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.
He would have obtained guaranteed deliveries of the oil and grain and
other products he needs. His guarantee would be the disarmament of the
Red Army to the point where the Germans could march in at any moment
and enforce their demands. He would also have obtained the right to
march his troops across the Ukraine, or sail across the Black Sea and
from the Caucasus drive at Suez, or eventually India. Furthermore
the re-neutralization, or the military emasculation, of the Soviet
Union would free Japan’s rear from the danger of attack, and would
proportionately increase the chances of Japan’s attacking southward in
the area of our vital interests. Such a compromise peace would enable
Hitler to endure many years longer than if he had to fight on to the
complete conquest of Russia, against a nationwide, scorched-earth,
guerilla warfare.
Q. _You make it seem as though a compromise peace were quite possible.
Why then did Stalin fight at all?_
A. You mean, when the Germans attacked? Because he was given no choice.
There was rumor of Hitler’s having submitted an ultimatum or terms to
Stalin, but as it turned out Hitler submitted no demands at all; he
simply attacked.
Q. _Why didn’t Hitler at least make the attempt and demand of Stalin
the things he wanted, including the demobilization of the Red Army?_
A. I suppose he knew that even Stalin could not successfully order
the demobilization of the Red Army without suffering the danger of
revolution. Hitler had successfully brought the armies of several
powers under his control without fighting: Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Rumania, Bulgaria, but they were small states which would never have
stood a chance for more than a few hours or days of resistance against
the Germans. It seemed to many people that Hitler could have done the
same with Russia. The acquiescence of Stalin in every other German
demand encouraged this belief. But Hitler never made the trial.
Q. _I still do not see why he did not try._
A. Perhaps because of Napoleon. This is only a theory of mine, but in
analyzing Hitler’s motives for attacking Russia, it struck me that
his vanity may have led him to wish to impose his will by force upon
Stalin, his only remaining rival on the continent, and to do the
thing Napoleon failed to do, conquer Russia. Hitler is an admirer of
Napoleon. When he first visited Paris he spent half an hour alone
by the tomb of Napoleon, then ordered the remains of Napoleon’s son
brought from Vienna to be re-interred beside his father. Hitler does
not collect ordinary Napoleonana as Mussolini does. Hitler collects the
same countries which Napoleon once collected or tried to collect. He is
not merely going over the same territory, he is consciously emulating
Napoleon.
The French Emperor’s excuse for attacking Russia was that Alexander
refused to join Napoleon’s blockade of England, the “Continental
System.” Historians now agree, however, that Napoleon went into Russia
in 1812 chiefly to satisfy his vanity and his lust for war and to
appease his jealousy of Alexander, his only remaining rival on the
continent. Alexander was willing to do almost everything Napoleon
wanted, but Napoleon wanted to impose his will by force. So with
Hitler. He had even less excuse than Napoleon for attacking Russia.
I share the opinion of many observers that Hitler could have had
anything he liked from Stalin, beginning with the delivery of
all available materials even if it meant stripping the Russians,
and including the permission to pass troops through Russia, and
even including perhaps consent to as much of a demobilization of
the Red Army as Stalin believed he could order without danger of
revolt--possibly enough to have satisfied Hitler that the Red Army
could not attack him. Nor does it seem likely that the Red Army ever
would have attacked the Germans except after they had definitely lost
the war in the West, and then it would have made little difference who
delivered the final blow.
The Russians would probably have behaved toward Germany exactly as the
Italians behaved toward France. In their anxiety to run no risks, the
Italians waited until their intervention made no difference; the French
were already defeated. So Stalin would probably have waited until the
German Army was knocked out before he moved.
Q. _But wasn’t it likely that Stalin would have attacked if Hitler
attempted to invade the British Isles?_
A. Not unless it had become apparent that the invasion had not only
failed but that the German Army had lost practically all its Air Force
and was about to collapse. If this contention is correct, there was no
danger to Hitler from the Russians, and the material supplies he seeks
could certainly have been obtained in greater quantity by peaceful
coercion than by war.
Q. _You have given us quite a number of strong points of the Soviet
Union. Can you outline its weak points?_
A. Without pleasure. It is no pleasure to expose the demerits of a
force which for the time being, at any rate, is fighting against our
major enemy, and has fought gallantly and has lost more blood than
all the other opponents of our enemy put together. Yet it seems to
me useful always to keep our eyes open and to know as much as we can
about the characteristics of friend and foe and especially of the sort
of ally which has the ambiguous role of the Soviet Union toward both
Britain and America, neither friend nor foe, but possessed merely of
the same enemy.
The fundamental weakness of the Soviet Union and the root of all its
evil is the fact that the Bolsheviks believe and practice as their
first rule of political conduct that the end justifies the means. This
rule led to adoption of the Terror as the chief weapon in the struggle
to establish Socialism, and the Terror in turn made it impossible to
establish Socialism. The Terror destroyed democracy. Without political
democracy, the vaunted economic democracy of the Soviet Union became
a farce. Constant coercion of the masses through the Terror benumbed
them. Production was concentrated on war materials and the output of
consumption goods never rose above subsistence level. The Soviet Union
became a permanent pauper state. The level from the standpoint of
culture and comfort remained barbarian, but the Russians showed they
had the virtues of barbarians. When the time came to fight they proved
they could stand up better to their Nazi brother barbarians than any of
the civilized folk of Europe.
The principle that the end justifies the means works in wartime as
it is a barbarous principle and war is a barbarous business, and that
is one reason why the Russians have done as well as they have against
the Germans. In peacetime the principle that the end justifies the
means defeats itself because peaceful processes are not promoted by
violence. The Bolsheviks used the Terror to force every member of the
vast community of Russia into a pattern of National Planned Economy,
but after thirteen years of watching the Five-Year plans, now in the
midst of the Third, we can scan the whole Russian scene and soberly
observe that National Planned Terror plus Bolshevik zeal have not
been able to produce anything like as much for the whole population
as free capitalist economy running on the profit motive with a
competitive labor market. I am not for Hoover capitalism, but even it
is incomparably better than Stalin’s economy.
Q. _What authority have you to speak about Russia?_
A. Possibly no authority, but a good deal of experience. I was for two
years a correspondent in Moscow, from 1925 to 1927--that was during the
NEP--and thereafter made three long trips and visited every part of the
country from Vladivostok to Odessa and Leningrad to Tiflis. I was the
first correspondent to visit the huge industrial plants of the First
Five-Year Plan from the Urals to the Caucasus, and after a 17,000-mile
trip which lasted three months I wrote a series of twenty-four
articles, which were given a Pulitzer prize. That was in 1930, and I
made another study trip in 1934 and another in 1937. I keep up as well
as one can by diligent reading and contact with friends fresh from the
Soviet Union and it appears that the conditions there today, aside from
the war, are about as they were when I was last there. Most capitalist
critics of the Soviet Union oppose it because it has done away with
the institution of private property and of profit, and substituted
a collectivist system. It would not make much difference to these
capitalist critics whether the Soviet collectivist system worked or
not. What irks them is that it has eliminated the form of economic
organization which has enabled them to become well to do.