Russia: An American Problem
THE question whether one could do business with Hitler was answered with all the final emphasis of a slammed door when the Fuehrer hurled his declaration of war against the United States. What are the prospects of coming to a satisfactory modus vivendi with Stalin, or with the Soviet régime in general, if Stalin should disappear from the political scene? For at the present time there are only two effective military powers on the continent of Europe, Germany and the Soviet Union.
Committed as we are to the defeat of the former, we are logically interested in the military success of the latter. And this interest is reciprocal. If it is a service to America when Soviet armies destroy German man power and matériel on the snow-covered plains of Russia, it is just as certainly a help to Russia when American tanks help to bring about an Axis defeat in Libya or when American airplanes and submarines strike at Japanese warships and transports in the South Pacific.
The sense of national interest has almost always proved stronger than ideological conflicts. A Most Christian King of France allied himself with the Sultan of Turkey against his Christian enemy, the Emperor of Germany. The French Cardinal Richelieu supported Protestant states and principalities as part of his policy of creating a European balance of power which would be favorable to France. And this at a time when men felt strongly enough about religion to kill their fellow men for differences of faith.
Even before America had become a full belligerent the interest in a Russian victory had found expression in the extension of a billion dollar lease-lend credit to the Soviet Government — a step which would have been unthinkable before June 22. The American stake in Soviet military success has greatly increased since December 7. Should Hitler’s reverses in Russia assume the proportions of a Napoleonic disaster, the beginning of the end of a nightmare that has long hung over the civilized world might be in sight. And it is only from Soviet Far Eastern bases, especially from Vladivostok, that there is a favorable prospect of dealing heavy blows to the industrial heart of Japan in any near future.
If one looks at the situation more pessimistically, what prospect would face the Anglo-Saxon powers if Russia should collapse or change sides? There would be, at least temporarily, a very grave preponderance of enemy land and air power. Not only would the prospect of freeing Europe from Hitler be indefinitely postponed; the security of many links in the chain of lands and bases that now help to assure Anglo-American maritime superiority would be endangered. The British Isles would face the greatest peril since the fall of France.
So, barring an unpredictable and unfavorable change in Stalin’s policy, SovietAmerican military coöperation can be taken for granted until the achievement of the common goal: the downfall of Hitler. American aid to a fighting Russia will be unstinted and will be limited only by such bottlenecks as shipping and the availability of routes of supply and by such technical considerations as whether American tanks and airplanes can render most effective service in Russia, at Suez, or at Singapore.
I
Can this coöperation in war, which seems to be historically predestined under present circumstances, be prolonged into the period of peace that will some day follow the war?
The answer to this question is of enormous significance for world tranquillity and stability. For, if one assumes a crushing defeat of the Berlin-RomeTokyo combination, the Soviet Union will rank with the United States and the British Empire as one of the three surviving great powers. China is still too undeveloped industrially and militarily to fall within this category.
Russia and the United States are far and away the most populous large countries with a predominantly white population. There are about 170,000,000 people in the Soviet Union, a little over 130,000,000 in the United States. The Soviet Union is about two and a half times as large as the continental area of the United States, and Soviet orators like to boast that their country embraces one sixth of the land surface of the globe. (A cantankerous and chronically skeptical American correspondent in Moscow once carried out some statistical research and demonstrated that one seventh was closer to the fact than one sixth.) In any comparison of size, however, one must discount the huge regions of Northern Siberia and Northern Russia which are comparable to Northern Canada in barrenness and which can never support a large population.
Similar in their vast dimensions, Russia and the United States have followed utterly divergent lines of development. Unlimited and unquestioned state power is as characteristic of Russia, whether under the Tsars or under the Communists, as individual liberty and initiative are of the United States. If the typical figure in America’s century of westward expansion and settlement was the pioneer frontiersman, going where he chose, Russia’s settlers of new territory in the East often went under compulsion and sometimes literally in chains.
The Tsarist régime sent considerable numbers of political and criminal prisoners to Siberia. The Soviets have carried out huge forced transplantations of groups that were regarded as undesirable for political, racial, and economic reasons. Among these groups were the kulaks, or well-to-do peasants, Koreans from the Far East, Finns from the neighborhood of Leningrad, recalcitrant tribesmen from Central Asia, and most recently Germans from their homes on the Volga. This is only one illustration of how the pressure of state authority has been stronger in Russia, as it has been weaker in the United States, than in almost any large country. Contrasted national psychologies are the natural outgrowth of such strongly different political systems.
America and Russia have never understood each other well and have experienced perhaps less physical contact than almost any other great powers. Americans and Russians have fought each other only once, during the halfhearted intervention in the Archangel and Vladivostok regions which was soon abandoned as futile.
Most Americans disapproved of many characteristics of the Tsarist régime: of the autocracy, of the stern treatment of political prisoners, of the pogroms against the Jews. But Imperial Russia never clashed seriously with American interests. Russia, like Japan, had little use for the American idea of the ‘ Open Door ‘ in its sphere of influence in Manchuria. And Russia joined with Japan in rejecting Secretary of State Philander C. Knox’s idea that the Manchurian railways should be internationalized.
But there were never American-Russian issues that aroused high blood pressure or talk of war in either country. A landlocked power with negligible naval strength, Russia could not threaten the security of the Western Hemisphere. The regions where Tsarist imperialism was active — Manchuria, Mongolia, Central Asia, Persia, and the Balkans — were not parts of the world in which America felt any vital concern.
Much the same situation continued to prevail after the Romanovs had been replaced by the Soviets. Most Americans (an ardent but small minority of Communist sympathizers dissenting) still disapproved of the Russian governmental system. They did not like what they heard about persecution of religion, ‘purges’ and executions and mass deportations without trial, the squalor of everyday Soviet life. But the Soviet Republic, like the autocracy, offered no threat to American national security.
There was, however, one aspect of the Soviet system that raised a problem that had not existed under the Tsars. And it is on the solution of this problem that the existence of normal American-Soviet relations after the end of the war largely depends.
Tsarist Russia was a static traditionalist autocracy. It made no effort to convert Americans, or anyone else, to the idea that Tsarism would be a good form of government for the whole world. It indulged in its full share of international intrigue and espionage, but it maintained no corps of agents aiming to promote a particular type of social revolution in other lands.
The Bolshevik Revolution, on the other hand, was conceived by Lenin and by all its leaders in the beginning as the first act in an international revolt against the capitalist system. The Communist International, the world association of Communist Parties which has always maintained its headquarters in Moscow, grandiloquently described itself as ‘the general staff of the world revolution.’
Given the centralized, totalitarian character of the Soviet State, it has always been idle hairsplitting to contend that the Communist International is independent of the Soviet Government. No doubt there is and has been some technical separation of the functions of these two organizations. But every important decision of the Communist International, like every important decision of the Soviet Government, could only be taken with the approval and sanction of Stalin and his associates in the Political Bureau, the highest steering committee of the ruling Communist Party. Between the Soviet Government and the Communist International there has always been the close bond of a completely interlocking directorate. There has never been an instance when the foreign parties of the International did not follow, in the most slavish way, the political line prescribed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Individuals and groups have protested against this Muscovite domination of the international Communist movement. But these individuals and groups have been swiftly excommunicated and expelled from their respective parties.
Now a situation where a group of citizens of one country takes orders blindly and unconditionally from the government of another power is at best unhealthy and not conducive to smooth international relations. In a time of great crisis such a situation may become an intolerable threat to national security. Take the recent example of the fall of France. Most comment on the internal causes of this catastrophe has concentrated on the sins of the well-to-do ‘appeasers’ and has overlooked the rôle of the Communists in undermining French morale.
Yet the record in this case is clear and indisputable. Until August 23, the French Communists did everything in their power to push their country into war. When war was imminent, after it had actually begun, they abruptly swung over to a policy of all-out defeatism. In both rôles, as war agitators and as defeatists, they were acting not as Frenchmen, but as agents of Moscow. The sole reason for their change of attitude was the Stalin-Hitler pact. Since June 22, 1941, Communists in France, as in other countries, have executed a new about-face. Many of them have perished at the hands of German firing squads. But, however much one may respect them for their devotion to their cause, history has little pardon for groups that place the interests of a foreign power ahead of those of their own country.
In France, where the Communists were the third strongest party in the Chamber of Deputies, where they attracted a large following among the industrial workers, their ‘Russia First’ policy was a national disaster. In the United States, Communism has been a nuisance rather than a menace. It has gained no appreciable mass support, although the Communists, because of their solidarity and their capacity for intrigue, have acquired an influence in some tradeunions, professional groups, and ‘innocents’ organizations’ that is out of all proportion to their actual numbers.
Yet America too would have become acutely conscious of the Communist problem if Hitler had pressed his campaign against the British Empire instead of attacking Russia — a step that automatically placed the Communists in the front ranks of America’s interventionists. Had there been no attack on Russia, Communist-inspired strikes and antiwar demonstrations would have become increasingly numerous.
II
It is this question of Soviet support of revolutionary movements in other countries that is likely to prove the touchstone of future American-Soviet relations. If, out of the stupendous ordeal of the present war, there emerges a clearly nationalist Russia, whether under Stalin or some other leader, a Russia that is willing to forswear the mirage of world revolution, to scrap the machinery of subversive intrigue and propaganda that is represented by the Communist International, to content itself with peaceful development within its very wide and generous ethnographic frontiers — then there would seem to be no obstacle to the maintenance of normal AmericanSoviet relations. Indeed, some kind of modus vivendi between Washington and Moscow may well prove to be an essential prerequisite of post-war world stability.
The cordiality of American feeling toward Russia would, of course, be influenced by the treatment of religion, by Soviet administrative methods, by the question whether ‘habeas corpus’ or ‘habeas cadaver’ would be more characteristic of Soviet jurisprudence. But, especially after the strain of an exhausting war, there would be no impulse in America to exercise pressure or dictation in Soviet internal affairs. There would be general acceptance of the fact that only the Russian people themselves could overcome and cure the defects of their own political and economic system.
There are signs that a nationalist Russia may be in the making. For years before the beginning of the war, Stalin, whose personal power had become steadily more unlimited and more unchallenged, had been visibly slipping the bonds of strict Communist ideology. Tsars like Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible (there are similarities to both in Stalin’s own character) were publicly exalted instead of being reviled. The sharpest edge of the terror was turned against veteran Communists with a cosmopolitan background, men who still clung to the international revolutionary ideas of Marx and Lenin. The restoration of discipline and conventional methods in education, the discouragement of divorce, the growth of a stabilized inequality in wages and salaries — all these are the familiar symptoms of a revolutionary volcano that has spent its force.
Since the beginning of the war, Soviet propaganda has been nationalist, rather than Marxist, in character. The PanSlav ideal, cherished by Russian conservatives in the nineteenth century, has been revived. Stalin’s chances of victory, as he knows very well, are linked up not with any proletarian uprising but with the amount and effectiveness of the help he may obtain from the non-revolutionary governments of Great Britain and the United States. This consideration is bound to influence Soviet policy in a moderate direction during the war.
And after the end of hostilities Russia will be a wrecked, desolate country, many of its largest cities gutted, much of its industry destroyed, tens of millions of its people uprooted and scattered. Over and above this there will be a staggering toll of casualties, even for a country of Russia’s vast man power and traditional resilience in recovering from catastrophes which would have swamped a less tough and stoical people. America at that time will certainly be the largest if not the only remaining reservoir of reconstruction supplies.
One suspects that, as soon as the sense of imminent peril has passed, Americans wall repudiate the rôle of playing Santa Claus to the entire anti-Axis world. But, if a grave unemployment crisis is to be averted, foreign as well as domestic markets must be sought. Outright subsidies to Russia would cease. But a clearinghouse system of exchange of American food, machinery, and railway equipment for Russian manganese, furs, gold, and other products might be worked out to the advantage of both countries. As Russia, in the beginning, would be the principal gainer from this process, Soviet policy would scarcely be directed along anti-American lines.
So there is a fair probability that, in striking contrast to the situation after the last war, Russia may emerge from this conflict with conservative rather than revolutionary objectives in foreign policy. One cannot, however, rule out the possibility that European post-war conditions, as much as Stalin’s own design, will rekindle the flame of social revolt. There is no revolutionary dynamo comparable in its effectiveness to large-scale war.
If the Nazi régime should collapse suddenly, which some observers regard as a possibility, most of Europe would become a turbulent vacuum, hungry, cold, embittered, and leaderless. Russia would become the sole military power of any strength on the Continent. Should the old crusading fervor of the first years of the Bolshevik Revolution revive, should Stalin’s legions sweep on to the Danube, to the Rhine, to the Seine, to the Tiber, all blueprints for a democratic reconstruction of Europe and the world might as well be thrown into the wastebasket.
A Stalin-dominated Europe, from the standpoint of American national interest, would possess only one advantage over Hitler’s New Order. It would be less efficient, and therefore less of a military threat. But the writ of the Four Freedoms would certainly not run in a Europe that was ruled from Moscow. And many of those difficulties in the fields of trade and propaganda that are widely foreseen in the event of a consolidation of Nazi power would be just as perplexing if the Russian colossus should bestride all Europe and a large part of Asia.
So the prospect of future permanent coöperation between America and Russia depends mainly on the character and mentality and foreign political aims of the Russian régime that emerges from the present ordeal by battle, the greatest in Russia’s history. It also depends on the kind of Europe that is being forged in the crucible of Nazi domination and exploitation.
III
What of the more immediate problem of American military and economic aid to the Soviet régime? What are the results, the lessons, and the prospects of the Soviet-German war?
The principal surprise of this war has been the tenacity and relative effectiveness of Soviet resistance. Hitler’s longest previous land campaign had lasted six weeks. More than five months have passed since the invasion was launched, and Soviet armies not only are in the field, but have assumed the offensive with success. Our knowledge of the Soviet-German war, mainly limited to the conflicting propagandist claims of the two sides, meagrely supplemented by the impressions of correspondents on the few conducted fleeting visits to the front that have been permitted, is woefully imperfect. But I think it is possible to discern four main causes of the Soviet endurance: —
(1) The Soviet system of government by unlimited propaganda, plus unlimited terror, accompanied by intensive indoctrination of the younger generation, very like the Nazi system, has produced a similar type of youth, mentally and physically tough, hardboiled, cocksure, free from doubt, firmly attached to the new régime, with few exceptions. To this Soviet or Communist patriotism of the youth add the nationalist feeling that prompts many non-Communist Russians to fight a foreign invader, and one has an explanation of Russian morale.
(2) The leaders of the Red Army, unlike the British and French generals before the outbreak of the war, were not attached to the obsolete tactical precedents of 1914-1918. Russia’s military chieftains have always thought in terms of a war of machines. And Stalin launched a ‘guns instead of butter’ campaign with the inauguration of the first Five-Year Plan, long before Hitler came into power.
(3) The Soviet political and economic system, emphatically not calculated to produce individual comfort or a high standard of living, is well adapted to war needs. It is the system of total war, with the State disposing of all the human and material resources of the country, able to wreck factories and farms, to make wholesale forcible shifts of population, to impose the utmost sacrifices. The Soviet State does not consider the hankering of business men for profits. The last business man has long been liquidated. Neither does it have to worry about strikes in defense industries, for the Soviet trade-union organization, like the Nazi Labor Front, is just one of the many branch offices of the omnipotent State.
(4)The enormous expanse of the Soviet Union, the greatest land mass under a single sovereignty in the world, forty times the size of France, is an effective protection against blitzkrieg methods. The Soviet armies can sustain losses and carry out retreats that would be fatal and final in one of the comparatively small countries of Western or Central Europe. There are always more men to call on, there is always more space in which to retreat, to re-form, to counterattack.
With all recognition of these factors in Soviet resistance, it would be unwise wishful thinking to assume, on the basis of the present military situation, that the Soviet Union is certain to defeat Germany. It would be useful, in order to obtain a fair perspective on the results of Hitler’s Russian campaign, to compare the line which the German armies held after five months of fighting and the line which they held after three years of war in 1917. The modern German armies have overrun the whole of Ukraina, one of the most productive regions of the Soviet Union, with a population of thirty-five millions. The German armies of 1917 had not even reached the border of Ukraina. Nor had the Kaiser’s armies come close to Moscow and Leningrad.
Probably half of the Soviet industrial output has been paralyzed. This does not mean that half of the Soviet factories are in the hands of the Germans; for much industrial property has been destroyed, some has been evacuated, and the factories of the Leningrad and Moscow industrial regions have been crippled for lack of regular supplies of raw material. But there has certainly been a depletion of Soviet industrial production far exceeding the value of supplies that have reached Russia from abroad or are likely to arrive in any near future.
The true account of the Soviet-German struggle is far and away the biggest unwritten story of World War II. It is unwritten because it could not be written with any degree of assurance for lack of firsthand information. Neither Germans nor Russians have afforded foreign correspondents more than fleeting glimpses of the front. Secretary Stimson has publicly complained that American official military observers have been given scanty facilities in Russia.
It has been possible to follow with reasonable accuracy the shifting lines of the front. But on the far more important questions of comparative losses of men and tanks and airplanes, of the reserves which are still available to the two sides, one can only grope in a fog of rumor and uncertain speculation.
Until the end of November the tradition of German invincibility in land fighting had not been broken, although the timetable of Hitler’s advance had been much slower than many observers had anticipated. Soviet resistance at some pivotal points, at Smolensk, at Kiev, at Odessa, had been stubborn and prolonged. There had been occasional local Russian counter-offensives. But when the Germans occupied a large city it always remained in their hands. Several major battles, in the Minsk-Bialystok area during the first weeks of the war, around Kiev in September, in the neighborhood of Briansk and Vyazma in October, had ended disastrously for the Russians and must have been costly in men and matériel. After five months of fighting, Hitler’s forces had conquered a good deal more Russian territory than the Kaiser’s forces had occupied during the three years of fighting from 1914 until 1917. Almost the whole of Ukraina, for instance, had been overrun, and the German lines were close to Moscow and to Leningrad.
The first sign of a turn in the tide was the recapture late in November of Rostov, a large town on the River Don which was the gateway to the Caucasus. One setback of this kind might have been attributed to the use of inadequately supported armored units in the taking of Rostov. But after the first week of December the initiative on both the Moscow and the Leningrad fronts passed into the hands of the Russians. Towns of unmistakable strategic value, Kalinin, Tikhvin, Volokolamsk, Klin, figured in Soviet claims which were not disputed by the Germans. Hitler spectacularly dropped his commander in chief, Von Brauchitsch.
American public opinion, even in normal times, is likely to run to extremes; and this tendency is accentuated under the strain of war. Russia was hastily written off as doomed to immediate and crushing defeat when Hitler launched his offensive last summer. As soon as the Germans began to retreat on a wide front, headlines proclaimed a rout, a disaster of Napoleonic proportions. That the Russians have won important victories is obvious. They have apparently warded off the threat to their most important sources of oil supply. They have relieved the pressure on their two largest cities.
But there was no sure indication during the first weeks of the Russian offensive that the German armies were being annihilated or that they are disintegrating and melting away like the Grande Armée of Napoleon. The German retreat was slower than several phases of the Russian retreat that preceded the counter-offensive.
Both the proportions and the causes of the Russian success will become clearer with the passing of time. The Germans quite conceivably overextended their lines of supply and communication. Hitler may well have forced the period of active fighting, against the advice of some of his experienced generals, into a winter season to which the Germans and their Italian and Rumanian auxiliaries are less accustomed than are the Russians. The arrival of fresh mechanized units, drawn from the crack Far Eastern Army, may have tipped the balance. This would account for Soviet unwillingness to begin hostilities against Japan at this time.
One cannot fairly criticize a country that has stood up to such battering as Russia has endured for declining to take on a two-front war. But the defeat of Japan is quite as much in the national interest of Russia as it is of the United States. Vladivostok is more vulnerable to the Japanese arms than is San Francisco. Should Japan achieve its maximum aims in the South, the reduction of Singapore and the Netherlands Indies, Russia would scarcely be spared an attack. One may therefore hope that complete unity of effort on the part of the anti-Axis coalition will be attained in the Orient, as in other fields of action, that the Soviet Union will not overlook any reasonable chance of striking effectively at Japan while its Navy, Air Force, and picked Army units are heavily engaged thousands of miles away from the Siberian-Manchurian frontier.
There is another possible explanation of the German retreat that cannot be dismissed. It may have been a planned move, designed to shorten lines in Russia for a defensive stand during the winter while troops withdrawn from the Soviet Union are used for a major offensive in the Eastern or Western Mediterranean, or even for a desperate onslaught against, the British Isles. The Nazis are good showmen. They would be quite capable of inspiring exaggerated rumors of the proportions of their defeat, of dissensions in their own ranks, as part, of the game of masking the preparation of a new offensive. They employed similar tactics, not without success, in order to promote a false sense of security before the drive into the Low Countries and France in 1940.
The American popular tendency to run to extremes is reflected not only in the understandable desire to give Russia the breaks in the headlines, but in a much more questionable tendency to soft-pedal any criticism of Stalin and his régime. One frequently encounters the argument that the sturdy character of the Soviet resistance automatically refutes all testimony about the negative features of Communist dictatorship.
Here certainly some clear thinking is called for. If Japan had been won over to the Allied side in this war, as in the last one, it would have been welcome politically. But it would have given no reason to Americans to endorse Emperorworship, or to rewrite the historical facts about the seizure of Manchuria or the sack of Nanking. If Mussolini had changed sides it would have been a political and military benefit. But it would not have altered the fate of Mateotti and men like him in Italy.
Precisely the same line of reasoning applies, or should apply, to the Soviet Union. It is an ally for reasons of mutual interest so long as it fights our enemies. Until and unless its system of government is drastically changed it can never be the ideological partner of a free America.
In the difficult and ticklish business of dealing with a profoundly secretive dictatorship, American policy should be guided by one consideration alone: a hard-headed consideration of American national interest. It should not be forgotten that Stalin’s original policy in relation to the war was to promote its outbreak by signing his pact with Hitler, then to sit back and hope that the ‘bourgeois’ world would destroy itself, with the Soviet Union gathering the revolutionary spoils at the end. His participation in the war against Hitler was distinctly Hitler’s decision, not his own.
American support for the policy of aid to Russia will be more wholehearted if this policy is based squarely on considerations of American national interest in defeating Hitler and not cluttered up with efforts to whitewash or redwash Stalin or to falsify the historical record of the Soviet régime. It is certainly unfortunate, for instance, that President Roosevelt, perhaps speaking hastily, conveyed an impression that religious freedom of the American type exists in Russia. Anyone familiar with Soviet conditions knows that persecution of all forms of religion has gone further there than anywhere in the world, that to be a priest or minister is to follow one of the most dangerous professions, that great numbers of churches have been arbitrarily closed, and that those which remain are denied any opportunity to carry on social, charitable, or educational work. We are helping Stalin because he is fighting Hitler, not because he is a champion of religious freedom.
One must also deprecate efforts to prettify Stalin, whose internal homicide record is even longer than Hitler’s, as a character, or to assume, without any evidence, that all the numerous individuals he put to death, with and without trial, were traitors and ‘fifth columnists.’
Our government officials and leaders of public opinion will be well advised to leave the glorification of Stalin and the Soviet régime in the zealous hands of the Communists and the Dean of Canterbury, and to base the policy of coöperation with the Soviet Union on the one ground that will command the support of the majority of the American people: that it is a means to the downfall of Hitler.