Those who wait for Communism to change, Russia's Nikita Khrushchev crowed not long ago with a bravado that impressed much of the world, "might better wait until a shrimp learns to whistle." The eerie sound that penetrated the Kremlin last week from out of satellite-land was suspiciously like just such a whistle. Communism's leaders watched their authority flouted, their names assailed, their puppets overthrown, their flags torn down, their soldiers shooting down workers. In a few short days, these unpleasant truths were thrust upon the Soviet high command:
¶ Russia can no longer trust its satellite armies. In fact, it must in future be on guard against hostile acts by the 1,500,000-satellite troops who have been equipped with Soviet arms as the Communist answer to NATO. This discovery comes on top of Russia's widely advertised reduction of its own army by 1,200,000 men. (The Budapest fighting also showed that the Kremlin cannot count on the loyalty of all Russian soldiers.)
¶ Eleven years of relentless Communist-indoctrination of the satellites' youth, in schools, workshops, clubrooms, gymnasiums, in cafes and across kitchen tables, has failed to capture their imagination or loyalty. The demonstrators in Poland, the fighters in Hungary were largely people who have come of age under Communism.
¶ The international thaw, which began with the death of Stalin and continued at the Big Four campfire at Geneva, may have diminished the momentum of NATO, but it hurt the Communists worse.
¶The belief in Soviet good intentions (especially among Asians) has been grievously shaken. The uncommitted countries, still fighting the shadows of Western colonialism and inclined to discount the actuality of Soviet imperialism, could see a spectacle of foreign domination at its brutal worst. In Indonesia an official spoke of "Soviet colonialism," strange words on a Djakarta tongue.
¶ The brooding appearance of monolithic Communist strength (effective especially in Western Europe), the vision that sent stout old Konrad Adenauer home from Moscow last year with a we-must-do-business-with-them resignation, was more illusory than anyone had guessed.
The Warnings. The Soviet leaders had known for months that they were in trouble in the satellites. Stalin's ruthless economic exploitation strained the satellite regimes beyond endurance, and generated layers of explosive discontent beneath the placid surfaces, particularly in Poland and Hungary. The strain could not be kept up, either in Russia or the satellites. Out of that realization came Russia's new course, which began with Malenkov, and then (after a retreat) was continued by Khrushchev. Hoping to win popular allegiance, Khrushchev, as the head of a gang that rose to authority under Stalin, delivered his famous weeping recital of Stalinist terror. But the discussion of Communist evil was not so easily confined to Stalin alone, for how different was the new crowd? In the satellites, the first timid flutterings of public criticism were masked as indictments of Stalin. But in Poland, in particular, the criticism took on a decided anti-Russian tone—it was, after all, Soviet insistence on farm collectivization, on heavy industry, on unfavorable trade terms, on oppression of religion, that caused Poland's basic discontent.