Page:The Hero in History.djvu/134

134 there was an abatement of the struggle for colonial liberation by native Communist Parties in the English and French Empires.

In 1939 the line was switched once more when Stalin thought that, as a result of his pact with Hitler, the latter would go west and stay there. Again the “plutocratic western democracies” became the chief enemy, and war-mongers to boot. Fascism was declared by the Kremlin to be merely a matter of political taste.

In 1941, Stalin perforce had to reverse himself once more since Hitler gave him no alternative. The Bolshevik dogma, that all capitalist countries—and they still considered Germany a capitalist country—had more in common with one another than any one of them had with Russia, proved bankrupt. But at what cost!

It must be borne in mind that the Bolshevik campaign for domination over the international working-class movement and its liberal allies was not a piece of political diabolism on the part of Lenin and Stalin. It followed from the needs and interests of the world revolution and of the Soviet Union as Lenin and Stalin respectively interpreted them—needs and interests of which they considered themselves the sole spokesmen. Lenin reasoned that without the necessary knowledge and leadership, which the Bolsheviks alone possessed, revolutions were doomed. Stalin reasoned that, if the affiliated sections of the Comintern were to have any political weight in swaying the decisions of their government on matters that affected Russia, Bolshevik leadership of the masses in foreign countries was essential. Bolshevik leadership in both periods was disputed in most countries, partly because of the methods of rule or ruin by which it was sought, but mainly because socialists, trade unionists, and democrats refused to accept dictation on domestic issues by agents of a foreign power—one that despite its socialist appellation was unmistakably a dictatorship of a minority party over its proletariat and peasantry. But although the Bolsheviks did not succeed in achieving leadership, they succeeded brilliantly in fragmentizing the opposition to Fascism everywhere except in Austria where the clerical Fascists under Dollfuss and Schuschnigg took over that role.

Despite the fact that the Bolsheviks had abandoned the policy of world revolution for the preservation of peace, large sections of the conservative and propertied groups in Western countries remained fearful of the Soviet power. The memory of the early years of the Russian Revolution had not died out. As the