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Russia Revisited. The Soviet Union has solved the problem of economic security v. political liberty—by liquidating political liberty. Hence few things are so important to the future of the U.S. as an understanding of the Soviet Union, the functioning of its single party, the character and purposes of its leaders, the meaning and purposes of Marxism, its guiding philosophy, and what the sum of these things mean in the daily life of the Soviet nationalities. Few subjects are so controversial, or more confused by the unqualified adulation of the Russia-lovers and the almost equally unqualified abhorrence of those who see in the Soviet system the complete negation of democracy.
Professor Frederick L. Schuman, Woodrow Wilson professor of government at Williams College, has been looking at Russia steadily for some 20 years, and each time that he looked he liked better what he saw. His purpose in Soviet Politics is to show, with a disarming air of objectivity, how the Soviet Union got that way and what that way really is. He brings to his task the methods of a trained historian, great learning, unflagging industry and a firm belief that, if Russia and the western democracies cannot get together, civilization is doomed.
Soviet Politics is, first, a great historical recapitulation from the twilight of Russian history through the expulsion of the Mongols (twelve years before Columbus discovered the New World) to the end of World War II. From this historical background, and from the meddling stupidities of the western democracies, Author Schuman argues, have resulted those terrorist and tyrannical aspects of Russian Communism that have shocked or baffled many Americans. For it is Schuman's basic premise that Marxism is merely a contemporary and inevitable development of the libertarian and humanitarian ideals of the French and American revolutions.
Unlike most apologists for Russia, Author Schuman is much too intelligent to blink the facts about Russia. He does not hesitate to say that Russia is "the first of the totalitarian states." But "Soviet 'totalitarianism' was not inevitable nor necessarily implicit in the Bolshevism of 1917-18 but was forced upon it, with death as the alternative, by the decisions of Russian democrats and of the Western Democracies."
This premise once granted, it is possible to construct a plausible exoneration of Russian Communism for almost everything that it has ever done. The result is this book, which, in the guise of objective appraisal, is 689 pages of special pleading so adroit that many readers will not realize the nature of the device.
Prof. Schuman's indictment of the western democracies is clever, but it is unlikely that many western democrats will find themselves seriously indicted. They are more likely to find Schuman's reasoning, in this case, of a piece with his justification of the Purge: because "in my considered opinion the portrait of conspiracy spread on the Soviet court record appears . . . to be closer to reality than any alternative explanation." In the presence of equally cogent alternative explanations, that merely raises the question of the value of Schuman's opinion.