It is more than three years since Joseph Stalin died. Not for one day since that event has the Communist juggernaut ceased its remorseless advance. The Middle East has been breached; the Titoist schism healed; united-front connections with the neutralist bloc immensely strengthened; the blockade of trade in strategic materials broken; our position in Western Germany and Japan undermined. Most decisive of all, a climate of opinion has been created in which socialists, Liberals and “men of good will” can “see no reason [the words are George Kennan’s] why a satisfactory and hopeful relationship should not be established between the United States and Russia, even though the respective social systems and political philosophies remain theoretically in conflict.”
It is not a bad harvest for three years of détente and “the lessening of international tension”; but it is a different world from the one our hopeful apostles of coexistence have been describing to the American people. Throughout these years—and with accelerating crescendo in the months since the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—like the twittering of birds before an oncoming thunderstorm, the voices of the Russian experts, the commentators, and, alas, of the political leaders of both parties, have been heard in the land, confiding to one another and to the public that a new era is beginning, that a great change has occurred. It may take time. We mustn’t expect too much too soon. But the bogey-man is dead, and his successors are sensible generals, industrial managers, Russian patriots— anything but dedicated Communists.
Comments