(2 of 3)
For Egalitarianism. The astounding thesis of Russia and the United States is that the two nations tend to resemble each other in culture, morals, industry and democratic standards. Russians and Americans, says Sorokin, have a common instinct for egalitarian philosophy. He predicts that the economic systems of the two nations will converge more & more, as small-property rights come back in Russia and as big-property rights in the U.S. are subjected to increasing Government manipulations.
Russia, says Sorokin, is moving to the right even as the capitalist world moves toward its own compromise with statism. Sorokin never seems to suspect that that compromise may be saving Stalin the trouble of collectivizing the democracies.
USSR is another version of the book that Walter Duranty has been writing ever since he became the New York Times' correspondent in Moscow shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution. Packed with firsthand observations by a brilliant reporter of Russian life, politics, and politicians, the book is a history of the U.S.S.R. from 1917 to date. But it must be borne in mind that Author Duranty was long Russia's No. 1 apologist among foreign correspondents. He is also the man who, when Stalin deliberately doomed some 3,000,000 peasants to death from starvation by withholding grain, remarked that "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." Oncoming Glacier. David J. Dallin's study is perhaps the most enlightening book that has appeared about Soviet for eign policy. Most foreign observers of Bolshevik policy are defeated at the start because they do their thinking within the context of European political traditions.
European foreign policies are often ruthless and immoral in the sense that they violate the basic premises of Europe's Christian culture. Bolshevik foreign policy is always ruthless and amoral, in the sense that it denies these premises — an important distinction. Professor Dallin, a former member of the Moscow Soviet, at best thinks like a Bolshevik, at worst understands how Bolsheviks think. Soviet foreign policy which for Winston Churchill has been "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" is for Dallin a sphinx without a secret.
Dallin's main point : the tactics of Russian foreign policy change with circumstances ; the grand strategy never changes. The aim of that strategy: to keep all other powers in hostile balance or at war among themselves so that they will be too divided to unite against Russia, and eventually too weakened by war to resist the spread of Russian foreign policy when, in Clausewitz' phrase, it is continued by other means — i.e., by the Red Army. Thus there is nothing mysterious (and from the amoral Bolshevik viewpoint, nothing perfidious) in Russia's series of sudden switches from alliance with the French-British-U.S. political cartel to the German power trust, and back again. When viewed through the Kremlin windows, the Moscow-Berlin pact was strategically impeccable. (It embroiled all Russia's important enemies except Japan and the U.S.) Tactically, it involved a miscalculation —the Allies were weaker, the Germans stronger than the Kremlin realized.