Satellite Empire: Achilles Heel?

Let’s stop letting Russia determine where the Cold War should be fought. Eastern Europe is where she’s most vulnerable: Eastern Europe is where the West should center its attack.

Nearly four years have passed since full-scale revolt in Hungary and riots in Poland presented a massive challenge to the Soviet Union. In the intervening years, the significance of those events has become blurred. We tend to forget that the risings in Eastern Europe attested unequivocally to the potent force of suppressed opposition which lies latent within the Communist bloc. For the first time in history, the myth of dialectic materialism exploded with a bang that was audible everywhere. For once Communist propaganda could not plausibly claim that a “counterrevolution” had been launched by reactionary bourgeois and feudal landlords, for these had been liquidated or driven out years ago. What the critics not only of Communism, but of all collectivist philosophies had always suspected, but were never able to prove conclusively, was suddenly revealed as a demonstrable truth: there is no such thing as collective freedom, and the vaunted freedoms of “popular democracy” are shams. The urge to individual freedom burst to the surface in the Hungarian uprising.

RS

About the Author

Robert Strausz-Hupe

Let’s stop letting Russia determine where the Cold War should be fought. Eastern Europe is where she’s most vulnerable: Eastern Europe is where the West should center its attack.

Nearly four years have passed since full-scale revolt in Hungary and riots in Poland presented a massive challenge to the Soviet Union. In the intervening years, the significance of those events has become blurred. We tend to forget that the risings in Eastern Europe attested unequivocally to the potent force of suppressed opposition which lies latent within the Communist bloc. For the first time in history, the myth of dialectic materialism exploded with a bang that was audible everywhere. For once Communist propaganda could not plausibly claim that a “counterrevolution” had been launched by reactionary bourgeois and feudal landlords, for these had been liquidated or driven out years ago. What the critics not only of Communism, but of all collectivist philosophies had always suspected, but were never able to prove conclusively, was suddenly revealed as a demonstrable truth: there is no such thing as collective freedom, and the vaunted freedoms of “popular democracy” are shams. The urge to individual freedom burst to the surface in the Hungarian uprising.