EDITOR’S NOTE: 2005 marks the fiftieth anniversary of National Review. In celebration, NRO will be digging into the NR archives throughout the year. This piece by James Burnham appeared in “The Week” in the July 18, 1956, issue of NR.
Your Sergeant Death, as Shakespeare calls him, is a great stripper-off of masks, particularly when he comes revolver in hand. Not all the perfumes of Muscovy can wash the Poznan blood off the Kremlin’s face, which behind Stalin’s genial pipe or Krushchev’s affable grin, is revealed in the first flash of a security guard’s gun to be ever the same grim visage of terror and brutality. Machine guns, bombers, tanks: this is the answer of Communism to the call for bread and freedom.
And as they rolled over Polish bodies the Communist tanks flattened also the soft rhetoric of our George Kennans and Stewart Alsops, our experts and smug journalists, who have been telling us how the Soviet regime has come to be accepted by its subjects, how (in Kennan’s servile words) “there is a finality, for better or worse [sic], about what has occurred in Eastern Europe.” The people of Poznan, clasping hands as they faced the tanks demanding food and decent working conditions and an end to Moscow’s rule, and the soldiers who joined them instead of firing on them: these in one day communicated more of the truth about the Soviet Empire than a decade’s dispatches by correspondents and diplomats.
The embryo revolt in Poznan was not isolated, but the latest act in a series that extends over the past four years: the slave labor revolts beginning in 1952, before Stalin’s death, in the Vorkuta complex; the East German uprising; the large-scale recent fighting in Eastern Tibet; the riots in Tiflis. Every such demonstration proves, contrary to the skeptics, that a policy of liberation is closer to Soviet realities than any policy of containment or coexistence.
Each time that the East Europeans act on the premise of liberation, Washington is taken wholly by surprise. The actors receive no guidance, no aid, no comfort from us. They die, and our officials continue with the latest round of efforts to persuade those who shot them of our peaceful and friendly intentions.
The slave laborers of Vorkuta, the German workers of June 1953, the Poznan citizens of yesterday, prove that they are ready to die fighting their enemy, who is also ours. But by our vacillation–by our emptiness–we condemn them to die in vain. Therefore our cheek is also stained with their blood.
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