Where the News Ends:

...Apart from a small hard core of Communists and extreme fellowtravelers, there are few now who would uphold the "humanitarianism" or the "democracy" of the Soviet regime...

...The general upward trend persisted during the first years of the present century...

...A little serious factual history, again cited from Kennan, should place this conception where it belongs, among the discredited myths: "Real fighting took place between Allied and Bolshevik forces only in one theatre, in the Russian North, and here only on a small scale...

...Less pardonable, it seems to me, was the infatuation with Stalin's totalitarian tyranny as a worthy ally in the cause of freedom during the Second World War...

...Maybe under a freer economy the Soviet Union would not have put the first astronaut in space...

...A letter in the New York Times, signed by Taylor Adams, describes as "one of history's most dramatic counterrevolutionary failures" the extremely minor and limited operations of a few thousand American troops who were sent to Northern Russia in 1913 and withdrawn, after a few skirmishes with local Soviet troops, in 1919...

...Elsewhere, aside from one or two skirmishes, the fighting was done by the Russian Whites...

...The assumption is completely inaccurate...

...It is psychologically understandable that, in the bitter upsurge of disillusioned resentment that followed World War I, which George Kennan has rightfully designated "the great catastrophe of Western civilization in the present century," there should have an impatient, almost irrational desire to give the best of every doubt to a movement that started, in some measure, as a protest against the War...

...Some of the more sensational percentage growth figures with which Soviet spokesmen like to try to dazzle the outside world can easily be matched, of course on lower base rates, in Imperial Russia...

...A second new myth is that foreign intervention caused the Civil War which raged in Russia from 1917-21...

...But new myths have replaced the thoroughly discredited old ones...

...The purpose of sending American and British troops to Russia was to safeguard large military stores which had been sent to Russia before the collapse of the Provisional Government...

...The grim facts about deliberately caused famine, slave labor, wholesale purges and mass deportations from Eastern Poland and the Baltic States were, or should have been, well known...

...Russia's rate of economic growth during the generation that preceded World War I was extremely fast, faster than that of the more developed industrial countries of Western Europe...

...But I suspect the Russian people would have more than onefifth of the United States' housing supply...

...This industrial growth was achieved not because of any special virtue of the Tsarist system, but because of a combination of factors: the general advance of science and technology, a huge population within a single customs frontier, a considerable inflow of foreign capital and the evolution of Russian managerial capacity and engineering knowledge...

...As Kennan says very accurately in his book, Russia and the West, had there been no World War there would have been no Allied intervention...

...Many of the hydroelectric power plants and other projects completed under the Five Year Plans were on the drawing boards of Tsarist engineering firms...

...Yet Adams and others who swallow the Soviet myth assume that there was a serious Western attempt to overthrow the Soviet regime, which was "smashed" by the Red Army...

...This is a myth because it implicitly assumes that the Russia which the Communists seized in 1917 was a permanently stagnant economy which could not have been expected to make progress under a non-Communist system...

...One of these, which Premier Nikita Khrushchev himself propagates at every opportunity, is that Communism has wrought a miracle by taking control of an economically backward country and transforming it, within less than half a century, into the second largest industrial power in the world...

...No doubt Communist dictatorship in Russia (and even more, perhaps, in China) has diverted the course of economic development by squeezing the people mercilessly for the buildup of heavy industries that are most useful for war purposes...

...To make comparisons between Russian statistics of 50 years ago and today is almost meaningless, because there is no reason to suppose that economic growth and progress would have ceased if Russia after 1917 had become not a Soviet dictatorship, but a republic or a constitutional monarchy...

...Its high points of success were in the first years after the Revolution and in the period when Hitler's invasion brought Stalin, very much against his will, into World War II...

...This intervention was extremely feeble and half-hearted and exerted no influence on the outcome of the Civil War...