The Roots of Soviet Aggressiveness
NIEMEYER, GERHART
By Gerhart Niemeyer THE ROOTS OF SOVIET AGGRESSIVENESS IN HIS article, "A Historic Opportunity" (NL, January 26), Lewis S. Feuer tries to resolve the tension between the USSR and the West into a...
...Lenin's victory over these tendencies committed Bolshevism to the assumption that the gulf between it and all other ideologies is essentially unbridgeable...
...By Gerhart Niemeyer THE ROOTS OF SOVIET AGGRESSIVENESS IN HIS article, "A Historic Opportunity" (NL, January 26), Lewis S. Feuer tries to resolve the tension between the USSR and the West into a series of mistakes and misunderstandings...
...Our mistake, then, is to approach the Soviets in the spirit of "necessitation" assumptions...
...The Bolshevik revolution was no longer young in 1918...
...The greatest possible evil for a Communist, as Lenin formulated it, is to become an unwitting helper of "reaction" by failing to remain irreconcilably hostile to the non-Communist world (even though this does not bar him from using his enemies through tactical moves of "cooperation...
...Our policies would have made a difference...
...Bad philosophy: Feuer seems not to believe it possible that a world view can shape and fix human attitudes...
...To one who thinks in terms of Almighty History, the feelings and intentions of mere men are relevant—but as obstacles, never to be accorded significance as the voice of human beings...
...It also served to formulate, in dogmatic form, the views that make up Commimism's identity: The irreconcilability of the class struggle, the basic rejection of any interests pertaining to the "present society," the exclusive either-or choice between bourgeois and revolutionary ideology...
...Woe to the society whose philosophers do not know this much about man...
...Bad political analysis: Feuer seems to think that the hostility of the Soviets to the West is the result of a trauma, and the hostility of the West to the Soviets the result of an unfounded suspicion, an impulsive reaction and a regrettable rigidity...
...Decisive in this development is the turning point of 1903, at which Lenin fought against those Russian Marxists who envisaged, directly or indirectly, the desirability of certain liberal features both in the Party and in the regime the Party would eventually establish...
...Beyond this, the Revolution must be traced to Tkachev, Nechaev and Bakunin in 19thcentury Russia, and to Marx, Engels and Blanqui in 19th-century Western Europe...
...It is in terms of this doctrine of basic "irreconcilability" that Communists recognize each other as distinct from other Marxists or Socialists, and that they organize their Party, their State and their Empire...
...The hostility, he claims, could have been averted if the Soviets had encountered, at three junctures in their history, cooperation instead of malice...
...Bad history: West or no West, the Soviet leaders did turn to "liberal" policies in 1921—and stuck to them just as long as was necessary to catch their breath...
...They were helped and, indeed, saved by the West between 1941 and 1945 and, in the midst of the war against Hitler, GERHART NIEMEYER, a professor of political science at Notre Dame, is currently teaching at the National War College in Washington...
...The examples could be multiplied, and so could be the witnesses, some still alive, of Soviet faithlessness to those who put their trust in "cooperation" with the Communists...
...The hurt was inflicted on the Soviets, he feels, when the Revolution was "like a newborn child...
...By that time, it had assumed a rigidly defined identity, an ideological and organizational structure that goes back at least to the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903...
...For his choice in life has already been made: He has declared himself for a world view that defines us, once and for all, as members of classes and types of societies, which, in the inexorable forward march of History, no longer deserve to exist...
...He shares the illusion of those who naively trust in the power of their own personality when they say: "If only the Soviets knew us for what we really are...
...Had the West helped the Soviet revolution when it was still "like a newborn child," Lenin and Trotsky would have swung the rudder of their ship in the direction of liberalism...
...All this has been, and still is, incessantly taught, memorized, intoned and re-stated by Communists high and low, year in and year out...
...The first two of these "lost" opportunities occurred in 1918 and 1919, and the third when Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov tried to get the West into a collective security agreement between 1934 and 1935...
...It is a faith based on falsehood, begetting a rule of evil, but it is a faith nevertheless, and the human heart will live by faith...
...prepared their postwar aggressive advance against die West...
...They announced and practiced "cooperation" with the liberal and democratic Socialist forces of the West in 1935—and stabbed their allies in the back, both literally and figuratively, in the very act of common battle...
...For with what are we going to resist a false faith, if not with one founded upon truth...
...The Communists have staked their life on a full, elaborate faith...
...Feuer's thesis is bad history, bad political analysis and bad philosophy...
...The truth is that what we are and what we feel is not of the slightest interest to a Communist...
Vol. 42 • March 1959 • No. 9
