes all the difference between a moral world and an amoral world. It is the difference between the recognition of morality and the defiance of it--the difference between civilization and the jungle. This jungle attitude we hope to eliminate by defeating Hitler.

Q. _How do you expect to eliminate this jungle by fighting on the side of the Bolsheviks?_

A. We would not be “fighting on the side of the Bolsheviks.” We would be fighting disease with disease. As a youth I studied medicine for a while in Vienna, and one of my professors was the great Wagner-Jauregg, the discoverer of the malaria treatment for the tertiary stage of syphilis. Wagner-Jauregg observed that some of his paretic patients who contracted another disease accompanied by high fever would after the recession of the fever often be almost cured of their syphilitic disabilities. He began to inoculate his syphilitic patients with malaria and thus by using one disease against another won a considerable number of victories over the more dangerous of the two afflictions. After curing the syphilis it was relatively easy to cure the malaria. Nazi Germany is at this moment as much more dangerous than Bolshevik Russia to our world as syphilis is more malignant than malaria.

Q. _So you think Bolshevism, after it has helped eliminate Nazism, will be as easy to cure as malaria?_

A. Probably not, but we may entertain reasonable hopes that in case the Red Army as distinct from the Bolshevik Party is victorious, or even semi-victorious over the invading Germans, it will have more to say in the affairs of Russia than ever in the past.

Q. _Do you consider that would be an improvement?_

A. Decidedly. Armies are usually conservative and pacifist. If we want to get rid of the Communist International and have Russia re-enter the family of nations, let the Red Army take hold of affairs in the Kremlin. Stalin is afraid of it.

In the purge of 1934-1938 Stalin arrested no less than 30,000 officers according to an estimate quoted by Louis Fischer. He started by executing the head of the army, Tukhachevsky, and seven other of the highest generals, then three more, and so on until there were left of the original staff only Voroshiloff and Budenny. Some may have been guilty of wishing to cooperate with the Nazis, but most were killed because Stalin feared they were plotting against him.

Stalin’s principal instrument of espionage against his own army is the system of political commissars, whereby a Stalin party man is allocated to each Red commander, with the prime duty of watching his every move, listening to his every word, and if possible trapping him into an indiscretion. This obviously hinders military efficiency, and in times when Stalin feels safe or when he wants military efficiency more than an immediate sense of personal security, he gives it up.

When he attacked Finland, for example, he felt strong enough personally to give it up, and the Red Army improved sufficiently to win. There was much boasting among Communists that the Red Army now no longer would need political commissars again, but to their disappointment, shortly after the German attack on Russia, Stalin reinstalled his commissars. This at the moment when the Soviet Union was more gravely threatened than ever in its history meant that Stalin felt himself less menaced by the defeat of the Red Army than by the Red Army itself.

Is it farfetched to imagine that since Stalin has played the part of a super-Robespierre, the time may come when he will suffer Robespierre’s end?

Q. _If you say, as you did, that Stalin would make a separate peace if it suited him, despite his agreement not to do so, what was the use of Britain’s offering and entering into such an agreement?_

A. It was useful to make the agreement in order to convince Stalin that Britain, for her part, intends to keep on fighting no matter what happens. This might encourage Stalin to fight a little longer than he might have done if he thought that at any moment he might be deserted by his Ally. You remember the _New Yorker_ anecdote about the suburbanite who met the town Communist soon after Germany attacked Russia, and twitted him about the German-Soviet pact, but without results.

The Communist said blandly that it was only to be expected, that it proved Russia was the dominant figure on the international scene, and so on. Then he added: “The only time I was worried was when I was listening to Churchill’s speech on the radio. For a minute, at the beginning, I thought he was going to rat on us.” So the Anglo-Soviet agreement is strictly one-way, but it has its uses. It may persuade Stalin that Churchill is not going to rat on him!

Q. _Under what circumstances do you think Stalin would make a separate peace?_

A. At any time Hitler would let him have peace and remain in power and retain sufficient of the framework of the Soviet system to promise its continuance after the Western powers had defeated Hitler. It is plain now that, once the Germans had attacked, Stalin must have realized he had to fight or die, for Hitler was evidently sure of quick, complete victory. If Stalin had tried to capitulate, as some thought he would, without fighting, he could have obtained nothing better than obliteration of himself and his regime. Therefore Stalin fought, but this does not necessarily mean he intends to fight to the bitter end, with the Red Army backing up to the Urals, to Siberia, and the Soviet government moving to Sverdlovsk or Novosibirsk, as romantic enthusiasts would have it.

Stalin probably defines his task to fight Hitler so well, make it cost the Germans so much, that Hitler will finally offer a peace Stalin could afford to accept on the basis of his expectation that Germany would in the long run lose the war. The Bolshevik surrender at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 was based on similar reasoning, that the Bolsheviks’ enemy, Germany, would eventually be removed by world revolution and that good Bolshevik strategy would seek first to preserve the structure, if only a skeleton structure, of the Soviet Socialist State, at any cost of immediate humiliation and suffering.

The Russians have proved now by their destruction of the great dam at Dniepropetrovsk that they mean truly to scorch the earth before Hitler even if it means the destruction of their most precious possessions. The destruction of the Dnieper dam was to my mind the most important single event of the Russian-German war.

Q. _Why was the blowing up of the Dnieper dam so important?_

A. Because Dnieprostroy was an object almost of worship to the Soviet people. Its destruction demonstrates a will to resist which surpasses anything we had imagined. I know what that dam meant to the Bolsheviks. I visited it in 1930 when it was being built under the supervision of the American engineer, Hugh Cooper. It was the largest, most spectacular, and most popular of all the immense projects of the First Five-Year Plan. It was the principal source of hydroelectric power for the Ukraine.

During all the years under the Soviet government the Russian people had to do without romance, until the Five-Year Plan was begun. Then they began to find glamour in statistics. They glorified in figures showing that this or that project in the Soviet Union was the largest of its kind in the world. The Dnieper dam when it was built was the biggest on earth and so it occupied a place in the imagination and affection of the Soviet people difficult for us to realize. I remember standing in the middle of the mile-long dam and listening to a young Soviet engineer rhapsodically exclaim: “You see there, that forest of cranes, that army of excavating machines! There is more machinery concentrated on this construction site than was ever concentrated anywhere in the world! Look at those gravel mixers. We are pouring here five thousand cubic meters of gravel, more per day than any body of men ever poured in the history of the world! See those immense snail-shaped turbo dynamos! They are the biggest ever made. We will supply more electricity from a single point than ever....” And so he went on endlessly, and back in Moscow people would eagerly scan the newspapers for the latest bulletins on Dnieprostroy.

Stalin’s order to destroy it meant more to the Russians emotionally than it would mean to us for Roosevelt to order the destruction of the Panama Canal. Suppose our troops defending the canal were to have been driven back by the invading Japanese until it became evident they would capture the canal if we did not destroy it. If our troops then blew up the locks, it would be an act of determination which could be compared to that of the Russians in blowing up the Dnieper dam.

Q. _Well then, doesn’t this prove that the Russians will fight to the bitter end and never make a separate peace?_

A. Perhaps, but not necessarily. They may fight to the bitter end but even the Dnieper dam does not prove it. The task of Stalin, it appears now, is by just such a demonstration of stubborn courage, to whittle down Hitler’s demands until they reach Stalin’s ability to accede to them. If he can get Hitler to offer to keep the Soviet government and bureaucracy in power and to withdraw the bulk of the German troops, and not to demand too much in the way of demobilization of the Red Army, the two tyrants might once more get together.

Q. _But why should Stalin quit? Why should he ever be willing to make such a compromise peace if in the long run he believes Germany will be beaten?_

A. Because the Soviet Union is not strong enough economically to go on fighting indefinitely, particularly if the industries and mines and agriculture of Southern Russia are cut off by the Germans. It would be a miracle if the Russians could endure a long war. Most peoples have a surplus they can do without in wartime. The Soviet Union has no surplus.

Q. _What about the Chinese? They didn’t seem to have a surplus either, but they have gone on fighting the Japanese now for over four years._

A. That is true and important, but the Chinese economy was decentralized. The Chinese lives locally. Chinese communities could be cut off from the outside world and live almost normally. The Soviet economy is centralized, a closely knit system of collective farms-mines-factories, which if ruptured at one point would tend to go to pieces. Nevertheless there is a significant similarity between the primitive character of the Russian and the Chinese peasants, and their ability to improvise a living and keep on fighting when more highly civilized folk, as the French, would give in.

Q. _Under what circumstances do you think Hitler would offer Stalin a compromise peace?_

A. The moment he believes he has defeated the Red Army sufficiently to force Stalin to accept a peace which would include substantial demobilization of the Red Army--enough to ensure that it could not be used for a sudden attack on the German Army after it had returned its attention to the West. It is probable that Hitler had much more totalitarian goals in view when he first attacked Russia; but the Red Army has probably made him content for the moment with less.

Q. _Isn’t there some evidence that Hitler is after an all-out victory over Russia and intends no compromise, but complete conquest?_

A. Yes, the most direct evidence we have of such an intention is contained in his speech of September 12, 1936 at Nuremberg, when he said: “If the Ural mountains with their immeasurable wealth of raw materials, Siberia with its rich forests, and the Ukraine with its immense grain fields, were lying within Germany, this country under National Socialist leadership would be swimming in wealth. We would produce so much that every single German would have more than enough to live on.”

This does not sound as though he intended to stop short of anything, but the fact still remains that unless he believes he can make peace with the West (and he cannot have much hope for that after the Roosevelt-Churchill proclamations of peace terms), his most advantageous solution of the war would be compromise, with Stalin or some other Russian leader as his Gauleiter.

Q. _Wouldn’t Hitler obtain more supplies if he took them than if he trusted to the Soviets to deliver them, even if they promised to do so after having been conquered?_

A. Not for a very long time, probably several years. If Hitler, completely defeating the Red Army, were to try to replace the Soviet system with something of his own devising, imagine the chaos! There are several million employees of the Soviet bureaucracy. Suppose they all sabotaged as the Czarist bureaucracy sabotaged the Bolsheviks when they seized power. It took the Bolsheviks five years to work back up from starvation in 1918 to the level of subsistence in 1923.

Suppose the scorched-earth policy is extended to the oil fields of the Caucasus. Really determined skilled effort can make an oil field unproductive for a year or more. To pursue the Red forces into the Urals and beyond and then to hold down the whole country would be a task which would absorb the energies of even the German war machine. There would thus be bargaining points on both sides.

Hitler could say to Stalin: “I can utterly destroy you and your system if I choose.” Stalin could say to Hitler: “Yes, but I can make your conquest futile as far as supplies are concerned, and if you try to destroy me and my system I will starve you and tire you until you are too weak to win in the West.” Stalin’s argument might well run that by making a compromise peace he could save something, including his own job, from the wreck; then by waiting patiently for the victory of the Allies which he probably foresees in the long run, he would win back everything, just as the Bolsheviks did after they had deserted the Allies in the first World War.

Hitler, on the other hand, knows that without Stalin’s help he cannot begin to obtain the materials he needs from Russia in time to serve his necessity. Douglas Miller points out that in the two summers of 1917 and 1918 when the Germans occupied the Ukraine, they got only 43,000 small carloads of grain, which scarcely paid the costs of occupation. Only with Stalin as his Gauleiter can Hitler make his Russian investment pay economically during the critical next two years.

Q. _What would be the effect of such a compromise peace between Germany and Russia on the United States and Great Britain?_

A. It would be a disaster even worse than the signing of the original Soviet-German pact in August 1939.

Q. _Why worse? It would be just about the same, wouldn’t it?_

A. No, because this time Hitler would have obtained what he thought he had obtained but had not obtained from Russia through his 1939 pact. He would have nearly complete security on the Eastern frontier and would not have to pin down there more than a fraction of the divisions he had there from 1939 on.