2. MARCO TEORICO
2.3. Antecedentes legales
This article was written in reaction to a special issue of Collier’s weekly devoted to the fantastic supposition of a war in which the Soviet Union is quickly and easily overthrown by Western armies. (It’s hard to ignore the similarity to the neo- con predictions of a “cakewalk” in Iraq, in which American soldiers would be greeted as liberators by the grateful Iraqi people after a quick and painless mili- tary triumph.) Thankfully, most American policy makers in the Cold War era re- tained enough of a grip on reality so that this hair-raising scheme was never actually tried.
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October 25, 1951
I
n the first days of the Nazi attack upon the Soviet Union, when General George C. Marshall himself thought the USSR might col- lapse within a few weeks, Timemagazine spoke of the “pathetic fallacy” that Hitler could be stopped by the same defense-in-depth and scorched-earth tactics which defeated Napoleon.Events proved this was no fallacy. The pathetic spectacle was the hitherto unbeatable Wehrmacht after two winters on the vast frozen Russian plain. The experts who drew up the blueprint for Collier’sspecial issue on “Rus- sia’s Defeat and Occupation” did take note of Napoleon’s defeat and Hitler’s, but only to fall into as serious an error.
They realize that an invasion of Russia has proved fatal on three occa- sions. Napoleon, Wilhelm II, and Hitler alike were fatally enfeebled by their attempts to invade Russia. To meet this problem—quite a problem—
Collier’sassumes that Russia can be defeated without being invaded!
This needs to be read to be believed. Hanson W. Baldwin in his contri- bution, “How The War Was Fought,” says, “No deep land penetration of Russia was ever attempted—or indeed ever seriously contemplated.”
The main drive eastward halts at the Pripet marshes, i.e. on the ancient natural border dividing Russia from the Western lands. “Spearheads” move into Finland and the Baltic states and establish advanced air bases. A south- ern drive through Turkey ends “in a lodgment in the Crimea, where the last formal battles” are fought.
“In the meantime,” Baldwin explains, “as the Red armies fell apart in the West, Siberia, and Red China, . . . limited amphibious operations, many of them made against little opposition, put United States and allied troops ashore in Korea, Manchuria and China.”
As easy as that!
This picture of the Red armies falling apart and of the Moscow regime collapsing is based on the notion that the Russians are a kind of faceless en- slaved mass of what Robert E. Sherwood calls “docile flesh and blood.”
The impression Collier’screates is that Russia is one vast slave labor camp where we need only shoot the guards and wreck the gates to be hailed as lib- erators. The Communist regime, as Arthur Koestler explains in his contri- bution, “was simply a rule of terror.”
Millions of lives have twice been staked—and lost—on Koestler’s view that the Soviet dictatorship is “simply a rule of terror.” The first time was in the years of armed intervention which followed the Revolution. The second time was when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.
The same factors on which our anti-Soviet experts rely today—hatred of the secret police, the harshness of the Bolsheviks in dealing with dissi- dent elements, dissatisfaction among the Ukrainians and other non- Russian peoples, “religious longings,” etc.—also figured in the earlier calculations.
Twice the collapse failed to occur, though Russia was invaded and large portions occupied. Collier’swould have us believe that this time a collapse would occur without an invasion. This is quite a gamble.
A great deal is being written in the American press about the danger of some “miscalculation” in a Kremlin blinded by its own propaganda. There is at least as great a danger of a miscalculation in a Washington blinded by
itsown propaganda.
Much that is being culled from Soviet newspapers and Soviet refugees is undoubtedly true, as much is true that can be culled about American weak-
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nesses from the American press and American radicals who have gone abroad. But in neither case is this likely to be the whole truth.
A Russian whose head was full of stories about American lynchings and slums—both realities—might well imagine that at the approach of Soviet armies to our shores the Negroes would revolt and the American workers would hail their liberating brothers. An American whose head is full of sto- ries about forced labor camps and secret police—both realities—can well imagine, as the contributors to Collier’s imagine, a fervent welcome for the Western armies in the Soviet Union.
There is wishful thinking on both sides, and a fear on both sides of be- coming politically suspect if one dwells on the sources of strength in the other country. Even amid the hostile propaganda here, there are glimpses which explain Soviet capacity to survive and which warn against reliance on theories of easy collapse.
Margaret Mead in her new book on Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority, a study financed by Cold War funds, speaks of “the reserves of zest and en- ergy which the present population [of the Soviet Union] displays.” A nation of cowed slave laborers does not show “zest and energy.”
Ambassador Alan G. Kirk, just back from two years in Moscow, spoke here October 18of a trip he made across the Soviet Union. He pictured “imagina- tion and driving force at work” in Siberia. He spoke of the Soviet peoples as “a young race, virile and vigorous, with imagination and inspiration.”
Regimentation is undeniable but “despite regimentation the individual is made to feel that he is a contributing member of society—a feeling that adds purpose and happiness to life.” The quotation is not from the Dean of Canterbury. It is from the book written by the wartime director of Ameri- can lend-lease in Moscow, General John R. Deane’s The Strange Alliance.
Collier’sblueprint calls for round-the-clock bombing but assumes we can
fight Russia’s masters without fighting her people. There is no way to bomb with such pinpoint accuracy as to hit only card-carrying Communists. There is no way to wage a war of liberation with atom bombs. History shows foreign attack tends to solidify Russians against the invader rather than against their rulers, whether czars or commissars.
Let us listen to a bitterly anti-Communist writer, who himself advocates American aid to counter-revolutionary movements within the Soviet
Union. “If,” Boris Shub writes in his book The Choice,“through the contin- ued absence of a positive American peace program toward Russia, the Kremlin does convince the majority that we intend to wage genocidal war, they will have to rally behind Stalin as the lesser evil.”
“For no matter how much they hate the police state,” Shub continues, “they cannot welcome mass extermination by American hydrogen bombs.” War against the Soviet regime would inescapably be war against the Soviet peoples and their allies in China and Eastern Europe. That is a lot of people, about three quarters of a billion of them. It will take the lives of a good many American boys to subdue them, if instead of collapsing (as in