Page:Observations On The Collapse Of The Hitler Regime In Germany And The Weak Points Of The Stalin Regime In The Soviet Union.pdf/5

 At present the world's attention must be directed to the fact that the Soviet Union is going through a transformation which can weaken her even before Stalin's death.

The above statement can be confirmed by the following arguments:
 * 1) The vast expansion of the Soviet Union after the end of World War II, and above all the methods by which she penetrated into Southeastern Europe, greeted sharp disagreement between the Soviet Union and the Western Powers. During the decade before 1939 the non-Communist world was prone to believe that the Soviet Union had abandoned her original plans of world revolution and that she was honestly aspiring to a peaceful co-existence with the non-Communist states. However, recent developments in the Soviet Union have revealed the fact that this attitude of the U. S. S. R. represented a tactical maneuver and that by those tactics the Soviet Union was trying only to gain breathing time. The present domestic and foreign policy of the Soviet Union every day presents new evidence that the Soviet Government has resumed her original aims. But the difference is that in former times the Soviet Union, when she was still weak, tried to spread her influence on world affairs by ideological means only, whereas new she feels herself strong enough to use also her military strength to push the world revolution forward at a given moment.

Being aware of that, the Western Powers are taking countermeasures which induce the Soviet Union to subordinate her entire economy to the exigencies of rearmament. Thus, the hope of the Soviet population for a brighter life after the war has been frustrated. The Soviet population faces now even increased demands for its capacity to bear suffering and privations. Some of the few civil liberties which the Soviet population had been granted during the war were canceled afterwards. The Soviet people's disappointment is all the greater for, in the meantime, many Russians have been able to obtain personal knowledge of living conditions in the so-called capitalist states and have been deeply impressed by the feet that they were not so bad as they had been described by Soviet propaganda.

2. As regards the spiritual sphere, the Soviet Government in former years paid great esteem to the high standard of foreign science and induced Soviet scientists to make use of its achievements. Nowadays, the Soviet. Union displays not only a distinct presumption but even a hostile attitude toward foreign science. Moreover, since the Soviet Government is afraid that Soviet scientists might fall under the influence of bourgeois ideas or techniques, those scientists are forbidden to communicate with their colleagues abroad or to publish foreign scientific works at home. The Soviet Government even went so far recently as to eliminate a number of Soviet scientists, some of them renowned in the whole woldworld [sic], because they were suspected of inclining toward the West. Thus, the Soviet Government has rejected the