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There is no doubt that millions of Russians hate Stalin's regime, but it seems to be a weary, passive hate. Harvard's Dr. Merle Fainsod recently published a study of careful interviews with some 100 Soviet citizens who had deserted their country and fled into Western Germany. Besides the usual story of slowly mounting dislike for the party bullyboys who run the collective farms and the factories, Fainsod found signs of weakness in the Soviet Union's heralded nationality policy (which promises, on paper, complete equality for national minorities). He found that the younger intellectuals among the U.S.S.R.'s racial minorities are becoming increasingly restive under Russia's rigid control, also found that the Soviet hold on youth is less ironclad than generally supposed, because Communism has lost its aura of rebellion, its "ideological élan." But opposition is locked in the separate minds of millions of individuals, and unless it is organized it is valueless. There is no sign that it is becoming organized. The modern world has several impressive examples of the ability of dictatorships to control their people even under the most extreme rigors of war. One example is that of Russia itself, which fought on in World War II even after the most valuable portion of the country had been lost, after 5,000,000 army casualties had been suffered, and after the level of life had dropped to a point which the West would consider unbearable.
What Kind of War?
The most notable characteristic of the Russian war potential is unevenness. It is pre-eminently powerful in some fields, anomalously weak in others. This imbalance is not easy to correct. It does not result from errors of judgment on the part of Russia's ruler, but from the limitation of geography and of the Russian economy.
From the nature of Russian strength and weakness, observers can get a fairly clear idea of the kind of war Russia would like to fight. The greatest defect is lack of mobility, especially at sea; Russia is still militarily landlocked and will probably have to stay that way unless it can add the industrial resources of Western Europe to its own. To a lesser degree, its armies are also tethered by the limitations of Russian industry. The U.S.S.R. could not support vast masses of infantry operating thousands of miles from home.
Russia partially compensates for its lack of military mobility by control of the Communist Party throughout the world. The party carries the Red offensive into distant lands, dupes other peoples into fighting Russia's battles and ties up (as in Korea and Indo-China) the armed forces of the West. The Communist Party is the most effective substitute for sea power the world has ever seen.
Russia has three other main assets: 1) defensive strength based on self-sufficiency and tight political control of its own people; 2) a position within reach of the industrial centers of Western Europe, which are not beyond the logistical tether of the Red army; 3) possession of atomic bombs which might be able to reduce U.S. and other Western production to the level of the U.S.S.R.
If allowed full use of these assets, Russis could win world domination by two wars, or two phases of one war.