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Other areas of difference, and the conflicting views in these areas, were also known in advance. The U.S.S.R. wants a strong, friendly, de-Nazied Germany, the U.S. and Britain want a weakened Germany. Russia, as her press plainly said last week, refuses even to discuss the Soviet domination of her "security belt" in the Baltic States, eastern Poland, prewar Rumania's Bessarabia, the parts of Finland seized in 1940, all of which belonged to Czarist Russia.
The Russians want a strong and friendly Poland; according to Polish sources, the British have unofficially urged the Polish Government in Exile to cede the Pripet Marshes to Russia, keep the important city of Lwów, and presumably compensate themselves in East Prussia and German Silesia. In the Balkans, Russia will want a strong voice in Yugoslavia, Rumania and Bulgaria, where Soviet influence is strong.
The Russians are also eager to discuss the AMG (Allied Military Government in Occupied Territory), in which they see a pattern for the future. They dislike its present composition, have sharply attacked its work. Said Moscow's War and the Working Class: "[AMG] is generally developing from foundations that have nothing in common with the principles of democracy."
Policy-Makers. Basically, Russia's prime objectives are: 1) complete defeat of Hitlerite Germany and 2) security from future attack. To achieve these goals, the Russians are prepared to use every weapon in the arsenal of power politics: military force, alliances or armed isolation, collective responsibility or exclusive spheres of influence. On the choice of the weapons depends the harvest to be reaped by the Red sickle.
This shrewd Realpolitik has not been the product of Stalin's mind alone. He was helped a great deal by a small group of hardheaded party bosses, mostly unknown to the outside world. The group is bound by common bonds of Communist faith, strong nationalism, a long and harsh test of body & spirit in Czarist jails, exile, the civil war.
To each member of this band, Russia is an island lashed by angry capitalist waves. Each distrusts the outer world. Each, essentially, is comparable to a U.S. Midwestern isolationist set against a Red background. The band's motto is the old Russian proverb: "S volkami zhit, po volchii zhit"—"He that lives among wolves must learn to howl." With the capitalist wolves, these men propose to talk the wolfish language of power politics—tough, unsentimental, strongarm.
This group remained in the background while brilliant, flabby-fleshed Maxim Litvinoff had his internationalist innings in 1929-39. But when the Munich pact ended the Geneva daydreams, the nationalist band came to the fore. One of its members, Viacheslav Molotov, stepped into Litvinoff's place as Commissar of Foreign Affairs.
Two other party bosses help to forge Russia's Realpolitik: