According to orthodox Marxism, socialism or communism was to have come first in the advanced, most fully industrialized nations. Instead it came only in backward and largely agrarian countries: Russia, China, Cuba. Out of this historical accident has grown a theory which in effect stands Marxism on its head, namely that the more backward or primitive a nation, the more fit it is to embrace socialism.

       The theory is not only false, it is grotesque. It implies the socialization' of functioning industry that does not yet exist, the collectivization of agriculture when there is no industrial base to supply the necessary machinery and chemical support.

       Communists have succeeded in taking over relatively underdeveloped countries precisely because they were retarded, especially in terms of political experience and sophistication. "Lenin seized power not in a land 'ripe for socialism' but in a land ripe for seizing power," as Bertram D. Wolfe put it. Soon enough Lenin realized that Marx was right on this score, that socialism did not flow from power alone. When his hope that Germany or some other advanced capitalist nation would go communist and balance Russia's backwardness did not come true, Lenin sadly reverted to the private enterprise of the NEP period.

       This is a piece of Soviet history pertinent to the plight of Afro-Asians and Latin Americans tempted to embark on a communist course. Socialist catchwords may enable them to come to power, but they will not enable them to introduce a viable socialist life. (348) Admittedly Ghana or Peru or India could fall to the communists more easily than, let us say, Belgium or Canada, but their socialism would be at best a caricature of the real thing.

       In nearly all of the emerging or industrially backward nations there is a minority, organized in open or clandestine parties, pressing and intriguing for the imposition of their ready-made Moscow or Peking pattern. As groups, though not as individuals, they are too rigidly committed to be accessible to reason.

       But that is not the case with the largest part of the radical and progressive elements who think themselves, in a vague way, "socialists." They are not bound to a hard-and-fast program but are under the spell of a diffuse socialist mystique, convinced that they can do what existing communist systems have failed to do—that they can reconcile their cloudy visions of economic equality and abundance with the freedoms, civil liberties, and human rights they crave for themselves and their countrymen.

       It is to them, in the first place, that any plea for study and understanding of the fifty-year experience in the USSR should be addressed. The fact that Russia, in its attempt to "build socialism," quickly became totalitarian cannot be attributed to specifically Russian conditions or historic background. All other communist states are totalitarian, including Czechoslovakia and East Germany, which were industrially advanced and had democratic experience and traditions.

       In theory, fully industrialized and technically advanced nations like England or the United States could undertake full socialization and retain basic political freedoms. That is the hope that sustains sincere socialists and communists in such countries. It has been said that only the most affluent capitalist nations could afford communism with its built-in economic fallacies and wastes. But in practice, as Czechoslovakia for one has demonstrated, political freedoms cannot survive under economic dictatorship.

       The Afro-Asian and Latin American countries should be forewarned that involuntary labor, however trimmed with collectivist phrases, is uneconomic in the modern world and doomed to defeat in competition with free labor. (349) They should be forewarned, on the political level, that collaboration with communists always carries with it the threat of political annihilation. Communists declare openly, proudly, that they "cooperate" only in order to capture; and destroy temporary allies. In the Spanish Civil War, the Loyalists accepted communist help and in due time paid for it with submission to Soviet dictation, murderous divisions in their ranks and ultimate defeat. The postwar governments of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania began as coalitions in which communists were minorities, and ended up as totalitarian satellites of Soviet Russia.

       History is our warrant that a country or a movement cannot go just a little communist, any more than an individual can put just a little poison in his soup. Though men engaged in the revolutions of rising expectations are often in desperate need of guiding, training, money and weapons from outside, would they consciously accept it from fascist sources? Yet communists, even more than fascists, are committed to ruining what they cannot rule.

       Above all, the educated, thinking elites in the underdeveloped world should be forewarned that communism and democracy, communism and humanism, simply do not mix. They are stark opposites. Attempts to combine them are exercises in futility. Whatever the verbal camouflage, communism is a revolt against democracy, against liberalism, against social and cultural pluralism. Its high-priests ridicule humanist principles and aspirations—at least until some apocryphal future when their communist Utopia prevails in the whole world—as "petit bourgeois liberalism." They deride ethical values as "idealism"—a word of abuse in the communist lexicon—and the religious heritage of mankind as "superstition."

       Soviet Russia in its half-century has left no room for doubt that the costs of "building socialism" are higher than any people would knowingly agree to pay. This is what countries being propagandized to follow the Soviet road have to recognize. Even their willingness to pay the price in long-term deprivations and totalitarian regimentation is not in itself a guarantee that they can duplicate the Soviet record, sorry as it may be. (350) They need, in addition, the advantages with which the Bolsheviks started in 1917: a substantial economic base, existing scientific and technical elites, national resources and population gigantic enough to permit profligate investments without going bankrupt—and a citizenry that can be beaten into enduring incalculable sufferings for forty or fifty years.

       I am not inveighing against rebellion as such, as justified in. the Declaration of Independence of the thirteen American colonies in 1776. It is usually the product of injustice and despair. In many countries today rebels are staking their lives for causes they consider noble, idealistic, well worth the supreme sacrifice—and that includes rebels in the socialist-bloc countries.

       But to the extent that they identify their goals with communism and submit to communist leadership, they are the victims of a grand deception; in the measure that the truth is available, it is self-deception. Victory may then be a worse fate than defeat, for they will have won serfdom in new dimensions, colonial dependence in some Red empire. Victory would not only lead to their personal "liquidation" more surely than defeat but, as in Cuba, would make renewed rebellion infinitely more difficult.

       Alexander Kerensky, who headed the Provisional Government when it was smashed by Lenin, is alive and residing in the United States. "The Russian people," he wrote in his recent autobiography, "cannot be blamed for falling into the Bolshevik trap for, at that time, the world had had no experience with modern totalitarian techniques. But there is no such excuse for the millions of workers, farmers, and intellectuals in the democratic West who are offered the bait today. To them the frightful experience of my native land should serve as a grim warning."

       He need not have limited himself to the West. The traps are all set, the bait pungent, everywhere on this planet. Before swallowing it, those sincerely concerned for the future of their peoples owe it to their intelligence and their conscience to take a hard, clear-eyed look at the Soviet realities under the communist claims and to examine the alternatives. (351) They should compare what they see in Soviet Russia, again with eyes unblurred by propaganda cliches, with the open, democratic, prospering societies.

       These do not claim perfection and they fall far short of it. The press and literature in the democracies run over with criticism and protest against defects, against real and imagined injustices and corruption. Indeed, the social progress, the ever wider distribution of material goods and amenities, the almost universal access of youth to education, the fundamental liberties of speech and press, thought, and religious faiths, mobility at home and travel abroad, judicial protection of the individual against the state and the tyranny of majorities.—these tend to be taken for granted, tike the air one breathes.

       The existence of imperfections in democratic countries does not prove that communism is or can be more satisfactory, any more than the existence of an ailment in the body proves that a particular nostrum will cure it. This is the essential illogic of communist preachments, emphasizing the evils of the status quo in the free world but ignoring or misrepresenting the infinitely greater evils in the communist lands. Tsarist absolutism unquestionably obstructed the full unfolding of a modern industrial society—which hardly proved that another and more rigid absolutism would open the road to modernization.

       Despite their inadequacies, I submit, the advanced free nations offer more promising models than any of the closed, monolithic societies for rational men and women engaged in the contemporary revolutions of rising expectations. (352)