The Change in Russia

...Moslem power was consolidated in the Middle Ages and threatened the whole of Christendom much as Communist power threatens Western civilization today...

...Lenin did combine tactical flexibility with this fanaticism, and the combination proved very successful in the early days of Communism...

...It must be understood that, while Communism is officially anti-religious, we may rightly speak of it as religious because it seeks ultimate ends, regarded as redemptive for the whole of mankind, by its political maneuvers...

...Historical analogies suggest that the dogmas will be preserved for a long time after the fanatical fury of the dogmatism has disappeared...

...The current Russian bosses have embarked upon the adventure of reducing the height of the Iron Curtain, and they have thereby imperiled the fanatical basis of Communist power...

...But this logic leaves one factor out of account...

...We must expect the Communist dogma to be preserved, perhaps for ages to come, and the Communist oligarchs to pay lip service to it for many decades...

...The original power of Communism derived from the combination of absolute fanaticism and tactical flexibility, which was Lenin's real contribution to the Communist cause...

...Every "capitalist" nation was as evil as the capitalist class, and every nation which stood on the other side of the revolution was "peace-loving" and intent only on defending itself against the "warmongers...

...The Communists evidently desire a detente very fervently, but they are trying to purchase it at a very cheap price...

...It was this fanaticism which enabled Lenin to organize a minority of the revolutionary forces in Russia into an integral political power which was able to dominate first the revolutionary cause, then the whole nation...

...It might be added that the "collective leadership" of Communism has merely restored the tactical flexibility which was one of Lenin's boasts and which was sacrificed in the later days of Stalinism, when Russian policy hardened into a hard and unimaginative intransigence...

...The rigorous equalitarianism of both creeds is similar even as the religious basis of political power is analogous...

...Whether they are true believers or whether skepticism has corroded their souls may be politically irrelevant so long as they recognize that they cannot challenge the dogma upon which their political power rests...

...The world was sharply divided once more, according to Communist dogma, into the hosts of good and evil...

...Their present policy may be more formidable than the previous intransigence, but it is certainly not immediately as dangerous to the peace of the world...

...We are no longer "warmongers...

...Furthermore, it must be recognized that this flexibility is more formidable and more difficult to counter than the old intransigence, which, incidentally, had the merit from our standpoint of covering many of our mistakes...

...It is, they warn, just one more evidence of Communism's tactical flexibility, of which we have had ample evidence in two decades...

...The inconclusive bargaining with West Germany revealed clearly that Russia will not yield on such important issues as German reunification...

...In current history, its power had disintegrated to such an extent that it was not even able to unite the Arab nations against the establishment of the new State of Israel...

...As the complexities of the political scene begin to penetrate through the dogmatic preconceptions, empirical reality is bound to dissolve the fanaticism which gave the Communist world its cohesion and its striking power...

...for the corrosion of skepticism among both leaders and followers may prevent proclamation of the "holy war" which we have dreaded so much...

...The Sultan of Turkey's effort to call for a holy war when Turkey became involved in World War I proved abortive...

...The overall strategy of Communism remains the attainment of world dominion...

...Indeed, there are indications that it has already strengthened the hands of the "neutralists," whether in India or in France, and that it will lead to a relaxation of the posture of alert defense which has contributed a good deal to the security of our present situation...

...Lenin did not, of course, originate the fanaticism...

...In that sense, the "big thaw" may be one of the most important events of contemporary history...

...If we may hope for the dissolution of the spirit of fanaticism, this hope does not include the disintegration of the Communist dogmatic base...

...The pessimists are afraid that the Western world will be taken in by the smile...

...At one point, the analogy breaks down...

...For all we know, the fear of becoming involved in a war initialed by the Chinese nun have been a contributing cause of the '"new look" which Russian policy has recently acquired...

...The Chinese seem still to be true believers and to possess all the original fanaticism which is being dissolved in Russia...

...Whatever may be the truth about relations between the Russian and Chinese Communists, we cannot deny the fact that recent developments are quite different from what anyone could have predicted when we were in the winter of our discontent...

...If this should be a significant development, the exchange visits of farm experts between Russia and America may well prove to be as important as the Geneva Conference...

...his failure marked the end of the threat of Islam to any established order...

...Certainly the danger of being involved in war, because the Communist oligarchs believed their own propaganda and therefore misjudged their foes, has been at least partially eliminated...

...Everyone is speculating on just how much the smile, which has replaced the scowl, on the Russian face may mean to us and our posterity...

...The most persuasive historical analogy is the political course of the Islamic movement...

...When the party boss, Nikita Khrushchev, asserted after Geneva that "both sides are now convinced that neither side wants war," he may have written the close of a chapter in Communist history...

...If the Russian farm experts still adhered to the dogmatic Communist picture of our world, they must certainly have been disillusioned when they investigated the lush farms of Iowa and other Midwestern states...

...It is this fanaticism which is in prospect of being dissolved by Communism's new tactical line, and the prospect is the most hopeful development in contemporary history...

...Thus, we could be allies of the Russians during the war, but it was not long before we were held up to scorn as "imperialists," "militarists" and "warmongers...

...It may be significant that more danger seems to arise in the present instance from Chinese rather than Russian Communism...

...It may have ushered in a climate in which both a holy war by the Communists and precipitate action on our part to prevent a real or fancied holy war have become less probable...

...The quasi-universalism of this Moslem power, transcending Arab nationalism while rooted in the Arabian world, is analogous to the relation between the pseudo-universalism of the Communist creed and Russian nationalism...

...But the flexibility never dissolved the fanaticism...

...These arguments are cogent as far as they go...

...But the inexactness of all historical analogies must not obscure the lessons which may be drawn from these analogies...

...They could not possibly fit these prosperous farmers into the category of the "exploited...

...Stalinism boasted considerable flexibility in its day, enough to outrage the moral sense of mankind when, for instance, Stalin made his deal with Nazism...

...Chinese Premier Chou En-lai may still naively believe that the "ruling circles" in Wall Street meet every morning to send down their orders to Washington, but the more sophisticated Soviet bureaucracy does not have this simple picture of a complex world...

...Capitalism is not intrinsically related to "imperialism," and the world is no longer divided between good and evil nations and classes...

...That was inherent in the whole Marxist dogma, with its simple distinctions between exploited and exploiter, its too-simple conception of the class structure of society, its too-simple derivation of all social evil from the institution of property, and its consequent division of every nation and of the whole world into friends and enemies "of the people...

...Furthermore, the realists accurately point out that the "big thaw" in international relations has not brought a change in Communist behavior either in Germany or in Asia...

...Stalin was probably right in sensing that the dogmas of Communism could be maintained inviolate only by rigorously prohibiting a commerce of ideas between the two worlds...

...The important fact is that Moslem fanaticism was gradually dissolved without any explicit disavowal of Moslem dogma...

...Its conception of a necessary "holy war" against all infidels was analogous to the Communist conception of the inevitable conflict between capitalism and Communism...

...The complexities of history gradually made for dissolution of the fanaticism and the efficacy of the call for a "holy war...

...But it is not politically irrelevant in the long run...

...These facts do not encourage complacency regarding the Communist menace, but they do throw a ray of promise into what was hitherto a very dark future for mankind...

...The dissolution of Moslem fanaticism did not occur until after it had involved the whole of Europe in war and had established its dominion over a considerable part of the Western world...