Generalissimo Stalin and the Art of Government

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WE are living in an age when the social sciences claim to be able to predict more and more accurately the behavior of groups and individuals, rulers and ruled. It is strange, then, to find that one of the political processes which still causes the greatest perplexity is to be found not in some unexplored realm of nature, nor in the obscure depths of the individual soul intractable to psychological analysis, but in a sphere apparently dominated by iron laws of reason, from which, supposedly, the influence of random factors, human whims, unpredictable waves of emotion, spontaneity, irresponsibility, anything tending to loosen the rigorously logical nexus, has been remorselessly eliminated. The process to which I refer is the "general line" of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Its abrupt and violent changes of direction puzzle not merely the outside world, but Soviet citizens; and not merely Soviet citizens, but members of the Communist Party itself at home and abroad--to whom, as often as not, it occasions disconcerting, violent and even fatal surprise...