In January 1966, a so-called Tricontinental Solidarity Conference of Latin American, African, and Asian communists took place in Havana, Cuba, with seventy-nine Communist Parties and "liberation fronts" represented. It was largely financed by Moscow and the forty-man Soviet delegation dominated the proceedings. A message of greeting from Brezhnev for the ruling party in the USSR set the tone and the theme. "Today," it said, "Havana attracts the attention of all fighters against the forces of imperialist aggression and. colonialism and for the national and social liberation of peoples . . . . The U.S. imperialists are challenging all progressive forces."

       The Havana meeting was called to plan communist seizures of power in Central and South America. It produced blueprints for organization, strategy, and tactics—resting primarily on systematic terror—to achieve this purpose in a number of specified Latin American countries and one "colony": Puerto Rico. The groundwork was laid for an intensified campaign of Red imperialist aggression; a Military Directorate was set up to synchronize the offensive. And all of it was conducted under the banners of struggle against imperialism!

       The sheer audacity of the show was breath taking. Another expansionist adventure by the only active imperialism extant disguised as "progressive" anti-imperialism! But it conformed to the propaganda pattern in international affairs laid out by the Leninists from the outset and followed by communists ever since. (269) Its essence has been to attack the declining Western imperialism—by now more history than functioning reality—as a cover for the new, dynamic communist imperialism, the most ambitious in all history, aiming at nothing less than One Communist World—the ancient "Stop-thief!" trick on a global scale.

       Communists, in speech or print, never mention the West and the United States in particular without the qualifying word "imperialist." The' device is undoubtedly effective. The repetition year after year, day after day, of the same formula and its variations—"imperialist West .... American imperialism. ... the colonial powers"—has stamped the desired stereotype on millions of minds, especially in areas where memories of colonial subjection are deep and painful.

       Because it refers to an outlived era, irrelevant" to the present, the stereotype is fraudulent. But it accomplishes its purpose, which is to obscure the new varieties of imperialism promoted by Moscow, Peking, and Havana. The West itself, through a sense of guilt for its past colonialism, tends to go along with the communist distortions. Thus the United States and other democratic powers supported a communist-inspired United Nations resolution demanding immediate and unconditional independence for all colonies—so formulated that it exempted communist colonies!

       Great Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Spain have dismantled their empires, retaining at most a few meaningless shreds. In some cases, indeed, they are open to blame for imposing independence prematurely on unprepared peoples. In Africa, only Portugal still clings to its ancient colonies. Dozens of new, self-ruling countries have been born. The United States has divested itself of the Philippines, and Puerto Rico has been given the right to independence for the asking.

       No supremely strong nation in history has rejected the temptations of territorial aggrandizement as resolutely as the United States, or has been so slow and reluctant in assuming the obligations of world power. It has acted, perhaps too vigorously, to accelerate the dissolution of the empires of other nations, notably in India and Indonesia. Having come through two world wars as the leading military nation on earth, it hastened to demobilize and disperse its strength. (270) That this was unwise after the second of the wars, when only communism was prepared and eager to fill the vacuums left by the collapse of fascism and the Japanese Empire, became apparent quickly enough.

       In this context, the communist insistence that the United States and the West generally are engaged in building empires is a blatant propaganda hoax, among the biggest of the Big Lies in our lie-soaked age. The only formidable and expanding imperialism on this planet today is centered in Moscow. Some of its acquisitions, annexed by force and marked by genocidal atrocities, have been cemented into the Soviet Union. Others are mislabeled "peoples' democracies" and remain separate nations in form, but they are as subservient to the new imperial master, and as unconscionably exploited in his own interests, as old-style colonies.

       The fact that a number of them are apparently straining at the leash (to, an extent grossly exaggerated in world opinion) does not alter the colonial relationship. Colonies have strained at the leash under any type of imperial organization; proconsuls and puppets, being human, have always pressed for a little more autonomy in their sphere of rule. Even Vidkun Quisling, Hitler's creature in Norway, pressed Berlin for more autonomy. Symptoms of resistance to the Kremlin behind the Iron Curtain should not be permitted to blur the rock-bottom facts of the situation:

       The peoples behind the Iron Curtain have learned the sad way that they cannot count on help from the West in an attempt to throw off the Russian yoke; their rulers have learned that they can count on Soviet support against the people. (271)

       This, on the one hand, has reduced the potential for open revolt. On the other, it has dramatized for the satellite governments their life-and-death dependence on the power which created and. installed them. Their puppet-hood is therefore more complete than ever. Were they to1 show genuine resistance, the Soviets could bring them to heel by threatening to set them adrift to face their restive subjects alone.

       No marginal improvement of conditions in a satellite country can alter these quintessential facts of dependence and subservience. Any "mellowing" in Czechoslovakia or Hungary, as in the USSR itself, does not touch the substance of the communist system. It is calculated to contain discontents, relax tensions dangerous-to the rulers and offset damage done by central planning. The monopolies of political power, again as in Soviet Russia, are not affected.

       Nor do conflicts of national interest among the satellites, say between Rumania and Czechoslovakia, affect their dependence on the master-state. The supposition that the puppet nations are "no longer a monolith" misstates the case. They never were a monolith. Domination by the USSR did not automatically wipe out either old or new ethnic, frontier, and economic quarrels, any more than membership in the British empire ruled out conflict and competition among some of the members. Imperialist powers even exploit such tensions to fortify their control, on the divide-and-rule principle. The whole "monolith" argument has been stood on its head by those seeking consolation from quarrels among the East European regimes. These would represent a greater menace to their common Soviet overlords if they were united.

       Internally, at this writing, the processes of moderation are barely discernible in East Germany, Rumania, and Bulgaria, and making a belated appearance in Czechoslovakia. In Poland the movement is steadily in the direction of more repressions; Gormulka has been chipping away at the cultural, political, and religious concessions wrested from the dictatorship by the people, through the Posnan uprising and its aftermath. (272) Hungary, too, after a period of relative restraint, now appears to be on a more repressive course—new restrictions have been decreed; waves of arrests developed in 1965-1967; new concentration camps have been set up.

       Notwithstanding the plethora of articles abroad to the contrary, the satellites remain totalitarian police-states, with swollen secret-police establishments at home and reinforcements on tap in the USSR. The masses have not been granted the slightest participation in political life, no voice- in legislation or policy-making. The press and publishing generally are state monopolies policed by censors, and religion continues to be persecuted. Citizens still stake their lives on daring attempts to escape to freedom, or use legal trips abroad as an opportunity for defection.

       The masses accept such favors as the bosses dispense, press for more, and now as always look upon the communists as Quislings. No matter how he may bribe them with "improvements," the Hungarian people never forget that Janos Kadar rode to power on Soviet Tanks, just as the Polish people never forget that Gomulka has canceled out most of the new freedoms and all of the new hopes they won in 1956. In a book smuggled out of the country and published in Paris in 1967, the perspicacious Pole hidden under the pen name of George J. Flemming put a reality bluntly: "Poland's thirty-two million people are-condemned to live with the party and the regime, but most live despite them and against them." This holds true for the great majority of the nearly one hundred million in Moscow's East European empire.

       The Russian presence in the satellites is today less obtrusive, to avoid inflaming anti-Russian feelings, but it is no less real. Soviet occupation troops in both Hungary and Poland are stationed at some distance from the capitals and other large cities. But the deepest, most pervasive presence, alien and hated, is communism itself imposed on unwilling populations and maintained by force. (273)

• Illusions of Independence

       In a recent book surveying Eastern Europe, one of the authors, Dr. Andrew Gyorgy, declares hopefully that each of the communist-captive nations "is bound eventually to turn against Russian control and shake off this latter day imperial domination as it did the Austro-Hungarian or Turkish overlordships." When we recall how long those overlordships lasted, how many wars were fought to overthrow them, the historical analogy is scarcely consoling.

       But it is only a partial analogy in any event. For the peoples involved, the problem is not merely to shake off Russia, but to shake off communism. They want to be rid not only of the Russian yoke, but also of the communist harness." As the politically conscious opponents of the regimes see it, certainly, the primary advantage of national freedom is that it would enable them to drive out communism. The Soviet-installed rulers know this only too well. No matter how nationalist they pretend to be—as a device for currying favor with their subjects—sheer self-preservation compels them to stop short of actual independence. They have no impulse to suicide.

       Seeming gestures of disagreement with Moscow, often made with its consent and in some cases at its instigation, have been magnified in world opinion. They generate illusions in the West (which may be their purpose)— illusions translated into more of the trade, credits, and technical aid desperately needed in the Soviet empire. At the bargain price of an occasional token disagreement with the USSR, more semblance than reality, the satellites are drawing from the West the kind of economic and political cooperation that in the aggregate fortifies the entire bloc.

       There is, to put the matter mildly, room for suspicion that some of the symptoms of "independence" are in fact stratagems to beguile and disorient the non-communist world. Is Rumania's Nicolae Ceaucescu, in suggesting that both the Warsaw Pact and NATO be dissolved, really "defying Moscow"? (274)It is not more likely that he is doing a diplomatic chore for Moscow? The end of NATO and the withdrawal of American troops from Europe have always been prime objectives of the Kremlin, which has no need for a formal Warsaw Pact to exercise control over the communist-bloc military forces.

       The Western hope of weaning East Europe away from the USSR—known in. its American version as "bridge-building" to the East—derives from a self-induced conviction that momentous changes are under way in the Soviet world. Curiously, that hope overlooks the one pertinent case history on record, namely American aid to Red Poland for more than a decade now. That particular bridge was built before the metaphor was adopted, according to the very blueprints now being laid out for the other Red Nations, and under conditions more favorable than any that exist today in the other communist societies. The traffic on the Polish-American bridge has been strictly one-way, the American taxpayer giving and the Polish dictatorship receiving, without the courtesy of a thank-you or a diminution in hate-America propaganda.

       Yet Warsaw in this period has become not less but more servile to the Kremlin and the internal "liberalization'* touched off by the 1956 uprising has gone into reverse. U.S. Ambassador Jacob Beam, on leaving Warsaw in 1964, said bluntly: "The American policy of helping the Gomulka regime surmount its economic difficulties has not led to the more liberalizing evolution in Poland which could have been expected." And since 1964, the regime has become ever more repressive as against the intellectuals, youth, and the church. In short, the bridge has accomplished none of the things Washington now hopes to achieve elsewhere by the very same methods.

       In the book, Power and Impotence, by Edmund Stillman and William Paff, the authors remarked about Poland: "Indeed, one might argue that American economic aid since 1956 has had the effect of stabilizing an unpopular regime's power and slowing up the process of domestic reforms." They put their fingers on the central fallacy of the bridge-building doctrine. (275)

       The political engineers seem to be under the misapprehension that the Soviet dependencies, and the USSR itself, are panting to liberalize their national life; that our goodwill and economic generosity will encourage and speed up the process. In fact the communist rulers have allowed some relaxation and undertaken some limited economic revisions with the greatest reluctance and only under the pressures of crises and discontents. They would prefer to keep things as they are. In the measure that access to free-world machinery, credits, and expertise operates to remove those pressures, it takes the heat off and strengthens the hands of party hard-liners. The effect in general is to slow up the change we intended to accelerate.

       The West has persuaded itself, in the words of one of the main persuaders, Walter Lippman, that the Soviet Union today is "simply another great power." The cold war, it insists, is ended or about to expire. All the evidence, however, is that the Kremlin has not retreated from its global ambitions. If anything, it is giving them renewed emphasis, with the accent on wars of liberation. Anti-Western and anti-American invective is as violent as ever. The schools for revolution in Moscow, Prague, Havana, and other Red cities are training more terrorists and guerilla experts than ever before. Talk in official Washington of détente and accommodation has been brushed aside by Brezhnev as "a strange and persistent delusion."

       To square all this with the assumption that the USSR is just another great power is a feat of mental acrobatics. What conventional national interests are served in continuing support, as a cost of billions of rubles, of far-off Cuba and of insurrectionary movements in Central and South America? Why would a normal world power invest more capital and manpower than the rest of the world combined, in radio and other species of global propaganda?

       Soviet communism has relinquished none of its longtime ambitions. It fights resolutely for authority over Communist parties, undergrounds, and paramilitary formations in the entire ~ non-communist world and—because of political turbulence within Red China—appears to have won it. (276)There is no precedent in history of a garden-variety great power with such instrumentalities inside eighty or more other nations.

       The oversized Soviet diplomatic and trade delegations in the outside world are notoriously busier with intelligence and espionage than with diplomacy and trade. On the basis of information he garnered in Paris, C. L. Sulzberger of the New York Times reported on June 19, 1966: "Almost half of Russia's 75 envoys to non-communist countries are affiliated with KGB or GRU [espionage services.] The present Soviet ambassador to Havana, who uses the name Alekseyev, is actually a full colonel in the KGB, named Shitov, originally sent to Cuba to organize clandestine security. Four out of five Soviet diplomats in Cameroon are intelligence agents, thirteen out of sixteen in Ethiopia, seven out of eight in Senegal." The significant fact about "Moscow policy," he added, "is that it is conceived by the Communist Party, not the -Soviet government, and is largely applied by the KGB."

       In the Soviet empire, East Germany's Ulbricht is a cringing puppet and Poland's Gomulka is a close second in this respect. Satellite leaders incessantly pledge and re-pledge their allegiance to the USSR. At a party meeting in Sofia in early 1966, virtually every speaker intoned the same formula: "The cornerstone of Bulgarian foreign policy is fraternal friendship and collaboration with the Soviet Union." Janos Kadar, the man hand-picked by the Kremlin to help crush the Hungarian revolt, at the Twenty-third Party Congress in Moscow spoke for all satellite satraps when he ridiculed those who doubted the "eternal and historically determined" unity between Hungary and the USSR, and unreservedly endorsed all Soviet policies. His speech could not have been any stronger in its acceptance of Soviet tutelage if his Moscow superiors had written it, as perhaps they did.

• Colonialism, Soviet Style

       Soviet imperialism, of course, departs in some ways from the older historical patterns, but hardly to the advantage of the colonial peoples. (277) The two main differences are these:

       Communism before the war, it should be recalled, was weaker in Eastern than in Western Europe. Countries neighboring on the USSR knew more of the unpleasant truths about life under communism and were less vulnerable to Red propaganda. How, for example, could they ever forget the tides of runaway Soviet peasants that spilled over their Soviet frontiers during Stalin's collectivization? In all of Estonia there were no more than three hundred communists. In Poland the communists were a small underground party. In Rumania there was one communist for every 21,000 in the population—fewer by percent than in the United States today.

       The most hateful aspect of colonial captivity, for the people, was therefore the imposition of communism. They would have been more content had they been obliged to pay tribute to the conqueror (as Finland did, to escape the fate of puppethood), as under old-style imperialism.

       In every one of the victim countries, communism brought economic deterioration along with it's political and spiritual oppressions. The workers despise their phony labor unions. The peasants abhor socialized farming. (278) Every where productivity is low and scarcity of consumer products chronic. The built-in restraints on production and efficiency have been even more apparent and harmful in relatively advanced countries than in the more primitive areas.

       Before the Second World War, what is now communist East Germany produced one-third of all German motor vehicles; by now this branch of industry has been reduced to insignificance. Czechoslovakia, where the communists took over a prospering modern industrial society, withered in the new political-economic climate faster and more obviously than, let us say, Bulgaria—if only because there was so much more to wither. As socialist laboratories, the East and Central European nations have been a conspicuous loss.

       Punished by the inherent faults of communism, the captive states were further penalized by the exactions of Soviet need and greed. An exiled Estonian economist, Dr. Alexander Kutt, in an analysis published in 1966 by the Assembly of Captive European Nations, showed that these countries in the ten years of 1955-1964 were forced to contribute 12.8 billion dollars to the Soviet economy. Most of this total represented Soviet overcharges on its exports, the rest underpayments for imports. This extortion, moreover, has been on a mounting scale, from 503 million dollars in 1955 to over 2.2 billion dollars in 1964.

       There were of course comparable siphonings of wealth by the master-nation before the decade covered by Dr. Kutt and there have been since 1964-. A few available figures for 1965 leave no margins for doubt on this score. The USSR still exacts more for crude oil exports to the satellites than it charges West European buyers; the price to Czechoslovakia, for example, was two and a half times higher than to Italy.

       Some of the Kremlin's techniques of exploitation were noted by the Spanish philosopher, Salvador de Madariaga, in his book, The Blowing Up of the Parthenon (1960): "The Soviet Union has set up a thoroughly organized system of jointly owned firms, treaties of commerce, arbitrary price-fixing, currency manipulation and other devices whereby it is sucking the blood of the Eastern European nations as no colonial empire ever dared to do in the past." (279) The system of joint companies, with 50 per cent of the ownership and profits assigned to the USSR, comes remarkably close to what American gangsters call "muscling in."

       A ghastly light was cast on the blood-sucking operation by the recent suicide of Erich Apel, chairman of East Germany's Planning Commission and a notable figure in the communist hierarchy. Through Apel's diary, which he had sent to friends in the West page by page for two years, it was confirmed that he had fought to tamp the excessive flow of his country's economic life-blood to the Soviets. The climax came in negotiations of a 15-billion-dollar five-year trade agreement between East Germany and the USSR. "This is no trade treaty," he insisted, "but an instrument of colonial oppression."

       Frustrated by his failure to limit Moscow's rapacity, Erich Apel shot himself on the day the treaty was signed. This, be it noted, was in December 1965, when a self-hypnotized world was talking cheerfully about the "loosening of the bonds" and the impending dissolution of the Red empire.

       These, we may surmise, were some of the things the Foreign Minister of Thailand, Thant Khoman, had in mind when, speaking of communism on June 14, 1966, in South Korea, he said: "The new form of colonialism is the most frightful and odious scourge of our time." He knew the realities behind the "anti-imperialist leagues" set up by Moscow through the decades, behind the endless "anti-colonial" twaddle from all communist sources.

       No one doubts the earnestness of Soviet opposition to what remains of Western colonial systems. It is sparked, however, not by sympathy for the "exploited slaves" but by Moscow's determination to spread its own colonial network. Political altruism is no part of its nature. Red "anti-imperialism" has been, from Lenin's day to this, a strategic instrument, designed to undercut capitalist world stability and to clear the road for communist conquest. (280)

• Dishonored Slogans

       The appearance of Bolshevism on the world stage in 1917 was made with a dramatic flourish, of anti-imperialist rhetoric and gestures. "Peace without annexations and indemnities" was the Leninist peace-cry as the First World War ground to a close. The new Soviet government loudly renounced the inheritance of the Czars' imperial loot, in foreign real estate or special rights. Non-Russian nationalities within the Russian empire were solemnly assured of the right to secede, which was written into the Soviet constitution.

       In the perspective of fifty years of Bolshevik conduct, these early professions seem archaic and incredible. Very quickly the USSR reasserted all the prerogatives of empire, reclaimed every "historic right" of the old Russia, even if centuries old, and enforced Russian supremacy over the non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union with unlimited ferocity.

       At the end of the Second World War, Soviet Russia was the only victor nation to impose large-scale annexations and indemnities, not alone on defeated enemies but on Poland, which was an ally. Moscow took over the Baltic republics (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia), thick slices of Polish, German, and Rumanian territory, some Finnish soil, the Carpatho-Ukrainian areas; it indemnified itself not only with some twenty billion dollars in reparations, but with hundreds of thousands of human beings carted off for slave labor in the USSR; and it extended its empire of captive peoples deep into Germany. The United States and a number of other countries have not yet recognized the absorption of the three Baltic states.

       In a letter to Karl Kautsky, the Austrian socialist thinker, Friedrich Engels wrote in 1882: "The victorious proletariat can force no blessings of any kind upon any foreign nation without undermining its own victory by so doing." Soviet respect for sacred Marxist texts, however, is entirely selective. (281) The blessings were visited on nearly a hundred million unwilling foreigners, during and after the war. The heroic resistance of Finland defeated the Soviet invaders but the peace settlement did transfer some Finnish territory to the aggressor.

       The melancholy history of the immediate postwar years is too generally familiar to require detailed repetition here. Soviet duplicity and threats, compounded by Allied timidity and psychological fatigue, turned one country after another—Bulgaria, Poland, Rumania, Yugoslavia—over to Muscovite captivity. Massed Red forces on the frontiers toppled the coalition government in Czechoslovakia, adding another to the dishonor roll of captive nations. In a few, bold, carefully spaced strokes, three and four-power occupation authority was displaced by all-Soviet domination in the eastern third of Germany and half of Berlin.

       As for renunciation of tsarist conquests, it was forgotten almost as soon as it was uttered. Though, the USSR had just signed the American-sponsored Kellogg Pact outlawing war, its Red Army in 1929 invaded Manchuria to nail down extraterritorial rights in the Chinese Eastern railway exacted by the monarchy. That brief but sanguinary war on China was strangely ignored by the rest of the world.

       Previous servitude in the Russian empire was the Kremlin's political excuse for annexing Bessarabia, eastern Polish provinces, the Baltic countries, and various cities and territories in the Far East. It was the alibi for unsuccessful Soviet attempts to seize Armenian provinces from Turkey and special rights in northern Iran. Amid the thunder of communist "anti-imperialist" propaganda, Moscow was restoring and enlarging the old Russian empire. It has not willingly relinquished an inch of foreign soil ever held or claimed by the Romanoff dynasty.

       Its spokesmen by this tune dispense with ideological trimmings in a forthright old-fashioned defense of "historic Russian rights." Nikolai V. Podgorny, President of the USSR, was speaking in Khabarovsk, a city only a few miles from the Soviet-Chinese border, on June 1, 1966. "The soldiers of the Far East military district," he said, "the sailors of the Pacific fleet and our militant border guards are faithfully guarding this dynamic region, created by the hands of our forefathers and covered with the sweat and blood of our people." (282) It might have been a minister from the Court of Nicholas II talking.

       The long civil war following the Bolshevik seizure of power was in largest part a struggle to re-impose Russian dominion over the non-Russian parts of the old empire. The far-left socialist regime in Georgia (Gruzia) was crushed by the Red Army as bloodily as the reactionary far-right government in the Ukraine. In Central Asia several of the principalities held on to independence for some years after Soviet rule had been consolidated in European Russia, but were beaten down by military might in the end. The right to secede remained where it had been filed away, in the constitution. Any reference to it today, inside the USSR, is the shortest and most certain road to a slave colony.

       In the Communist Party Program of 1919, the emphasis was still on the dangers of "Russian great-nation chauvinism." In the latest version, as of 1961, it is on "bourgeois nationalism," a crime of which, as a practical matter, only non-Russian citizens can be guilty. Ukrainians, Belorussians, Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs, any of the scores of non-Russian nationals seeking more rights for their local "republics" or "autonomous regions," objecting to the grosser forms of Russification, attempting to salvage a little of their own culture, have been ruthlessly silenced, purged, and murdered ever since the early 1920's.

       Communists suspected or guilty of "bourgeois nationalist" agitation or sentiments, meaning a warm spot in their hearts for their own nations and histories, have been annihilated even more swiftly than non-communists. The blood-purges of the late thirties wiped out--virtually all the top-echelon communists in the non-Russian areas. Similar purges on a more "limited scale have been carried out, without benefit of publicity, in recent-years. Whatever the fluctuations in political climate, from' harsh to 'mellow and back, absolute control of the empire from Moscow has been undeviating.

       The "equality" vouchsafed to all peoples in the USSR— to the entire "fraternal Soviet family," in the official cant phrase—is so much crass hypocrisy. (283) In practice it has come down to rule by Kremlin appointees of their own race or nationality, and the use of their own language to propagate ideas prescribed by Moscow. Not only religious faiths but national traditions, heroes, self-esteems have been violated by the Soviet regime far more brutally than by the Czars. The monarchy had been interested primarily in exploiting these peoples, whereas the communists in addition seek to convert them.

       All nations in the Soviet Union, in George Orwell's inspired formula in Animal Farm, are equal but the Russians are more equal. A Soviet Russian may be, indeed must be, a Russian patriot as well as a Soviet patriot, but a non-Russian citizen will be denounced and punished as a "bourgeois nationalist" if his Soviet patriotism shows too many traces of his own native patriotism. Anything in his culture that does not fit into the dominant Soviet and Russian ideologies is by definition "reactionary" and treasonable. He is expected to join enthusiastically in glorifying the entire Russian heritage and to show gratitude for the boundless blessings of Russian big-brother leadership, protection, and culture—not only in the Soviet era but from the day his people were lucky enough to have been conquered and annexed.

       "Great and versatile are the merits of the Russian nations," one S, Koralev exclaimed in a Soviet magazine in 1950, "not only in respect to the other nations in the USSR, but also in regard to all mankind." "The leading place within the family of equal notions of the USSR belongs to the great Russian nation," M. P. Kareva wrote in 1952. Such random samples are typical of an ardent Russian patriotism, reconciled "dialectically" with Soviet patriotism. But it is a mix forbidden to Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Central Asians, or other national patriots. These must even condemn revered heroes of their own peoples who opposed subjugation of their respective countries, by Czarist Russia, whether a hundred or three hundred years ago.

       The non-Russian nationalities, in short, must pay tribute to what is always called "the first" among the "equal" tenants of the Soviet prison-house. (284) Their communist and cultural leaders as a matter of course, as simple self-protection, acknowledge the primacy of the Russian republic and abjure any special sentiment for their own land or people. "Our elder brother, the great Russian nation"—this is the standard obeisance in all their documents and speeches and editorials.

       After citing a number of humiliating examples of this kowtowing, Dr. W. W. Kulski comments: "The very fact that such acts of abjuration were deemed necessary points to the vitality of national "feeling among the non-Russian nationalities." The clinching proof is in the fact that the Kremlin, even in this its fiftieth year, never desists from harping on the "dangers of bourgeois nationalism."

• Fate of Russia's Jews

       Unique and far more tragic is the plight of the one minority without a fixed territory in the Soviet empire: the three million Jews, a race that has lived in Russia almost as many centuries as the Slavs. A moving book about their ordeal was published in the United States at the end of 1966: The Jews of Silence, by a young Israeli writer, Elie Wiesel, based on his visit to the USSR during the Jewish High Holy Days in 1965. He has both a keen eye and a passionate heart.

       Their religion is hounded with even more zeal than the Christian and Islamic faiths. In the whole of European Russia, where most of the Jewish population is concentrated, there were only three rabbis (one each in Moscow, Leningrad, and Odessa), according to a delegation of American clergymen who visited the country in the spring of 1967. Their ancient Hebrew language proscribed, the Yiddish press and theaters that still existed in the 1930's reduced almost to nil, these millions, Wiesel found, will survive physically but are menaced by extinction as a separate people and culture. "Cry out, cry out until you have no more strength to cry," is his summary of what Soviet Jews begged him to tell the world. "You must enlist public opinion, you must turn to those with influence, you must involve the governments—the hour is late." (285)

       Under the Czars the Jews were third-rate citizens confined to The Pale, delimited zones in western Russia. They suffered degradations without number and occasionally were victims of massacres or pogroms, usually instigated by the government. But they had the consolations of their religion, their own schools and community institutions. Despite persecution and grinding poverty, the Jews developed a rich and distinctive literature and culture of their own. Except in military and tax matters, their communities exercised local autonomy. They were not deterred from espousing Zionism or from emigrating— several million of them migrated to the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of this century.

       Non-Russians, being the most oppressed, inevitably and understandably were attracted most strongly by revolutionary hope and organizations. This was true of the Ukrainians, Poles, Georgians, Armenians, and Moslems. But the Jews especially, as the most discriminated against, played roles beyond their numbers in the population not only in the Bolsheviks but in Mensheviks and other more moderate groupings.

       As a result, non-Russians were conspicuous in the Soviet leadership, particularly in the early years. Trotsky and Zinoviev were Jews, Stalin was a Georgian, Mikoyan is an Armenian. Most of them, in their times of revolutionary zeal, considered themselves internationalists, citizens of the One Communist World to be. This was especially true of the Jews, for some of whom communism seemed also an escape from the alienation, and penalties of race and religion.

       The prominence of a handful of Jews in the communist hierarchy proved to be a misfortune for all Russian Jews, who in large measure became scapegoats in the mass revulsions against the crimes of communism. Anti-Semitism had always been deep-rooted in Russia, in particular in the Ukraine and the Polish provinces. Now, as popular hatred of the Red regime deepened, much of it was turned irrationally against the Jews. (286)I recall trying, and failing, to convince my simple-minded peasant house-worker that Lenin and Stalin were not Jews: to her they were hateful communists, and therefore Jews. This stupidity was so widespread, in fact, that until the rise of Hitler the Kremlin conducted campaigns against anti-Semitism, correctly identifying it as an indirect expression of anti-regime sentiment.

       Somewhere along the line, however, Stalin apparently decided to join the anti-Semitic tide instead of fighting it. His inborn anti-Semitism had been exacerbated by the bitter struggle with Trotsky and his chief associates, many of them also Jews. He came to abhor intellectuals in general and Jewish intellectuals in particular. His alliance with Hitler was marked by the immediate expulsion of virtually all Jews from high office in the diplomatic and military services and from the higher reaches in the Soviet elites generally. Essentially this condition still prevails.

       After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Stalin took over the vanquished Hitler's anti-Semitism along with other German reparations. Disguising it as a campaign against "cosmopolitans," "rootless persons," and other euphemisms for Jews, the Kremlin systematically demoted or purged Jews from sensitive positions in government, the party, education, science, and culture. (There were and there remain enough exceptions to sow confusion on the thorny issue —men like Lazar Kaganovich in the Kremlin, the late Ilya Ehrenburg in journalism, Yevsei Liberman in economics.) Military, diplomatic, and other elite schools excluded Jews altogether, and the universities fixed narrow quotas for admission of Jewish students.

       This was one area in which the death of Stalin produced not even the illusion of a new moderation. Khrushchev made little effort to conceal his notorious personal anti-Semitism. He retained all the Stalinist restrictions on the race. His drive against "underground capitalism" gave him a welcome opportunity to pillory Jews by underlining their complicity in illegal private trade. In 1964 a book called Judaism without Embellishment, by one Trofim Kichko, as foul a concoction as anything produced by Julius Streicher in Hitler Germany, was published and widely distributed in the Ukraine; in a country where publishing and distribution are carefully guarded government monopolies, so the regime could not easily disown responsibility. (287)

       Any expression of sympathy for Zionism or Israel continues to be treated as counterrevolution. In the Stalinist decades, alleged Zionism put thousands of Jews into concentration camps, where some of them no doubt still languish. It can still bring long terms of exile in "corrective labor colonies." Even in East European communist countries, there are Jewish schools and theaters, newspapers and communal organizations, but not in Soviet Russia, with more Jewish population than in its entire European bloc.

       The Kremlin appears committed, at this time, "to deprive corporate Jewish life of the means to preserve its collective existence and the denial to individual Jews of any opportunity to learn the meaning of their Jewish identity." The quotation is from an analysis of the subject by the American Jewish Congress published in December 1966. The Yiddish-American novelist, I. B. Singer, in reviewing the Elie Wiesel book in the New York Times, added up the facts:

       "They clearly show that the aim of the Soviet leadership is once and for all to root out Jewishness: to make their Jews forget Hebrew, Yiddish, Jewish literature and their religious and cultural heritage—an effort in which no one has succeeded in the two thousand years of Jewish exile." Third-rate citizens under the Romanoffs, the Jews are at best second-rate citizens under communism. It makes no more communist logic than it made tsarist logic. Now, as then, it is mindless race prejudice.

       The assumptions behind the American doctrine of "building bridges" to communist governments, in particular the belief that the cold war is over or expiring, were rudely shaken up by the Mideast crisis in May-June, 1967. "Lyndon's bridges falling down," some Washingtonians quipped. Even the New York Times, so ardent in its zeal for accommodation, editorially decried the "adventurism" of the USSR. (288) "The theory that the Soviet Union no longer would risk involvement in a conventional war," it sadly conceded, "must now be revised, along with all the illusions about the possibility of détente."

       The beleaguerment of Israel by Arab nations equipped with billions of dollars' worth of Soviet arms could not have taken place without Kremlin consent and encouragement. In the aftermath of the Israeli victory, Moscow disdained concealment and prudence in its drive to retrieve dominance in the area. At once it began to rearm the losers for another try, while mounting a diplomatic offensive against the victor. Premier Kosygin, in the United Nations and in his talks with President Johnson, was grimly unyielding. Soviet militancy in naked pursuit of imperialist purposes was again out in the open.

       With respect to the cold war, Kenneth Crawford of Newsweek wrote; "The Middle East has dashed ice water in the world's face, banishing in an instant the stupor of illusion so long fostered by the wishful and the woolly." Returning from a meeting of the International Labor Organization, at which he met many Soviet delegates, Representative John Ashbrook of Ohio could report: "At all levels of talk, the communist leaders are proving that the administration's talk of peaceful co-existence and accommodation is a subject of contempt and ridicule . . . . Never have they withdrawn from their determination to dominate the world."

       To sum up: In terms of the number of non-Russian countries and ethnic minorities directly and indirectly under its iron dominion, Soviet Russia is today incomparably the largest empire in the world. It is the only one (except for other communists) actively and unswervingly committed to the world hegemony and engaged in expanding that empire. Its pretensions to leadership in the "liberation" of colonial and semi-colonial peoples—in roughly the sense that Red soldiers liberated watches and fountain-pens in defeated countries after the war—are insulting to the intelligence of humankind. (289)