Communism and the Cold War

LENIN is dead--this time dead physically, for spiritually and politically he has been dead a year at least. We have got in the habit of speaking of him as a thing of the past; and for that very reason it will not be difficult now to write of him dispassionately.

THE official handbooks of the Soviets do not give Stalin's family name or the date of his birth. He was born in the year 1879, and is supposed to have come from a peasant family. Between 1892 and 1898 he attended a seminary for priests at Tiflis, whence, as the official "Communist's Calendar" states, he was expelled. Thereafter Stalin's life revolved within the monotonous triangle of secret revolutionary conspiracies, banishments and flights. This was the case with many other Russians, for Russia has always been a great producer of professional revolutionists.

THE individual human personality is fighting a losing battle against heavy odds in Russia today. When one hears of state planning in the Soviet Union one usually thinks of factories, steel plants, large grain farms and cotton plantations, tractors and other accessories of industrialization.

"A SPECTRE is haunting Europe -- the spectre of communism." Eighty-five years have passed since the Communist Manifesto opened with those fateful words. It is little less since Tocqueville predicted that the democracy, weary of the inadequate results of their political emancipation, would one day turn to the destruction of the rights of property as the condition precedent to their economic emancipation.

Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.

FOR world Communism 1961 was the year of the great schism. "Polycentrism," a term apparently first used by Palmiero Togliatti in June 1956, is not yet in the dictionaries, but it has become a most important fact in world politics.

The dates May 22, 1947, and May 22, 1972, span exactly 25 years. On May 22, 1947, President Truman signed a congressional bill committing the United States to support Greece and Turkey against Soviet designs, and the United States thereby assumed overtly the direct leadership of the West in the containment of Soviet influence. Twenty-five years later to the day, another American President landed in Moscow, declaring to the Soviet leaders that "we meet at a moment when we can make peaceful coöperation a reality."

Twenty years after the revolutions of 1989 brought down communism in Eastern Europe, a fresh crop of books attempts to unpack this epic story. The story these books tell is more of a civil war within the elite than of a revolt from below.