Verdict of Five Decades

         On November 7, 10917, a handful of Bolsheviks- under Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Leon Trotsky seized control of the Russian state, not from the Romanoff Monarchy, but from the democratic Provisional government set up about eight months earlier. On November 7, 1967, therefore, Soviet communism rounded out a half century of existence.

         This is a dramatic milestone not only in the history of Russia, but in world history. Because international communism has been, in essence, an extension of Soviet power and messianic zeal, the impact of the "Bo1shevik coup d'etat on all mankind can scarcely be overstated. The Kremlin's self-proclaimed leadership of the "world proletariat" in an unswerving drive for One Communist World has been and remains a prime force in shaping our twentieth century.

         The Soviet experience has been called a Great Experiment. The formula is unfair if not cynical in that it seems to equate the Russian people with guinea pigs and laboratory dogs. Yet Russia has in fact provided the longest, most intensive test of a set of social theories in all history, conducted by steel nerved fanatics in a laboratory comprising a sixth of the earth's surface, endowed with vast population and natural resources. (11)

         In today's fast-moving fast moving world, fifty years are equivalent to several centuries, in the past. No one can reasonably plead, as some did in the first decades, that the Soviet enterprise is too young to have proven itself one way or the other. The time is ripe for some clear and definitive judgments.

         Has Soviet communism "succeeded"? To what extent has it reached the objectives set forth in 1917; objectives indeed, set forth continually since 1848, when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels launched their Communist Manifesto? Does socialism-not as a theory but in its concrete embodiment in the USSR-offer a rational model for emulation by the rest of the world, in particular by peoples and countries caught up in the so-called revolution of rising expectations? What are the realities behind the communist rhetoric and hyperbolic claims?

         I am not proposing anything new. A great debate on these questions has been under way throughout the fifty I years. Perhaps no other phenomenon in modern times has been so thoroughly described, analyzed, documented, and argued about; books on Soviet Russia, adulatory and critical and in'-between, would fill a good-sized library. Winston Churchill's notion that Russia is an impenetrable enigma is far from the facts.

         Yet the completion of the half -century is a convenient point in time for other and more current appraisals.

         Soviet leaders and their partisans give us their own clear cut verdict, substantially the same one we have heard for at least thirty years. Soviet communism, they insist, has long ceased to be an experiment, it is magnificently "victorious" and just what Marx and Lenin ordered. "Socialism [has] triumphed in the Soviet Union, completely and finally," according to the latest official Program of the Communist Party, adopted by its Twenty-second Congress in 1961. A "classless society" marches resolutely and happily toward" fu1l communism in some dim future. The masses everywhere have only to follow in the footsteps of the Soviet Union, under the Marxist-Leninist banner, to achieve the same results. (12)

         That verdict is being loudly trumpeted to the world. A long turgid resolution by the Central Committee of the ruling party, on January 9, 1967, declared that year the "Jubilee year" of communism triumphant. Running to nearly two close-printed pages in all Soviet newspapers, the resolution ordered the whole country, in town and village, to begin at once to mobilize for the greatest celebration in history on the anniversary. No doubt the entire worldwide communist apparatus had been instructed to do no less. A full year in advance of the event, for instance, the mouthpiece of the American Communist Party, The Worker, promised "the biggest rip-roaring celebration in history."

         The resolution is an extraordinary document. In florid billowing cliches, it hailed the final achievement of socialism, without defining it concretely. It spread-eagled all the familiar claims and boasts: the abolition of poverty, the glories of industrialization, and collectivized farming, the defeat "of the "world of private property, individualism, and egotism." But there is little substance under the blaring boastfulness.

         In the thousands of words there are few specific facts or figures on any phase of soviet society; only flamboyant rhetoric and, sweeping generalizations about their "new world" and its happy 1ife. The grim realities of the half- century are evaded and bypassed. Karl Marx, the prophet, is mentioned directly three or four times, for the rest he figures only as part of the abstraction of Marxism-Leninism. There is not so much as a mention of Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev who, between them, dominated two-thirds of the fifty-year period. And this is presented as a summation of the whole history of Soviet communism.

         Whatever else the Kremlin may or may not have accomplished, everyone agrees that it has perfected a global propaganda machine without precedent for size and penetrative power. With that machine having gone into high gear for the fiftieth birthday, our planet was flooded with claims that socialism-or what Moscow calls socialism-has been demonstrated to be a superior system of social and economic organization, with miraculous achievement in all departments of life. (13)

         This claim has been spread to all corners of the earth not only by the Soviet Union and its captive regimes Europe and Cuba, by some eighty Moscow oriented communist parties, but by swarms of fellow travelers and sympathizers. Who are these unaffiliated supporters of everything Soviet, millions in the aggregate and what moves them to various degrees of fervor?

         For the most part they are middle-class intellectuals, not proletarians. Some of them sense in communism a path to heady personal power; in the fantasies that excite them they see themselves always among the elite of an iron dictatorship, never in the gray mass of those dictated to. Others are driven by hatred of their own capitalist, or colonial environment, a hatred too often justified, but of an emotional intensity that precludes a sensible assessment of all the alternatives. The great majority, however, are enlightened liberals and. progressives sincerely concerned for their fellow men, but so, bemused by; communist terminology and slogans- -"Workers' state . . .classless society . . . achievements with outmatch in history . . . national planning . . . universal brotherhood"–that they cannot always 1ook with unblinking eyes on the one nation that has tried to implement them for half a century.

         "In an exact sense, Soviet Russia has become the opiate of the progressives," the liberal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in The Vital Center. While Schlesinger was talking about progressives in the United States, his statement applies even more aptly to their contemporaries in the new or emerging nations, the underdeveloped nations, if only because their problems are more urgent and the temptations of a supposedly quick and. "efficient" solution more compelling. Politically young, excited by their new opportunities, distrustful and envious of the Capitalist West, these new elites have shown themselves especially vulnerable to communist enticements, with their easy-to-follow recipes of a vulgarized Marxism.(14)

         In the end, of course, each nation will find its own road, without slavishly imitating ready-made models. But in the search for guidance it can hardly avoid comparing relatively free and open societies such as the United States with totally regimented, one-party societies such as the USSR. The questions it asks are almost as important at the answers. Unless they are directed to basic, factual realities, the searchers may find themselves bogged down in doctrinal disputes about theoretical heavens on-earth.

         Granting that there are faults and contradictions in all human institutions–are ordinary persons, from peasants to intellectuals, more oppressed and exploited in the United States or in the USSR? Where do they have stronger, more independent labor unions to defend their rights as wage earners? Where do people enjoy more freedom of speech, press and assembly, more influence on the conduct of their government? Where can they count on more freedom of thought, beliefs, opinions and dissent? The less developed continents being predominantly agricultural, in which country do the tillers of the soil suffer more feudal" controls, whether exercised by individuals or by a state-landlord?

         I have not suggested economic questions; first, because they are always asked without prompting, and second, because more fundamental considerations, relating to the person, his dignity and his rights, are the essence of the contrast. If industrial output and rocketry were the proofs of a superior society, then Hitler’s Germany was an unqualified success. After all, no sane human being would knowingly settle for slavery or a fascist police state, even if it could guarantee a full stomach for everybody.

         Yet economic factors do have an important place in the comparison. Nikita Khrushchev in his time of power repeatedly stressed that the improvement of living conditions in the "socialist bloc" and their deterioration in the free-economy world would be an object lesson to developing nations. Things have not worked out as he expected but the object lesson remains valid. (15)

         Honest leaders of opinion cannot in good conscience ignore, in this connection, the implications of the forty-year-old Soviet slogan: dognat ' i peregnat', to overtake and outdistance the leading-capitalist countries. As of 1967, the slogan is being muted in Moscow, because the economic gap, far from being closed, is widening. The Soviets, after fifty years of travail, are still striving to reach the levels of economic well being which other systems have long ago attained. The plain truth is that in terms of material well being the superiority of the United States over the USSR is too apparent to require, at this point, statistical support.

         We need not derogate material goals to believe that human and 'spiritual values, age-old "ethical principles, justice and mercy and reverence for life, must take precedence. One proof of this is that millions under communism yearn for these rejected values, thousands constantly try to escape from dehumanized regimentation to the freer World. It is not for bread alone that they risk their lives--most of them are from the better-off classes--but for freedom, faith, dignity, and conscience.

         Despite the pseudo-scientific pretensions of Marxism, socialism has become in our century a formless concept, meaning different things to different schools of advocates.

         It ranges from the diluted socialism of the Scandinavian countries and England to the tota1 species in soviet Russian and China, and under different labels it has included, in all logic, managed societies like Mussolini's corporate state in Italy and National Socialism (Nazism) in Hitler's Germany.

         Leaders or would be leaders who consider themselves socialists, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America, therefore, owe it to themselves and to their followers to define their aims with some precision. The line between so called "scientific socialism" and socia1ist.voodoo is hard to trace. (16)

         On January 24, 1918, a small plan in rumpled clothes, with an aggressively jutting reddish, beard and a gleaming bald head, was, addressing hundreds of delegates from all over Russia in an ornate but unheated hall in Petrograd. This was the forty-eight-year-old Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov--Lenin to history--reporting on the young regime he headed to an All-Russian Congress of Soviets.

         The country was hungry and in economic collapse, torn by civil war and crumbling under the attacks of German armies in its western borders. But Lenin began on a note of triumph. Happily, a bit incredulously, he announced a new historical record "'Two months and fifteen days having elapsed, since the establishment of Soviet power;" he said, it had already survived "five days more" than the Paris Commune of 1871, the only other communist government of an entire nation in modern times. (Actually it was seven days more but Lenin was counting not from November 7, when he took the power, but from November 9, when his new government was formally proclaimed.)

         It was evident that neither he nor his comrades expected the fledgling regime to last very long–unless some major industrial nation, such as Germany, also went communist.

         A number of their most important associates (Zinoviev, Rykov, Kamenov, and others) had publicly warned Lenin and Trotsky that the revolution; would founder if they refused to share power with other socialist parties and failed to retain a modicum of democracy. ''The, preservation of a purely Bo1shevic government by Political terror, "they declared in a joint statement, could on1y lead to "an irresponsible regime, the loss of the revolution."

         The regime did survive to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. This is a remarkable fact. More remarkable, however is the wide belief that the mere staying power of a revolution proves its merits, establishes an irresistible wave of the future, and qualifies it to serve as a model for other nations. Those who argue that its sheer survival demonstrates the "success" and even superiority of Soviet communism forget that its predecessor, the Romanoff dynasty persisted for three hundred years.(17) Latin American history is replete with examples of oligarchies that ruled for a generation or more under a single strongman. The Franco setup in Spain is well on its way toward a ripe old age. The Middle Ages and feudalism, the despotism of the Pharaohs in ancient Egypt and the Byzantine Empire in closer times, all prevailed for many centuries

         The idea that durability somehow connotes excellence is especially curious when held by people who abhor capitalism, though it has endured in various forms since the decline and fall of feudalism. Capitia1ism was pronounced moribund by the Communist Manifesto one hundred twenty years ago. "The Western bourgeoisie," Lenin wrote, in 1912, "has decayed and is already confronted by its grave-diggers-the proletariat." Khrushchev was repeating a moldy cliche, to be found in every Soviet political, text these fifty years, when he boasted, "We will bury you!"

         These happy auguries have not been fulfilled. Thus far, capitalism has remained alive and flourished, especially where it is most capitalistic. As for the appointed gravediggers, they are otherwise engaged, busily enlarging their share of goods and rights in ever more affluent societies.

         Durability in itself, in short, proves nothing about the quality of a way of life or rule. With respect to the USSR, the decisive question: is what has endured. Is it the promised classless society or a society dominated by a new ruling class? Is it the promised "withering" state or a new breed of absolutism? "Normally the fact that a tyranny has long endured is hardly a recommendation for it; but rather a stronger ground for criticism," Sidney Hook, Professor of Philosophy at New York University, remarked in a recent article. If the dream with which the Great Experiment started has turned into a nightmare, then survival is not a "victory," but a calamity

         Referring to the, anniversary, an able analyst and historian of communism, the Frenchman Boris Souvarine wrote: "The Soviet regime has indeed endured, by renouncing its founding principles, and even its reason for existing." (18) Those close associates of Lenin who "did not believe in the durability of a strictly Bolshevik regime," Souvarine contends, "were perfectly right, for they did not attribute to their political opponents any design to endure through endless, limitless terror.

         What has emerged and entrenched itself is not the kind of socialism that Marx or the earliest Bolsheviks envisioned, not the kind that most self-styled socialists anywhere today would acknowledge as such. Before and since the Revolution, orthodox Marxists foresaw total control of an economy through nationalization of the means of production, but they had not foreseen nationalization of the bodies, minds, and even souls of the entire population. That had been foreseen and foretold, with startling accuracy, but only by critics and opponents of Marxism, from Herbert Spencer and Hilaire Belloc to Ludwig von Mises.

         What, in truth, were the Soviet Union and its world-wide apparatus celebrating? Not communism, surely, since that has been consigned to a remote and problematical future; Nor the existing socialism, at a time when it is admittedly in deep trouble and trying to extricate itself with capitalist devices. They are celebrating, in the final analysis, merely political staying power--the retention of sole authority by the same group that seized it half a century ago.

         If Soviet longevity has demonstrated anything, it is the awesome efficacy of modern totalitarianism as developed first and most completely in the USSR. Its German variant, too, might well have endured for fifty years had not Hitler, in his madness, gambled his "thousand-year Reich" on a premature war. All regimes and social systems survive until they are overthrown or die of old age. To turn this truism into proof of the superiority of any of them is unworthy of a clear mind.

         Can the fifty-year-old Soviet Union be reasonably accepted its own estimate, as a "success story"? The problem in historical accounting is to weigh the constructive against the destructive, the end product against the human investments; to ascertain whether equivalent or better results could have been obtained by more humane and more moral means. (19) Russia under Soviet communism has been industrialized to the point where it is second only to the United States, although the distance between them remains enormous. It has built a mighty military machine and is on a par with America in space exploration. Russia has scored high on literacy and in promoting education. It has introduced an array of social, services, such as health clinics and old-age pensions. Real wages, the basic index to living standards, have finally, in the last fifteen years or so, reached the levels that prevailed just before World War I and before the Revolution" and since then, though with occasional setbacks, have been rising marginally.

         To call these "spectacular achievements" and "miracles of progress" is gibberish. Two all-important facts must be borne in mind:

1. All other major nations have made similar and in most cases greater progress in the fifty, years without expunging essential political and intellectual freedoms.

2. Russia itself, under a relatively democratic and constitutional government, plus a measure of private enterprise would unquestionably have done as well; its record in the decades before 1917, as we shall see, leaves little doubt in this respect.

         The point is that there is nothing specifically and exclusively Marxist-Leninist about the real and purported accomplishments, nothing that has not been attained elsewhere and could not have been attained in Russia without benefit of the Marxist analysis and Soviet methods. It is incumbent on apologists for the Kremlin to prove that communism and communism alone is the magic ingredient capable of such progress. Actually, as many Western scholars have argued, the vaunted advances in many areas of Soviet life have been made despite communism---despite the built-in handicaps, the paralysis of personal incentives, the wastage of physical and human resources, the drains of mammoth bureaucracies, the priorities assigned to political ideological over economic imperatives. (20)

         The communist contempt for life, to cite one example, operated to destroy large professional and intellectual elites --engineers, scientists, agronomists, professors, and administrators--whose brains and expertise the country sorely needed. It was a blunder in practical terms. The Sovietized Russia was obliged to start from scratch, like the most primitive of countries, in many areas where it had at hand--but itself destroyed--inherited resources of knowledge, talent, and experience. Even today the Kremlin is plagued by a paucity of superior people for command posts as it seeks to meet the demands of a more sophisticated technology.

         Another example: Deliberately, the communist leaders have punished their impoverished society by stamping out valuable economic activities that could not be forced into collectivist straitjackets. They suppressed the small private artisans and service shops–tailors, shoemakers, tinsmiths, plumbers, etc.--which would have eased existence for a goods-starved population. Once flourishing Russian enterprises, such as family handicraft and cottage industries, were ruled out because they did not lend themselves to total state management. For forty years, billions of man-hours of labor represented by peasant idleness between harvests and new sowings were thrown away; only now are efforts being made to revive village crafts.

         A common-sense appraisal of an understanding, moreover, must take into account its original direction and goals. These, after all, have been the standard excuse for Soviet crimes and deceptions, euphemistically called "great sacrifices." Anyone who sets out for the balmy tropics and ends up in the frozen Arctic, then proclaims the journey a tremendous success, can scarcely be taken seriously. Even if the misdirected expedition brings some incidental benefits and showy trophies, say gaudy marble subways, the blunderers should be denied any medals.

         We need only sample the glowing promises to the Russian peoples and the world made before and since the revolution to realize how far bolshevism has strayed from its charted course. (21) Perfection being beyond mortal grasp, one does not blame communism for failing to reach paradise, but it cannot be held blameless for coming so close to an inferno.

         The central promises were explicit in Lenin’s pre-Revolutionary writings. He demanded unrestricted mobility for the peasant, release of all political prisoners, severe punishment for officials who make arbitrary arrests or imprison anyone without trial. "Until freedom of assembly, of speech and the press is declared," he said, there would be persecution of "unofficial faith, unofficial opinion, unofficial doctrines." He insisted on the elimination of the death penalty and of the internal passport.

         In the months before the October coup, the Bolshevik press and speeches recapitulated these pledges and heaped more upon them for good measure. The Soviets, when entrusted with all power, would be "fully democratic," allowing peaceful struggle among all non-bourgeois parties. They would assure "genuine freedom of the press for all." All the nationalities in the country would enjoy self-determinism; in Lenin’s words, "full restitution of freedom to Finland, the Ukraine, White Russia, the Muslims, etc., . . . including even freedom to secede."

         On the brink of the dictatorship, Lenin dared to promise that the state will fade away, since " all need of force will vanish." Not in some remote future, but at once: "The proletarian state begins to wither immediately after its triumph, for in a classless society a state is unnecessary and impossible . . . . Soviet power is a new type of state in which there is no bureaucracy, no police, no standing army." Also: "So long as the state exists, there is no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no state."

         Within a few months after they attained power, most of the tsarist practices the Leninists had condemned were revived, usually in more ominous forms: political prisoners, convictions without trial and without the formality of charges, savage persecutions of dissenting views, death penalties for more varieties of crime than in any other modern nation. (22) The rest were put into effect in the following years, including the suppression of all other parties, restoration of the internal passport, a state monopoly of the press, along with repressive practices the monarchy had outlived for a century or more.

         A decree issued immediately after lunching the Soviet regime asserted that "workers' control shall be exercised by all the workers and employees, of an enterprise." Lenin ordered, "All officials and every kind of deputy must be subjected, not only to election but also to recall at any time. Their pay must not exceed that of a competent workman.

         His aim, Lenin assured H. G. Wells and others, was "a regime of justice." There would be no more classes, no more "exploitation of man by man," no more rich and poor, plenty for all, equitably distributed, equality and more equality: "The privileges of wealth, of bourgeois education, of social connections', etc., . . . all this disappears under the Soviet organization."

         This suggests the flavor of the teeming commitments. I do not wish to imply that they were conceived in falsehood. Without a doubt, the founding fathers, of the Soviet state, certainly in the preparatory, years and in the early stages of their rule, were since in projecting the dream of their utopian future. This is even more true of the rank-and-file of their followers. Thousands of them, it should be remembered, fought heroically and died willingly for their cause-- it took more than the prospect of personal advancement to inspire them.

         Human motivation is complex. The individual himself rarely knows where "idealism" ends and the lust for authority begins. The most self-centered among revolutionists rationalize the appetite for power in terms of noble goals and shining visions. It is after power is attained that its corruptions begin to blot out the memory of altruistic commitments or turn them into empty cliches.

         Promises of the millennium, of course, are typical of all revolutions and for the most part believed in by those who make them. At the height of the French Terror, Robespierre was saying things like: "Our destiny, most sublime, is to found an empire of wisdom, justice and virtue."(23) This was the mood-music as the guillotine was busily chopping off heads. This was the mood music, no less for the torture chambers, the slaughter of innocents, and the expansion of the forced-labor population in the USSR. In the midst of the holocaust, Stalin blandly told an American visitor, Roy Howard: "We did not build this society in order to restrict personal liberty but in order that the human individual may feel really free. We built it for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks.

         The tune has not been changed in all the years that followed. The premise of a workers' paradise in the first, Party Program is repeated with only stylistic changes in the last, that of 1961: "A classless society . . . full social equality for all . . . . Socialism is the road to freedom and happiness for the people . . . . It does away with social inequality . . . . Socialism provides all peasants with land . . . ."

         "Communism will, bring about the fullest development of all the productive forces of society,'" Khrushchev declaimed in early 1956. "It will be a social system where all the social foundations of wealth flow freely, where every individual work with enthusiasm according to his abilities and will be compensated for his labors according to his needs." Three years later, in Albania, he called communism, "the long awaited dream of the working class, the bright, future of Humanity."

         The flow of promissory noises never abates, never falters. The high-priests and their acolytes, at home and abroad, intone the ritual without thinking of its meaning or its absurdity in the light of events" arid experience. They appear to be blind to the comical aspect of explaining again, and again the wonders that socialism will bring, when they have repeatedly attested that socialism has already been achieved. The repetition is not effrontery. It is habitual, automatic .incantation.

         Who listens? Certainly not the Soviet populace. It has become inured to the mumbo-jumbo. More than a hundred years ago, one of their great Revolutionary forebears, Alexander Herzen, wrote: "A goal endlessly remote is not a goal, if you please, but a hoax. A goal must be nearer. (24) The goal/or each generation is itself." Few of the Kremlin's subjects are acquainted with this profound warning, but they know its truth, in their flesh and bones. It is only in the outside world that the ritual promises still work their ancient sorcery.

         The current generation in Russia, as the Soviet press no longer bothers to conceal, is bored by this stale verbiage. It scoffs at the great mirage, of a socialist Elysium in their totalitarian desert; the more thoughtful resent it as an insult to their intelligence. But at least a part of the first generation found the fare thrilling. It was romantic, idyllic, above all, optimistic--a period of hardships and cruelties, and presto! the happy society in their own lifetimes. "For hordes of impatient radicals in the non-Soviet world, too, those craving instant utopia, it, was all so intoxicating that the effects persist long after the promises had been broken a thousandfold and turned into their opposites. In the long run, of course, nearly all of them were disillusioned. In the time of hangover that followed they often protested that they had been cheated, although in fact they had cheated themselves.

         But they held on as long as they could. Parroting a colleague of mine in the Moscow press corps, ''they shrugged off every new Soviet excess with the adage that you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. They merely failed to notice or report that, the omelet was inedible and, stank to high heaven. For those who still cling "to shreds of faith in Marxism, the murder of the dream of a worker's paradise, democratic and egalitarian--a dream that had warmed myriad noble hearts for a century may well be the cruelest atrocity of all in the record of Soviet communism.

         Marxism was supposed to be a science, with fixed laws that took the if out of history. It was a guarantee of success: the advent of a viable socialism was inevitable. This was one of its greatest appeals in an age when a superstitious faith, in science was displacing older non-scientific faiths. The Russian years have demolished the scientific pretensions and certainties of Marx and his major disciples. The exuberance of the promises in the end made the disillusionment more dismal and frustrating.

         Marxism survives as a vague religion of many denominations, but as a "science" it is dead. A historian at the University of Michigan, Arthur P. Mendel, entitled an article in Foreign Affairs (October, 1966), "The Rise and Fall of 'Scientific Socialism,'" Especially inside the Soviet Union, he showed abundantly, the presumed Marxist "laws" of history and economics were being soft-pedaled, either ignored or pruned to match inexorable realities. Most of those the world over who still hold on to socialist nomenclature for its emotional and propaganda values--like the Social Democrats in Germany and the Labourites in England--have openly discarded Marx and the clutter of inevitabilities associated with his doctrines. They are no longer offered as a blueprint but, at best, as a useful hypothesis.

         An annual, or a fifty-year, report on a business enterprise which limited itself to alleged profits but, slurred over the major casts would be dismissed on the face of it as falsification. This is no less true far the bookkeeping of a historical enterprise. Defenders of Soviet communism, now as in the past, extol and magnify the credits, but disregard or dissemble the debits. At most they allude to "great sacrifices" without spelling them out fully and truthfully. They can maintain the pitch of enthusiasm only by ignoring the fearsome costs to the Russian peoples and the rest of mankind. It is a price paid in the coin of terror, forcible collectivization, man-made famine, slave-labor camps, blood purges, thought control, brutal exploitation of workers and farmers, persecution of religion, political expressions, genocidal massacres and deportations. This does not exhaust the melancholy inventory, for it must embrace other costs that cannot be reduced to figures. (26) There is no arithmetic to measure the wretchedness and agony of hundreds of millions of human beings, year after year, their fears and despairs and humiliations, their physical deprivations, moral degradations, and spiritual starvation. In the balance sheet there must be great spaces for maimed minds and spirits, for the silenced and intimidated, the imprisoned and undernourished, for broken families, wasted fervor and tormented conscience. How does one calculate the price tag for denial of an inner sanctuary retreat for religious believers, cultural isolation from civilized humanity, the intellectual trauma of coerced conformity and hypocrisy?

         The price exacted from the world at large, beyond the billion human beings submerged by the communist tides, also weighs heavily in any fair accounting. The degree of the Kremlin's responsibility may be disputed, but not the fact itself that the Soviet masters were midwives to the modern scourge of totalitarianism. Professor Sidney Hook has given his opinion on this score: "There is a good reason to believe that without Bolshevism and the international revolutionary strategy of the Communist International, the world would have escaped Fascism."

         The Bolsheviks pioneered the basic techniques and set the pattern for fascist adaptations in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere: the one omnipotent party of blindly obedient zealots, the single slate "elections" the gigantic concentration camps, the substitution of' slogans for thought. Both in Italy and Germany, as we shall see in its proper context later, their po1icies directly helped open the floodgates to fascist inundations.

                  At the same time, Moscow's obsessive drive for global hegemony sowed chaos international relations, inspired declared and undeclared wars, provoked civil wars, imposed back-breaking burdens of armaments. Today, it continues to spread a pall of apprehension and uncertainty over the whole planet. The magnitude of these multiple costs through half a century has been set forth in thousands of books and articles. An encyclopaedia larger than any in existence would be needed to describe and document them all. Their character and dimensions will be apparent in the body of this book, and it will be summarized in the concluding chapters. (27)

         Any judgment on the communist half-century that omits or blurs the staggering toll paid by the Russian peoples and the rest of mankind, I submit, is either deliberate or unconscious falsification. What is more, the costs cannot be dismissed by reference to the milder political weather, in recent years.

         As Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. said in New Delhi in 1962: "The fact that one dictator eventually acknowledges the crimes of his predecessor is not enough to assure future justice." Neither is it enough to wash out the guilt of their regime, particularly when the crimes condoned by silence outweigh by far, those confessed.

         An editorial in the New York Times, on the highly selective indictment of Stalin by his heirs dec1ared: "The prime factor, which made possible Stalin's crimes, those acknowledged and those still unavowed, was the dictatorial nature of the Soviet, state and the ideological nature of the state's goals." More than ten years have passed, since Khrushchev' denunciation of his departed master. Endless hymns have been sung to the Thaw and de-Stalinization. But neither the state's nature nor its goals have changed.

         They cannot change, whatever marginal concessions and reforms the Kremlin may decree for tactical reasons, as long as it remains totalitarian. And it cannot cease to be totalitarian without ceasing to be. An end to Soviet ideology and the coming of anything like constitutional government would eliminate the justification and the need for the imposed communist government. It would mean political suicide for the regime and the physical liquidation of its bosses, so they are in the last analysis, trapped by their history

         In any case, the hope of evolving freedom from totalitarianism is the dream stuff of political alchemists. Suppose that Adolf Hitler had died and his successors, say Goering and Goebbels, tried to mollify a restive population by easing the terror; suppose, that they too, admitted some of Hitler's crimes and "rehabilitated" a few of his long dead victims. Would that have altered the character of Nazism or erased its sins? (28) Would anyone have dared to argue that we should "let bygones be bygones" and judge the Nazi oligarchy by its newly "mellowed" condition of "de-Hitlerization"?

         This is the substance of the situation in the USSR. The ambivalence of world opinion on the two brands of despotism, Brown and Red, is a curious phenomenon. Although Nazism has been wiped out, mankind has neither forgotten nor forgiven its crimes. But we are importuned from some directions to forget and forgive crimes of the same order and much larger dimensions by soviet communism--despite the fact that this tyranny is still very much alive and still engaged in the old iniquities.

         The impulse of a well-intentioned and wishful-hoping world has been to exaggerate the professed "mellowing" in the Soviet Empire. This has induced waves of euphoria in some quarters. There is loose talk of "liberalization," thought the Kremlin mocks the word and dreads the idea. With the passing of time and changing conditions, there are inevitably modifications, adjustments, easement; but basically soviet Russia remains a closed society, police-ridden, censor-ridden, ruled by the same Communist Party still led largely by men formed and hardened in Stalin's service. Their awesome machinery of internal espionage and terror has not been dismantled. Not a dent has been made in their monopoly of power.

         VAnother element is pertinent to the kind of historical assessment this book is attempting. Worried by growing popular skepticism about the essence of the matter --their right to rule--the Soviet leaders are anxiously emphasizing the continuity of their party. They have no alternative, since that is the sole basis of their claims to succession. If they were to disown their past, they would in effect be declaring themselves to be usurpers.

         That is why Khrushchev found it necessary to exempt large chunks of Stalinism from his revelations. That is why Brezhnev and Kosygin are cautiously but clearly restoring Stalin to respectability as a good communist, if not yet as an admirable personality. (29) That is why, above all, Kremlin propaganda seeks to intensify the cult of Lenin--the one thread that gives the appearance of continuity. Complete rejection of Stalin--a twenty-five-year hole in Soviet history, half the life-span of the regime--would cut the thread and strip the rulers of the last semblance of legitimacy even within their own frame of reference. Already the party's credentials for ruling have been opened to so much doubt that the new bosses, as we shall see in the chapter on de-Stalinization, have all but foreclosed further criticism of Stalin and are rediscovering his "positive side."

         The first party Congress under the Brezhnev-Kosygin aegis, in March-April, 1966, did not formally "rehabilitate" the lost leader, as many top-shelf Soviet intellectuals feared would happen. But it did revive some institutions connected with Stalin's name, and make clear that no additional vilification of Stalin would. be sanctioned

         A quarter-century void between itself and be historic source of its authority is too dangerous for the Kremlin hierarchy. But the hierarchy cannot have it both ways. They cannot have their indispensable continuity, from Lenin to themselves, yet shrug off responsibility for Stalin's "mistakes" and for admitted mistakes since, Stalin even unto Khrushchev. Our appraisal, to make logic, must take account of the entire history. (30)