Argument from Moscow
A letter cabled from Moscow and published on a later page of this issue throws an interesting light gn both the diligence and the naïveté of Russian propagandists. Every B.B.C. broadcast, it would appear, is listened to and duly recorded, and replies sent as from some individual Soviet citizen. There is no reason to doubt that the individual citizen does reply ; there have been several similar cases of cabled letters to The Times, all marked, incidentally, like the one we publish today, by not merely the correctness but the excellence of the English. The aim of the letter, to drive a wedge between this country and America, is too palpable to cause anything but amuse- ment ; there appears to be not even an attempt at any shade of subtlety. However, it is all in the official tradition. The speech delivered by M. Malenkov (one of the most important men in Russia) at the conference which gave birth to the Cominform has just been published in Pravda and summarised in The Times. M. Malenkov dwelt inevitably on existence of an Eastern Trend and a Western Trend " led by the ruling cliques of American capitalism." That, of course, he was bound to say ; the Marshall plan must be repre- sented, and increasingly will be, as one of the tentacles of American capitalism. What is more significant is M. Malenkov's admission that the two systems, capitalism and socialism, are bound to exist "for a long time." That is a reaffirmation of the Stalin thesis as against the Trotsky thesis, and 'there was always more sense in Stalinism than in Trotskyism.
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