The Russian People

by VICE ADMIRAL LESLIE C. STEVENS, USN (Ret.)

THE villain more on the the Soviet world stage, Union the becomes more the we tend to be sweeping in blaming “the Russians,” without going much beyond the fact that they are a perplexing nation which is obviously composed of oppressors as well as oppressed. We don’t expect a Chinese to act like anything other than a Chinese. But the Russian, who has great charm when he is frankly Russian, is at his worst when he is trying to be European. One is always caught offguard by the illusion that he is a Westerner, and rather unreasoningly resentful when he fails to act consistently like one.

The only prudent rule to follow, and one which constitutes a great stride towards understanding, is never to expect a Russian to act as we would act under similar circumstances, for he is influenced by different values than we, or at least applies different weights to such values as we hold in common. Things that seem important to us, or which we are in the habit of assuming or expecting, do not have the same importance for Russians, and their habits have formed in other channels.

Take the case of Lenin’s tomb. It is difficult to imagine Franklin Roosevelt, or even the less controversial Queen Victoria, lying in pomp for a generation under glass, all but breathing, like the Sleeping Beauty, while great queues of people stand patiently in line in storm and snow and sun hour after hour through the years to witness. The values involved in deciding to put Lenin on permanent display are bold, dramatic, and moving, and they are certainly not European.

When I saw the state funeral of Zhdanov, the only member of the Politburo to die in recent years, I caught a glimpse of darker values. It was on a showery September afternoon, with heavy, tumbled, dask blue clouds and little intervals of pale, cold sunshine. The broad street outside the Home of the Soviets, where Zhdanov’s body had been lying, was such a great mass of flowers and wreaths that the people carrying them could scarcely be seen. At last, well beyond the scheduled time, the bands began the slow, sad, majestic Chopin music; a gigantic portrait of Zhdanov started down the street, followed by a train of Marshals carrying Zhdanov’s decorations in their hands; and the crowded heaps of flowers and wreaths began to move behind them like a forest. After them came four men carrying the scarlet coffin’s lid, and then, half propped up in the red coffin, riding on a gun caisson, the body. Its face was deathly pale, yellowish-waxy, and so startlingly different from all the thousands of other faces that it was easy to pick it. out as far as the cortege, following the Birnam Wood of green wreaths and flowers, could be seen. It was Death itself— the Great Doom’s image.

As always in Russia, there were many strange rumors surrounding Zhdanov’s death, centering in the possibility of an unseen struggle for power on the part of a man who had perhaps begun to build up a following. As I left the balconies of the Embassy, it came to my mind that in the days of the False Dmitri and the Time of Troubles, there were so many impostors and false claimants to power that the bones of the real Dmitri were carried publicly through the streets to convince the people that he was dead. The impostor, or self-proclaimed, has always flourished in Russia as in no other land. There have been literally scores of enigmatic claimants to the throne, many of whom, perhaps with good reason, were completely convinced of their high origin. Although the reasons why the impostor should be so compatible with Russia are curious, and his involved story sheds light on the depths of Russian personality, it is enough to note that rather positive steps have been taken to convince the people that such figures as Lenin and Zhdanov arc permanently in their last resting places.

Copyright 1952 by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

There is a Russian proverb which says, “The soul of a stranger is darkness.” The Russians are stranger and more alien to us than any European people; they are full of dualities and contradictions, and with a natural talent and affinity for what seems to us to be deviousness and cunning, but which to them seems something quite different, carrying no opprobrium. There are many barriers to understanding this gifted people, and more of them today than ever before are deliberately fostered by the rulers of Russia. One way of going about the problem is by a consideration of origins.

Although the ethnographic complexities of the country are enormous and there are many Russias which can be separated only in vague and overlapping ways, the unifying force, the governing power, the predominant culture and language, is that of the Great Russians, and it is generally they whom we mean when we speak of Russians. The north-central part of European Russia is their homeland, but they are everywhere throughout the vast areas in varying numbers.

The origins of the Great Russians are obscure, and have long been a subject for debate. Sarmatians, Scythians, Khazars, Huns, Goths, Vikings, Bulgars, Finns, and wave after wave of Asiatics must have left their mark. Although the familiar Russian proverb says “Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar,” it is very annoying to most Russians to suggest that they are Asiatics rather than Europeans. Few Englishmen question the profound effects of the Norman invasion on the English character, and there is no valid reason why Russians should question the imprint of Asia, culminating in three hundred comparatively recent years of Tartar rule and occupation. Russians are much closer than Europeans to the great Asiatic life sources, in time as well as in space. Their reaction is probably due to the fact that the Russians themselves, including Lenin, have long used “Asiatic poverty” as a common phrase to describe former Russian conditions, and to them “Asiatic" has associations with something lower-class, deplorable, and reactionary. Since it is equally annoying to true Asiatics to have the Russians included in their midst, it should be noted that whatever there is of Asia in the Russian heritage is localized, coming from north-central Asia and the Mongolian steppes, and it includes much that is appealing, fine, colorful, and far from derogatory.

Evidences of Asia are common in Russia, from the camels of the lowver Volga (the terminus of the great camel caravans, before and even after the coming of the railroads, was at Nizhni Novgorod, only some 200 miles from Moscow) to definite characteristics of appearance, architecture, language, and dress. It is only to be expected that their folklore, their native dances, and their music should be colored by Asiatic influences. The intriguing and devious side of the Russian nature, its love of proverbs, its respect for and love of office, its lavishness, its fondness for jewels, gold, and horses, and its subtle and complex attitude towards woman all seem more Eastern than Western.

Secretiveness and suspicion, to an Oriental degree, play their part to make the scale of Russian values different from our own. This has been a Russian trait from Tartar days and before, and it was as marked under the Tsars as today. The Russian has a conspiratorial nature; and in spite of his deep patriotism, intrigues for power in high places have abvays flourished. It seems almost unnatural for him to take an associate unquestioningly at his face value, and often for good reason. This is natural and fertile soil for the police state, which, in one form or another, has always existed in Russia. The informer, too, is a familiar character. Often forced into his shadowy activities, he pervades all walks of life in Russia today and is a major instrument in maintaining the regime in power. Blackmail, spying, provocateurs, and the physical and moral pressures that are inseparable from the police state are old, old stories there. The revolutionary movements of Tsarist days were highly conspiratorial in nature and were spiced with a danger which has a special fascination for the Russian.

2

ALTHOUGH the Russians have their own peculiar pride and self-respect, they also have a tendency to self-abasement. The low bow is still often accompanied by the very Oriental gesture of a sweeping motion of the oulstretched arm to the floor, with two fingers extended. Even more extreme, but seen occasionally, is the gesture of bit chelom — literally to beat one’s head on the floor. It can be seen in the churches and in the theater in representations of pre-Revolutionary life. And only recently in the American Embassy, when a valuable chandelier was dropped through the carelessness of servants, they promptly resorted to that ancient Eastern gesture of abject submission.

I remember the Easter services in the Roman Catholic Church in Moscow. It was gloomy, and a fine, cold rain — half rain and half sleet —was falling. Even the enclosure around the church was jammed with crowds of Russians, so that we could not drive to the entrance, but had to push our way through on foot. Two or three rows in front had been reserved, and we finally made our way there. One little old lady was on her knees in front, leaning patiently against the wall near the altar as if tired, covered with a great, open-knitted, white shawl tied around her throat. Every bit of space was packed with standing people.

The faces in the Russian congregation were wonderful to watch — shawled and kerchiefed women, and bearded, strong-faced men. One woman near by read continuously and devoutly from her prayer book, moving her lips slowly as she read. Another kissed her book throughout the service, never taking it from her lips, while others fingered their rosaries. The communion at the end was particularly affecting. Never before had I seen women kneel and place their foreheads on the floor in an Eastern gesture of submission, nor had I seen them come through the aisles to the altar on their knees. And when we finally went out through the rows of poor people at the door— it is not correct or proper to call them beggars— I felt soft lips on my hand. “Batyushka! Mama! Matoushka!" Gentle, musical, long-drawn-out Russian words that caught at one’s throat.

This strong tendency towards self-abasement is important in understanding the attitude of the Soviet government towards “bowing down before foreigners.” I have had enough firsthand experience of it to know that in spite of the long campaign of hatred and suspicion against the foreigner, many of these impulsive people give the foreigner even more than his due—they literally and figuratively bow down before him.

It is difficult to see how the present Soviet government, in its own interests of security and selfpreservation with reference to its own people, could fail to attempt to check this exaggerated tendency. Inferiority complexes and lack of self-confidence may have something to do with it, but face-saving and its obverse, the putting up of a front, which are related to self-abasement, undoubtedly weigh higher in the scale of Russian values, as in Asiatic countrics generally, than in the West.

The torrent of abuse that is heaped on America in the Soviet press and radio has in it something of the insincerity of bazaar bickering and revilement. One often hears Russians, apparently with no deep passion or bitterness, cursing each other in a way that would lead to trouble in America or England, and Russians occasionally seem almost surprised that we are as offended as we are by the violence of their propaganda.

All foreigners are struck by the run-down appearance of even recent Soviet dwellings and their surroundings. Lack of materials and poor workmanship play their part, together with lack of personal responsibility for results, but one cannot escape the conclusion that the Russian nature is comparatively insensitive to neatness and order. No one repairs minor breakages, no one cleans away litter and trash; entrances and courts of pretentions buildings are often a sea of mud where only a little effort would be required to make noticeable and convenient improvements. The bones of the woven structure beneath modern Soviet stucco are often laid bare. The severe climate is frequently given as an excuse, but other countries with severe winters produce more serviceable products. The climate cannot account for the general inadequacy of the paving on the main highways, and even the unpaved roads in the little villages would not be quite the unbelievable morasses and traps they are if it were not for this natural trait of insensitive indifference to details which, in the West, would not be tolerated by personal and rudimentary civic pride.

The Asiatic squalor and poverty, against which so many nineteenth-century Russian writers spoke, is perhaps due more to this cast of mind than to perpetual shortages of materials and supplies. Eventually one comes to wonder if the perpetual shortages of Russia are not themselves largely due to this same cause. Even when not aggravated by shiftlessness, there is some sort of difference in Russian standards which we can only regard as a chronic deficiency. I have been in peasant houses in the country which were spotlessly clean within, with the soft wood worn away from continual scrubbing, yet the immediate surroundings outside were disorderly and dirty.

A universal complaint of all Western engineers who have had to supervise installations and construction in Russia is the lack of foresight and planning with which the work is carried out. The rigging and handling of heavy loads has pained nearly all of these Westerners. Cars and trucks are loaded without regard to clearances through which they must be moved, and there is a general hand-to-mouth attitude that we regard as slovenly. Valuable equipment is continually being damaged because of sheer disorder and bad handling rather than from any lack of understanding of its value or method of functioning. This is not always due to laziness, for the actual work to be done is often increased thereby.

On one overnight trip in 1948, I went to sleep under a luxurious, long-haired, thick blanket in as comfortable a sleeping car as I have ever seen — made in Germany. Sure, Russia probably can make them, and perhaps does, but this one had German markings on all its specially designed plumbing, and undoubtedly came out of Germany and not out of the communist economy.

The next morning I woke late, just before we pulled into Minsk. We went very slowly past a wreck — four or five sleepers, including one at least like ours, lying on their sides, and propped with crutches at odd angles to keep them from rolling down the steep embankment. The roadbed seemed to have given way, for it looked loose and sandy and ragged, and there were no rails at all to be seen for part of the space under the wreck. It was obviously something that had just happened, from the position and condition of the cars.

“Good God! When did that happen?” I asked the porter.

“Long, long ago,”he said, with a sly smile.

“War damage, no doubt,” I said, with a hoot.

“Yes, of course. It happened during the war.” And the porter walked off with an air of finality.

One marked trait of the Russians that undoubtedly affects their lack of tidiness is their Asiatic attitude towards time. They seem incapable of appreciating time in the same sense as we, and it seems to them less important. Vast numbers of Russians fill the railroad stations and air terminals, waiting for trains and airplanes with a patience and indifference that is unimaginable in the West. Sometimes they camp there for days. Travelers have pointed out that this Oriental indifference to time constituted a major problem for the present regime, adding plausibly that it is only in the present generation that the great mass of the people have become familiar with watches and clocks. The punishments for tardiness at work which we regard as fantastically savage, sometimes extending even to serious labor camp sentences, can best be explained as being regarded by the regime as necessary to educate the people out of their inherent ways. Both the Eastern time sense and the manifestations in the Russians of what we would call indifference and carelessness are indications that they tend naturally to place their own values on many things, and that those values are not the same as ours. They would say that they do not break their lives over tritles.

3

THE conditioning of history has obviously had much to do with making the Russians what they are. Many of their fine and admirable qualities seem to be the result of tempering through hardship and trial. Their long-suffering patience, their humility, and their genuine broad love for humanity, as well as their rebelliousness, are due in no small measure to an age-old need for social justice. Soviet Russia is very like what it professes to be in that it is a nation of workers and peasants, and these characteristics have been impressed upon the masses of the people, who have always been ground between the millstones. Yet the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is a misleading phrase, for it is the Party alone that is master in Russia, and the people still stand in need of individual justice in terms of personal freedom.

Russia never experienced the Renaissance and the Reformation, which have largely determined the basic character of the Europe of today. She had no part in the Crusades, which reached their culmination at the precise time she went under the Tartar yoke, and she was under Tartar domination when chivalry was a formative factor in the West. Opposed to this negative experience, we find a positive factor in Russia’s almost continuous exposure to wars and invasions. As a result the Russians consider their country another Belgium, a cockpit of Eurasia rather than of Europe, and a desirable prize for conquest in the eyes of other lands.

A unique aspect of major importance was serfdom. Some 20 million serfs, one third of the entire population at the time, were emancipated in 1861, so that there are countless Russians today whose grandparents were born to a condition of genuine slavery. The legal and economic problems which were involved in the abolition of serfdom were extremely complex and have never been completely solved. There is little doubt that serfdom and its later problems have left a strong imprint on the national character and conscience.

The Russians are so full of what seem to us to be dualities and contradictions that generalizations about them require definition and explanation beyond similar appraisals of peoples who are more familiar to us. One of these apparent contradictions lies in their genuine wide sympathy for downtrodden humanity, which exists side by side with a toughness and hardness that sometimes seems insensitive and callous. There are Asiatic tribesmen within the Soviet Union who are today as wild and savage as the hordes of Jenghis Khan, and Cossacks who are as capable of pogroms as their fathers under the Tsars. But by and large the Great Russians are distinguished by an emotional humanitarianism, varying widely, of course, with individuals.

This Russian humanitarianism came to a great flowering of expression in the nineteenth century. The liberal literature of that time set a high mark for the world which has perhaps never been surpassed, and it is still a great heritage of the Russsian people. ‘I’he broad sympathies of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Pushkin, and a host of other Russian writers whose names are less familiar in the West, are still those of the Russians of today. Except where it conflicts with ideology or sheds too unfavorable a light on the operating code of that ideology, as in much of Dostoevsky, that literature is still taught in Russian schools, and forms an admirable part of the mental and ethical equipment of most Russians.

Sympathy for the downtrodden is natural to the Russian because he himself knows so well what it is to be downtrodden. His sometimes contrasting indifference stems partly from a feeling of helplessness in the face of the universality of suffering, and partly from the inherent differences between theory and practice which are not experienced by the Russians alone. It is noteworthy that the literature on Soviet prison life, written by people who have experienced it, so often stresses the impersonality of abuse when it occurs, and remarks on how rare it is that the enforcers of the system, unlike those in Germany, seem to take pleasure in cruelty or brutality. Brutality is more apt to take place because the system demands it. By and large, the Great Russians are a decent folk with a welldeveloped conscience which is generalized rather than personalized. Although they say that only people who are secure can be idealists, the Russians know what idealism is and value it in the abstract. In the interaction between their basically ethical character and the realities of their daily lives we see the contradiction of an almost mystical value placed on personal comradeship in a land where the resources for implementing such comradeship are pitifully lacking, and where, more often than not, to be comradely is dangerous.

We necessarily hear more about the millions of victims in the prison camps then about the countless Russians who have helped many of the victims in one way or another, usually at great risk to themselves. The condemned have always been regarded in Russia as unfortunates. In spite of all that Russia suffered at the hands of the Germans, there was no animus in the attitude of the Moscow crowds toward the long lines of prisoners passing through from Stalingrad.

The Russian nature runs to extremes, and sometimes extreme opposites are embodied in a single individual. Without perverting the truth, we may say that the Russian craves material things in a way that makes greed and oppression a perennial problem, and also that he is sympathetic and bighearted, with a tremendous feeling for human equality. Above all, he is, in his way, an individualist, with a high degree of inner independence beneath the expediencies of surface conformity.

This individualism is seen in his attitude toward government and authority, for which he has no natural respect and affinity, but which he rather regards with something of the distrust, dislike, and native cunning shown by the hunted to the hunters. It was government and authority which imposed serfdom on him, and it was only in 1600, at the time of Boris Godunov, that serfdom became an institution which seriously interfered with the Russian tradition of freedom. Before that time the Tartars interfered little with that freedom, usually being content to take their due in tribute, and no millennium followed either the abolition of serfdom or the coming of communism.

The Russian’s inner independence is not much concerned with problems of social and political organization, but it is personalized and emotional. He has never known the sort of organized safeguards of the individual against government and authority which developed through the centuries in the Magna Carta, the Anglo-Saxon common law, and the American Bill of Rights, and his sort of freedom is comparatively more primitive. Unlike the disciplined Teuton, he has never accepted any authority which he instinctively distrusts — just because it was authority— and, with all his patience, he has a passionate and stormy nature.

The fondness that most Russians have for one of Lermontov’s poems is an indication that it expresses something deep in their nature. No translation can carry the music of the Russian language, but it might be put in English like this: —

For more than a hundred years this expression has had a peculiar fascination for the Russian. It is often quoted in conversation and in literature, used as titles and themes of books, and known by heart by almost everyone.

This stormy and rebellious nature seems to be recognized by today’s regime, which is well aware of the hundreds upon hundreds of uprisings that have taken place in the countryside throughout Russia’s history. Today the individual Russian is remarkably free to blow off steam, provided only that he does not get political in so doing. One quiet night I was awakened by police whistles and a prolonged and unusual squealing of brakes in the big square between the Kremlin and the American chancery where I lived. Outside the windows was a light, drizzling fog which made the expanse of pavement slippery and gave a little Russian automobile driven by a Russian an opportunity for the time of its life. The car was alternately speeding up and braking to skid like a polo pony around the tall light posts with which the square was studded. The dreaded Russian police loomed through the drizzle, converging on foot from all directions, blowing their whistles and holding out their arms as if they were trying to catch a chicken. At last the cavorting car came to a stop. I fully expected the hilarious driver to be visited with some terrible retribution, but after a long conversation the police dispersed and the man drove quietly away, alone.

Again and again I have seen individual Russians create disturbances which have been handled more gently and tolerantly by the dreaded MVD than similar disturbances would have been handled by the police of New York or Chicago. I have seen them argue by the hour with a drunk, only to let him go. More important, I believe that there are many of these individualistic, suspicious, stormy people, with their strong ethical bias, who would not be responsive to a government which professed to be founded on authority, or even on force, nor to a government which appealed to self-interest rather than to ethical concepts.

The loyalty of large numbers of Russians to the regime seems capable of explanation only on the grounds that they believe in it, and that they consider their belief to be not a blind faith, but founded on rational science. There have been very many instances of innocent Russians who suffered under the regime but still retained their belief, thinking to the end that their own torment was due to the malfunctioning of a basically ethical and rational system.

4

THE Communist Party, which has been deliberately limited to 2 per cent or less of the population, has captured Russia and holds it to this day by force in much the same way as an occupying force holds a territory after a war. We regard the Red Revolution as having ended successfully about 1922, but the Soviets consider that it is still in process, even in Russia. A Soviet citizen is taught that he must continue to struggle for the Revolution in his daily life, in an even more real sense than we must continue to struggle for our freedoms, for the Revolution is still very far from being as well consolidated anywhere as is the capitalistic system. To this day every bridge, canal lock, and important junction in all the Russias is guarded day and night by sentries with fixed bayonets and live ammunition. This is not to say that there is not considerable popular and nonParty support for the regime, but is to keep in proper proportion the fact that the Soviet Union as a state and as a world power is identical with the Communist Party of Bolsheviks and not with the peoples of the Russias or the Russias of the Tsars.

At the end of a protracted discussion of the suppression of academic, nonpolitical freedom of thought in Soviet Russia, a Russian who was by no means a Party member once told me: “At last I see what is bothering you. You do not realize that we are a new nation, and not yet as secure as the older ones. You do not realize that now overriding priority in everything must be given to the safety and future well-being of the Party to which we are indebted for our present freedom. Why should any one of us accept the benefits of the state — housing, heat, light, paper, any sort of income — and use those benefits in any way that might not contribute directly and positively to the strength of the Party?”

The Soviet state may be intolerant because it is basically Russian, but it is not intolerant for the sake of intolerance. All the controversies in the Soviet world of arts and sciences are rooted in a fear that if they are not settled as they are, the state may eventually be undermined thereby. The Soviets pride themselves on being the first completely rational and “scientific” civilization that the world has seen, and it is a civilization that is deliberately based on a naïve and positive materialism which has nothing to do with the scientific spirit. All other values are denied, and they are denied because they cannot be clearly proved by materialistic concepts. If the West would take the content of Soviet controversies seriously instead of deriding them, instead of regarding them merely as arbitrary demonstrations of state interference with academic freedom; if it would refute them point by point, the truth would spread that the basic communist philosophy as well as its practical implementation is not “scientific.”

The Soviet leaders are not reckless gamblers, nor are they adventurers like those who surrounded Adolf Hitler. They are professional revolutionists and they know their business. As such they have a different background of experience and viewpoint from other leaders. The Party leaders really believe that Wall Street and monopolistic capital control the West. They consider this controlling element to be completely conscious and profoundly Machiavellian, and to be continually laying deep plans aimed not only at greater ill-gotten gains, but towards the defeat of communism. They know that there are other forces at work, but regard them as inherently weak and futile. Misrepresentation on a large scale is regarded as a desirable and necessary means to assist in the overthrow of their basically hostile enemy, capitalism. The extent to which they deceive themselves by such maneuvers is debatable. One often hears the statement that the Party leaders have begun to believe their own propaganda. I think that a more accurate statement would be that they have always believed in its general validity, but that its specific forms remain conscious distortions.

To the uncompromising and irreconcilable Soviets, no solution with the Western world is acceptable except on their own terms; and a military one, with all its hazards, is only one solution among many that are possible. Military conquest brings many problems in its wake, particularly for Russians, and the goal of a communist world controlled by a single Party is not identical with world-wide expansion of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, since the use of armed force does bring a solution and often a speedy one, the Western world in elementary prudence must make the military way as hazardous as possible for the Soviets. Steps to implement this prudence became urgent the moment we knew of the Soviet possession of atomic bombs.

Recent communist analyses deal with the thesis that one of the catastrophic economic crises whose periodic occurrences they consider as a fundamental lew of capitalism is now active in the West, concealed only by the military buildup. To them the great danger to the Soviet Union lies in the assurance that the capitalist world, driven by the laws of its own nature, lacking expanding markets and faced with these recurring crises, will attack them when it can. There are ways of delaying and even of preventing such an attack, but they must always be prepared for it in case things go wrong. Their ideological reasons for expecting attack are reinforced by their historical experience, by their belief that their land and resources are desirable ends in themselves, by ample evidence of capitalist fear and hatred of communism, and perhaps by the vestiges of a guilty conscience.

The Soviet image of the United States is a distorted one, deliberately warped by their leaders, and yet the Russian people do not accept it without something akin to unvoiced questioning and doubt. They know that there is nothing in their press or radio, their books or theaters or other means of communication, which is not carefully controlled by their government, and which therefore exists for some purpose other than objective information. Moreover, their own memories and experiences tell them that much of what they read and hear is false. As for the rest of it, they neither believe nor disbelieve, but are agnostics. In the nature of things, the Russian knows that he does not know.

There is no more enthusiastic supporter of the regime than the youth who is just finishing his schooling. A Russian in his thirties once said to me: “You can have no idea of the brightness of the dream we had when we were young. It was a shining glory, a heaven on earth, You cannot possibly realize what it meant to come into a new world, where the brotherhood of man seemed really to exist.” But when the youth takes his place as a responsible cog in the vast machinery of Russia he comes in contact with the seamy realities of Soviet life, and the dream soon tarnishes. He may still support the regime, but disillusionment often replaces the enthusiasm of youth.

Most Russians do not question the necessity or even the desirability of substituting propaganda for objective fact, but as they acquire experience and memories with the years, they realize more and more fully that this is done, and what it implies. One result is that, lacking reliable news, all Russia lives on rumor and gossip, in spite of the dangers that are involved. Everything in Russia has its political and ideological aspects, and the more rumor and gossip are concerned with those aspects, the greater the danger.

The American image of Russia is not clearly formed, but wavering and blurred. It is not enough, in peace or war, to declare that we are friends of the Russian people but not of their masters, for every Russian knows enough about propaganda to expect just that. He is first of all a Russian, and therefore wary and suspicious as a fish in an overfished stream. If war should come and our assurances are not backed up by some measure of genuine and sympathetic understanding, as distinct from merely using the Russian for our own ends, he will be apt to prefer the Russian devil he knows to the foreign one he neither knows nor understands.

The struggle with the Western world is inherent in communism, and not in the classic relations between Great Powers. However much Soviet communism may be tinged by peculiarly Russian characteristics, neither the Russian people nor their nationalism can be held responsible for the end product. The people have no voice at all in their government, and the net result is that the Russian individual today, as in the past, is a victim of Russian institutions. The Iron Curtain is deliberately used to lessen or destroy his awareness of that fact.

1 do not believe that the Russians are responsible as a people for either communism or the present difficult world situation. I am satisfied that our best and probably only chance of keeping a war from being fantastically expensive, protracted, and indecisive in the end will be the genuine possibility of getting a large part of the Russian people on our side. There is much to support this viewpoint, notably the experience of the German armies in the Ukraine, where they were at first met with open arms by the civilian population and hundreds of thousands of military deserters. It is consistent with what nearly all defectors tell us. Many informed people believe strongly that the Germans could have won their war if they had not lost their golden opportunity because of a lack of sympathetic understanding of the Russian people.

The circumstances surrounding our own problem will not be the same, but nevertheless we also will surely lose our opportunity if we do not develop a deeper understanding than was required of the Germans. The more understanding one acquires of the Russian people, the more one realizes that in spite of the darker side of their dualities and contradictions, they not only cannot be held responsible for the acts and policies of the regime, but are capable of far better things and deserve a far better lot than they have today.

(In the June Atlantic, Admiral Stevens will discuss the Doctrine which the Kremlin has enforced.)