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The two systems, Stalin writes, would be organized around two centers: "a Socialist center, binding to itself the countries that gravitate to Socialism, and a capitalist center, binding to itself the countries that gravitate to capitalism. The struggle between these two centers for the possession of the world economy will decide the fate of capitalism and Communism in the whole world."
Is this a hint of war between Russia and the U.S.? That Stalin foresees such a war is made clear by the following, one of Stalin's favorite quotations from Lenin (and also widely republished up to the present):"'. . . The existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with the imperialist states for a long time is unthinkable. In the end, either one or the other will conquer. And until that end comes, a series of the most terrible collisions between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois states is inevitable.' "
To this, the "inscrutable" Stalin appends the comment: "Clear, one would think."
* Stalin was 69 this week. As a birthday gift, the Czech Reds decided to build a monument. The design, when chosen in public contest, "must express Mr. Stalin's personality, mostly from his ideological features."
* It was the second time in two years that Foreign Affairs had rung the bell on the subject of Russia. In the summer of 1947 it published the eye-opening study, The Sources of Soviet Conduct, by "X." Mr. X was George F. Kennan, head of the State Department's policy planning staff. Historicus, according to Washington gossip, is George A. Morgan, 43-year-old Foreign Service officer, who is now First Secretary of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Morgan was formerly a philosophy professor at Hamilton College and at Duke University.