FUTURE PROSPECTS:
FOREIGN POLICY
IN his first Statement as Prime Minister, Malenkov said:
‘The most correct, indispensable, and just foreign policy is a policy of peace between all peoples, a policy of mutual confidence, business-like, based on facts, and confirmed by facts.’
Malenkov's words were an implicit criticism of Stalin's conduct of foreign affairs, although the criticism applied to the manner rather than the matter of Stalinist diplomacy.
Stalin's foreign policy was bogged down in the irrationalism of the cult and the magic. His diplomacy did not lack a peculiar realism and shrewdness; but it was incapable of facing facts. It was obsessed with prestige. Nothing could be allowed to detract from the greatness and infallibility of the Father of the Peoples. Every Soviet success had to be fantastically exaggerated; every reverse had to be dressed up as a success. Not only propagandists, but also ambassadors and diplomatic spokesmen had to conform to this style. Consequently the hypocrisy which permeated domestic policy affected foreign policy also; and this hypocrisy accounted for the bizarre unreality and rigidity in Stalinist diplomacy.
To be sure, in critical situations Stalin carried out sharp reversals of policy which gave the impression of great flexibility. But the need for these sudden and sharp reversals sprang also from rigidity. Quick perception of shifts in international alignments, the subtle nuance and manoeuvre, the gradual transition from one policy to another — all these were beyond Stalin's diplomacy. Instructed to pursue a certain line of conduct, Soviet Foreign Ministers followed their instructions to the point of absurdity, until Stalin himself suddenly stopped them and ordered them to turn in the opposite direction.
At home a quotation from Stalin was supposed to resolve any doubt on any subject. Therefore the final and decisive argument produced by Vyshinsky, Malik, and Gromyko before hostile or indifferent foreign audiences was also the sacred quotation from Stalin. Even when they had a strong case to make they most often wrecked it through unbusiness-like presentation. They had to repeat ad nauseam the same abuses or protestations of friendship, regardless of the situation.
Stalinist propaganda usually vaunted the agility of Soviet diplomacy in exploiting ‘the contradictions in the enemy camp’; and anti-Stalinists believed in this and feared it. In fact, Stalin's diplomacy frequently acted as if it were desperately anxious to eliminate all those ‘contradictions in the bourgeois camp’: it semed bent on uniting adversaries and on turning neutrals into adversaries. If it, nevertheless, benefited from divisions in the anti-communist world, this was due to the inherent force of those divisions.
Malenkov's first preoccupation was to free Soviet foreign policy from its irrational Byzantinism and to make it more worldly and subtle. A peace policy ‘based on facts’ required that Soviet diplomacy relax its inflexible attitudes and postures. Such a policy could not be pursued by means of constant repetition of cliches dictated by requirements of domestic orthodoxy but utterly ineffective or even incomprehensible when produced at an international forum.
Almost immediately after Stalin's funeral, the style of Soviet diplomacy became more civilized and sober. Less obsessed with prestige than its predecessor, Malenkov's
government proceeded to free itself from some of the rigid commitments it had inherited. It dealt in a conciliatory spirit with incidents in the ‘air corridor’ from Western Germany to Berlin. It offered its services in repatriating British and French civilian prisoners from Korea. It ceased to obstruct the election of a new General Secretary of the United Nations. In these gestures of conciliation there was no surrender of any vital Soviet interest. But even if only gestures, they contrasted refreshingly with the ceaseless mutual mud-slinging of the cold war.
Soon afterwards, on March 28th, the Chinese and North Koreans — under Soviet inspiration — made new proposals for armistice negotiations in Korea. The previous protracted negotiations had reached a deadlock over one point: the repatriation of prisoners of war. With Soviet support, the North Koreans and Chinese had insisted on the unconditional repatriation of all their prisoners. Now they announced that they were willing to abandon that demand.
The new Soviet attitude over the Korean war was no mere change in diplomatic style — it foreshadowed a new policy.
It is evident that during Stalin's last years the ruling circles were divided over foreign policy at least as much as over domestic affairs. This division was not very different from that familiar in other countries. One faction was anxious to seek conciliation with the West, another refused to countenance ‘appeasement’. There is no need to have recourse to guesswork in order to reconstruct the broad outlines of the disagreement — Stalin himself provided the clue in his much discussed Bolshevik article on the eve of the Nineteenth Party Congress.
The disagreement was logically premissed on two opposite views about the prospects of war and peace.
One group held that war between a united capitalist world and the communist bloc was ‘inevitable’; and that it was probably inevitable in the near future. The other group took the view that accommodation between the two camps was still possible and even probable, despite mounting tension.
This controversy directly affected the Soviet attitude over Germany and Korea, the two main storm centres of world politics.
The opponents of ‘appeasement’ refused to consider any compromise with the West over Germany and Austria. They refused, in the first instance, to contemplate the prospect of a Soviet military withdrawal from Central Europe. If, as they held, a new world war was inevitable and near, then it was obviously in the Soviet interest to hold on to all advanced strategic outposts on the Elbe and the Danube. These outposts were equally vital in offensive and defensive operational plans. They could be used as jumping-off grounds for an advance into Western Europe; and they could serve as shock absorbers in case of a Western attack. From this viewpoint, Moscow was interested in preserving the status quo, in keeping Germany divided until the outbreak of war, and in completely integrating Eastern Germany in the Soviet bloc. All talk about Germany's unification was empty propaganda.
The conciliators recognized, of course, the advantage of holding Eastern Germany. But almost certainly they argued that if Russia could buy peace and a long breathing spell at the price of a withdrawal from Germany and Austria, she ought to pay that price. Germany's reunification should be the major aim of Soviet policy, not a propaganda stunt. Reunification might entail the loss of the communist regime in Eastern Germany. But Soviet Russia had more than once sold space to buy time, and she could do so again. Even from the conciliators’ viewpoint, however, this concession to the West should be made only if, as a counterpart, the Western powers also agreed to withdraw their forces from Germany. A neutral Germany would be a useful buffer between East and West; but it was for Russia a matter of only secondary importance whether Germany freed from oecupation would be neutral or remain a member of the European Defence Community. The edge of the European Defence Community would be blunted anyhow, and after the occupation armies had withdrawn a prolonged international detente could be expected.
The controversy affected Korea similarly. In the view of those who held world war to be inevitable and near, it was in the Soviet interest to prolong the fighting in Korea, to pin down as high a proportion as possible of American military power, and so to obstruct the building up in Europe of the military effectives and reserves of the Atlantic bloc. From the ‘appeasers'’ viewpoint the risks of prolonging the fighting were prohibitive. The Korean war provided a powerful stimulus to Western re-armament and the belligerent mood in the West; and it was more important for Russia to stop the armament race in time than to pin down American forces in the Far East.
This conflict of views was very close to the surface of Soviet foreign policy in recent years. Stalin personally placed on record his view that war between the communist and anti-communist blocs was neither ‘inevitable’ nor even probable. He agreed with the ‘appeasers'’ premiss but did not draw all the inferences from it. Acting, as usually, as supreme arbiter of the opposing factions, he avoided an explicit and final refutation of the views of either and delayed the ultimate decision until a critical moment.
In this way, Stalin imposed a stalemate on the two hostile factions and Soviet policy was the resultant of their conflicting views. This accounts for its peculiar indecisiveness and lack of direction. Geared neither to war nor to peace, the policy tried to pursue simultaneously the objectives of both. Nearly all Soviet diplomatic documents and pronouncements of recent years were a patchwork of contradictory formulae; and it is easy to distinguish those designed to meet the views of the conciliators from those calculated to satisfy their opponents. Thus, Stalin's diplomacy repeatedly proposed the withdrawal of occupation armies from Germany; but it always appended conditions which from the start made the proposals unacceptable to the Western powers. Similarly, Moscow took the initiative for armistice negotiations in Korea, allowed all controversial issues to be settled, but produced a ‘hitch’ over the last point on the agenda. The conciliators in the Kremlin saw the stage set for an armistice; and their opponents were satisfied that a cease fire would not be sounded.
Who were the conciliators and who were their opponents?
According to Titoist sources, Malenkov headed the so-called peace party. He had been opposed to the blockade of Berlin in 1948; and he had repeatedly urged Stalin to adopt a milder foreign policy. He was probably supported by most of those who openly or tacitly favoured domestic reform, because an easing of international tension was, and still is, an essential condition for the success of domestic reform.
While in domestic policy Malenkov had to fight the die-hards of the security police, in foreign policy he had to contend with the opposition of influential army leaders. In Russia, as elsewhere, Chiefs of Staffs and prospective commanders are concerned mainly with their operational plans. They survey mentally the future battlefields, inspect the outposts and ramparts; and they are reluctant to give up any of these. In their eyes a conciliatory policy which would necessitate the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the Elbe and the Danube and allow American armed forces to disengage themselves from Korea was too dangerous to contemplate.
Conceptions of foreign policy were thus mixed up with the pros and cons of domestic reform; and both foreign and domestic aspects were equally important in the last incident of the struggle before Stalin's death, the ‘doctors' plot’.
The alleged discovery of the conspiracy in the Kremlin was designed to make domestic reform impossible. It was also calculated to inflict a blow at ‘appeasement’. Its purpose was to create an atmosphere of war-like fever and nationalist hysteria, and to cut off the communist bloc from any contact with the West. In such a mood the ‘alien’, the citizen suspected of ‘divided loyalties’, is naturally regarded as the worst ‘security risk’, to use a current expression. And who could be a worse ‘security risk’ than the Jew with Zionist sympathies or the ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ whose brothers or cousins lived in the West?
There is circumstantial evidence that alongside officials of the political police some army leaders were also involved in the case of the doctors' plot. In that affair both scored a dramatic but indecisive success. Between the middle of January, when the tale about the Kremlin physicians was first published, and March, there were several indications that the struggle continued unabated behind the scenes. At the height of the anti-Jewish campaign two spectacular ceremonies were staged to honour two Jews. Mekhlis, former chief political commissar of the army, who had just died, was given an elaborate State funeral quite out of proportion to his official importance. Ilya Ehrenburg, the writer, was honoured with a high award and used the occasion to argue in public against racial discrimination. Pravda fully reported his speech, which it would hardly have done without orders from above.
At this stage Stalin may have been too ill to intervene, or else he kept himself au dessus de la melee and allowed the leaders of the opposing factions to do as they liked.
From Moscow the struggle had already spread to the provinces, and also abroad — to Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, and Bucharest. The two factions competed for control over the administrations of the satellite countries. This fact produced a curious diversity in the regimes of those countries and the methods employed by their Communist Parties.
The most striking contrast was between the Czech and the Polish scenes. In the Czech party a complete upheaval was carried out with lightning speed in 1952. Slansky, Clementis, and other prominent leaders were demoted and after only a few months executed as traitors, Zionists, Trotskyists, and foreign spies. The Slansky trial was a prelude to the spectacle that was to be enacted in Moscow; in both places the same hand pulled the wires. In Poland, Gomulka and his associates had been charged with ‘nationalist deviation’ as long ago as 1948. Yet for nearly five years no purge trial was staged. No accusation of terrorism, sabotage, or foreign espionage was added to the not unfounded charge of nationalism levelled against Gomulka. Nor has any other purge trial modelled on the Stalinist pattern taken place in Poland so far. Poland and possibly Rumania were obviously aligned with the conciliators and reformers in Moscow, while Czechoslovakia was swayed by their opponents, and in Hungary the two factions held each other in check. This state of affairs could last only as long as the struggle had not been resolved in Moscow.
On March 5th and 6th the ‘peace party’, led by Malenkov, carried out its coup, placed itself in power, and at once intimated its desire for an improvement in Russia's relations with the West.
The first moves which Malenkov's government made in this direction were relatively easy to take. The Soviet diplomatic envoys were instructed to speak softly. So were the Soviet newspapers. The Chinese and North Koreans were promptly persuaded to prepare for the winding up of the Korean war. Overnight they dropped their previous objection to ‘voluntary repatriation’ of prisoners of war, the objection on which the armistice negotiations had foundered.
These first moves made their impression in the West. But the real test of the new policy was, and at the time of writing is still, to come. Has the conflict between East and West not been allowed to drift too far to make a genuine easing of tension and conciliation extremely difficult or even impossible? Soft words are certainly not enough. The aggressive language in which East and West have spoken to one another aggravated the international tension, but it was not its major cause. A cease fire in Korea may bring about an improvement; but by itself it cannot solve the conflict of interests that led to the Korean war. Beyond Korea there remain the grave issues of control over armaments and of Germany and Austria. Over all these questions Russia and the Atlantic powers failed to find a common meeting ground during many years. Will they be able to find it now?
The domestic reforms already initiated in Russia strongly suggest that the new government is anxious to call a halt to the armament race. A Soviet regime freer than Stalin's needs for its survival firm popular support. It must therefore strive to raise the national standard of living; it must off er more butter and fewer guns.
Hitherto mutual fear and suspicion have dominated every debate on disarmament. The Western powers were apprehensive of Russia's superiority in ‘conventional’ arms; while Russia feared American superiority in atomic and other ‘unconventional’ weapons. Each camp hoped to redress the balance in its favour, Russia by accumulating a pile of atom bombs, and the United States by building up the armies of the Atlantic Alliance.
Of late there has been a feeling in each camp that it may not be able to ‘redress the balance’. It is not known whether Russia's rulers had hoped to attain parity in atomic weapons with the United States in the foreseeable future. If so, recent American progress in that field must have caused sober reflection in the Kremlin. On the other hand, it has become apparent that the Atlantic powers had taken far too optimistic a view of their ability to raise joint armies which could counterbalance the armed strength of the Russian bloc in Europe and Asia. The armament race has reached a point at which each of the chief participants has reason to wonder whether he has much chance of winning.
Yet, while the results of the race so far may not have favoured either side, neither has seemed able to stop it. Each bloc would like the other to reduce its strength in those fields where it is superior. Russia has clamoured for the destruction of the atom bombs and for a ban on their use. The Western powers have demanded that Russia should first reduce her vast standing armies. Each side has been wondering just how great the other's superiority is. The West has pressed Russia to reveal the size of her armies; and Russia has asked about the size of the American stock of atomic weapons. Both have closely guarded their secrets and refused to divulge them, unless the other side sets the example first. And even if one side were to disclose its strength, the other would refuse to believe the truth of the disclosure, unless it was allowed to check it on the spot. Thus every debate has invariably led back to the question of ‘international supervision and control’.
The history of this century is strewn with the wreckage of international conventions on disarmament; and it is extremely difficult to believe in the efficacy of new conventions. But it is possible that now, when Russia is moving away from the Stalin era, some of the old obstacles to agreement may vanish. As Russian obsession with secrecy lessens, a degree of conventional international supervision of armaments may become feasible. There has always been ground for the suspicion that what Stalin concealed so stubbornly from the world was not merely and perhaps not primarily the state of Russia's armaments but her low standard of living, her lack of freedom, and her concentration camps. Malenkov's government may be more inclined to allow United Nations commissions to travel inside Russia and inspect military establishments.
This, however, is the extreme limit to which it can go. Just as its predecessor, it will in no circumstances accept the demand for international ownership or management of the sources of atomic energy and of atomic plant. If the West insists on this, the deadlock over disarmament will continue. Even without this, the chances of agreement are slender enough. If Russia were to accept international supervision and inspection of military establishments, would the Western nations reciprocate? Obsession with military secrecy has recently grown so strong in the West as to justify scepticism on that point.
(It is one of the most tragi-comic developments of our day that the more intense the obsession with secrecy, the less effectively governments guard their secrets from their enemies. Stalin's most elaborate devices designed to cut off Russia from the West have not prevented multitudes of Soviet citizens from escaping and supplying Western Intelligence Services with a richer harvest of information than the most ingenious espionage network could collect. Western secrecy has not prevented Russia from obtaining the most closely guarded atomic secrets from the West's most competent scientists. But both East and West have paid for their mania of secrecy with a demoralization in government and people, with panic and witch-hunts.)
However, disarmament rarely if ever results from formal international conventions. It comes about spontaneously after a genuine detente has eased relations between great powers. Since the chief obstacle to such a detente lies in the problem of Germany and Austria, it is there that Malenkov's government is likely to seek a new solution.
The scope for new solutions, however, is extremely limited. Russia can probably do nothing more than reformulate her proposals for a withdrawal of the occupation armies and for unification of Germany.
The Western powers have so far rejected these proposals for two reasons. Hitherto, because of the tug-of-war in the Kremlin, the proposals have been couched in terms that made them unacceptable from the start. Russia suggested unification in the form of a merger between the existing East and West German administrations. The Western powers naturally suspected that such schemes concealed a Russian design for communist ‘infiltration’ of the whole of Germany; and they demanded free elections in the Soviet Zone as a preliminary to further agreement. If all German parties, including the banned social democrats, were allowed to electioneer, the communist government of Pieck and Ulbricht would collapse. Until now Russia was not prepared to face this consequence. A withdrawal of the occupation armies was therefore out of the question.
This, however, has not been the sole reason for the negative attitude of the Western powers on the unification of Germany. Equally important has been their fear that the withdrawal of American forces would automatically result in Russian predominance on the European continent. The United States would retire beyond the Atlantic, while Soviet armed power would to all intents and purposes remain on the Neisse and the Oder.
What can Malenkov's government do to break this deadlock?
The possibility cannot be ruled out that in their desire to resolve this potentially dangerous situation Russia's new rulers may go so far as to permit free elections in the Soviet zone, without attempting to save the communist government there. The restoration of a bourgeois regime in Eastern Germany is the highest price the Kremlin can possibly agree to pay for the withdrawal of all occupation armies. What must trouble the ‘appeasers’ in the Kremlin is whether they can secure a withdrawal even at that price. After the instatement of a Christian Democratic or Social Democratic government in the whole of Germany, will Western policy cease to be dominated by the fear of Russian predominance in Europe? In the long run Russia's proximity and growing industrial strength will most likely secure for her that predominance. This being the case and the consequence of geography and historical development, there is little or nothing that any Russian government, even the most ‘peace loving’, can do to reassure the West. At the most it can pledge itself not to use this position for military or direct political expansion. But will the Western powers have confidence in such a commitment, even if it is backed up by the restoration of a bourgeois regime in Eastern Germany?
We have said before that the general doctrine of foreign policy bequeathed by Stalin to his successors is one of ‘self-containment’ within the communist third of the world. The main difficulty in the application of this doctrine is that the communist third of the world has no clearly demarcated boundaries. The frontiers of the two power blocs overlap dangerously. Self-containment would logically require that the overlapping zones be eliminated.
Malenkov's government may be expected to explore the lines of retreat from Germany. But it can retreat only if the Western powers do the same. Should they refuse and the occupation armies hold on to their positions, Soviet diplomacy may still try to avoid new conflicts and seek conciliation within the unpropitious framework of a partitioned Germany. Peace would then depend on palliatives. However, the prolongation of the present state of affairs, with Soviet and Western armies facing each other across the Elbe, would from the Start gravely handicap Malenkov's peace policy. The demarcation line across Germany would remain a potential front line; and on both its sides the perilous manoeuvering for positions and outposts would continue.
Malenkov has staked his reputation and perhaps his future on the success of his peace overtures. Opposition to ‘appeasement’ is probably as strong in the inner councils of the Kremlin as it is in Washington, though it is not vocal. For the moment the conciliators have the upper hand and the opportunity to put their policies to the test. They have begun to ‘dig a tunnel of friendship’ from their end and have appealed to the statesmen of the West to do likewise. In the meantime the Soviet opponents of ‘appeasement’ stand in the background and watch the scene. Should Malenkov's policy fail, they may yet come dramatically to the fore and reverse the trend.
The changes in Russia will strongly affect the communist movements of other countries.
The quiet winding up of the Stalin cult is already having repercussions in the ranks of world communism, even though Stalinist leaders outside Russia were at first comically slow in realizing what was happening in Moscow.
The crumbling of Stalinist orthodoxy is sure to be followed by an intense ferment of ideas which may eventually transform the outlook of Communist Parties everywhere. Much depends on the extent to which the Soviet Communist Party evolves in a new direction. If the barrack-square discipline of Stalinism gives place to a freer regime, genuine and public controversy may be expected to develop in the ranks of the Russian party. It will then be impossible for most foreign Communist Parties to maintain their ‘monolithic’ character. Once they begin to discuss frankly their own policies, they may abandon the puppet-like attitude towards Russia which was their chief characteristic throughout the Stalin era. They may regain a certain independence of outlook and a measure of autonomy which would free them from the encumbrances of the past and greatly enhance their appeal.
Should, however, the era of reform come to a premature end in Russia then this process would be cut short in the foreign communist movements too; although even then those parties would have to search for an ideological substitute for Stalinism. In any case world communism finds itself at an historic crossroad.
Whatever evolutionary stages lie ahead, the link between world communism and Russia is not likely to be broken. The communist devotion to Russia as the pioneer and mainstay of the whole movement, may change its character. It may free itself from the taint of subservience and become more spontaneous and dignified than it has been hitherto.
Here again Russia's new rulers may be confronted by a difficult dilemma. If the communist bloc is to pursue a policy of self-containment and ‘peaceful coexistence’ with capitalism, its leaders may think it advantageous to prevent the further spread of communism which might endanger the status quo. Yet they may not be able to impose upon foreign Communist Parties the discipline under which Stalin kept them. They may not be in a position to dictate the policies and control every move of French, Italian, or Indo-Chinese communists. We have seen how first Tito and then Mao wrecked Stalin's policy of self-containment. Another Mao may rise in some corner of Asia or another Tito may reach out for power in some part of Europe, and wreck Malenkov's policy of self-containment as well. Even if the rulers of the communist bloc were to discourage new revolutions, as Stalin did, their background and tradition would compel them to identify themselves with every new communist regime emerging in any part of the world. And any such development would tend to aggravate or bring to a head the conflict between East and West.
The prospects depend, however, not only and not even primarily on what happens in the communist world. They may be determined more decisively by the trend of American policy.
Russia's new conciliatory attitude has been in the nature of a delayed reaction to the American policy of ‘containing’ communism, the policy of which George Kennan is widely regarded as the inspirer. Indeed the overtures of Malenkov's government are a signal success ofthat policy. The new Soviet leaders have acknowledged that the mutual pressure which East and West have brought to bear upon one another has resulted in an equilibrium which can form the basis for peace.
This indubitable success of the American policy of containment has, however, coincided with a crisis of that policy. Its inspirer has left the State Department at the very moment when official Washington might have celebrated him as the victor of the day. A cry to abandon ‘containment’ in favour of ‘liberation’, a cry to overthrow communist regimes in Eastern Europe and China, has gone up. Large sections of American opinion are clamouring for a crusade; and official Washington at times behaves as if it were anxious to yield to the clamour.
These auguries, when seen from Moscow, appear to promise little success for conciliatory overtures. Yet, Malenkov's government, not allowing itself to be discouraged, hopes to be able to calm the clamour for ‘liberation’, to dispel suspicion, and to induce the Western powers to revert to a policy ‘based on facts’. But it also knows that if the West were in all earnestness to abandon ‘containment’ in favour of ‘liberation’, self-containment would become meaningless for the Soviet bloc.
Should a war-like threat come from the West before the new regime has had the time to consolidate itself, another dramatic shift may occur on the Russian scene: the Malenkov government may be compelled to withdraw and to make room for its opponents. It may be succeeded by a military dictatorship, a Soviet version of Bonapartism.
The dynamic potentialities of the Soviet State are still incalculable; and the emergence of a Soviet Bonaparte is one of the possible surprises. The part played by military leaders in the recent crisis in Moscow is still obscure in some respects, but there is no doubt that it was important.
The Russian revolution has been the only one among the modern revolutions which has so far not led to a military dictatorship. But the ghost of Bonaparte has haunted it for three decades; and both Trotsky and Stalin, each in his own way, wrestled with the ghost. Trotsky repeatedly warned the Bolshevik Party of the military dictator who one day might rise above its head and crush it. Stalin suspiciously scrutinized the faces of Tukhachevsky, Zhukov, and other marshals to see which of them might secretly nourish this dangerous ambition. As in Dante's tale about the man who wrestles with a snake and in the struggle himself assumes the snake's shape, Stalin assumed some features of a Soviet Bonaparte when, as Generalissimo, he placed himself above his generals. But this was in part a masquerade. Stalin remained the civilian party leader in uniform, representing only a diluted and adulterated Bonapartism.
The mere need for such an adulteration shows that the trend towards Bonapartism was latent in Soviet society; it was no mere invention of the lovers of historical analogy. The trend remained only latent, in part because Russia was until recently too weak to breed a Bonaparte. A Bonaparte cuts no figure if he cannot conquer a continent. The Soviet generals of the past were incapable of such a feat—Russia's industrial-military strength was altogether inadequate for that. At the close of the Stalin era this may no longer be true. Nobody can say whether a real general, whom the uniform of a Bonaparte would fit much better than it fitted Stalin, may not appear in the Red Square one day. It is not irrelevant to the situation in Russia that the trend towards the ‘rule of the sword’, to use an old-fashioned expression, has been so much at work in the non-communist world as well.
There are as yet no signs of the advent of a Soviet Bonaparte. But if the peace offers made by Stalin's civilian successors were to fail, it may be with him that the West will have to deal next.
The day on which a Russian Bonaparte rises in the Kremlin may see the end of all self-containment, for the Bonaparte would disperse the party secretaries and make straight for the English Channel.