Joseph Stalin is far and away the most mysterious man in the world. What he believes and what he is planning to do are immensely urgent questions for everybody in every country. Especially for Americans. Last week the cloud of mystery around Stalin was penetrated. Foreign Affairs published in its January issue a 40-page article by "Historicus," entitled Stalin on Revolution. The article* contained few facts that were new. Yet it was big news. For it pulled together the whole kit & caboodle of Stalin's essential beliefs, the beliefs on which he bases his decisions. It was the first time that this had been done in such concise form. Historicus presents a scholar's brief packed with bobtailed quotations of tortured Marxist prose. Following is a decoding of what he has to say:
Is Stalin just an opportunist, saying and doing what seems best — for him — at the moment? Many Americans believe that, and thereby lose an opportunity to understand what threatens them. Stalin's line shifts. Sometimes he acts like a flaming revolutionist, sometimes like a good fellow who just wants to get along. The latter aspect is especially prominent in interviews given by Stalin over the years to visiting writers from the West. The confusion adds up to the "inscrutable Stalin," the man nobody knows. This misconception about Stalin is one of the most important facts of world politics today.
It was different with other great revolutionists. Marx knitted his beliefs together into a theory and a program, and then spelled it all out in a book. So did Lenin. So did Trotsky. (So did Hitler.) On the basis of their theories, a reader could make an educated guess about what they were up to.
But Stalin — so runs the misconception — has no ideological blueprint. With Lenin dead, he ditched all such nonsense. In his dealings with the world, he has gone this way and that. In the first years of the New Deal, Stalin and his Communists denounced the New Dealers as "social fascists." Then came the United Front : everybody who was against Hitler was a Progressive. Next, the Stalin-Hitler axis, which touched off the war. The war was an Imperialist War until Russia got in; then it was a People's War. After V-E day the Western nations were no longer allies of Russia, but suddenly became parts of what Stalin calls the Imperialist Front.
Those are the turns, as the American has witnessed them. And it is hard for him to discern in them anything he can describe by the word "principle."
Historicus does not deny Stalin's arrant opportunism. What he shows is that Stalin and the world Communist Party guide their main course on the basis of a hard core of theory, and have done so for 25 years with "amazing consistency." Around the hard core of theory is a hard layer of what Stalin calls program. Around this is a layer of strategy, then an outer husk of tactics.