MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
THE Americans this week have been thinking what on earth they are to do about Europe ; and the Europeans have once again been considering the eternal problem of what we are to think about Russia. The speech which Mr. Molotov delivered at the Bolshoi Theatre on November 6th was not in any sense a comforting oration. His statement that the secret of the atomic bomb was no longer a secret appears to have evoked applause which lasted for twenty minutes. One of the most striking of the many gifts possessed by the Russians is their capacity for enduring interminable sessions and for listening to sermons which are repetitive, hortatory and uncon- nected with reality ; the patience of Russian audiences suggests a firm Covenanter spirit. What strikes the European as so strange about these Russian sermons is that they are based upon a logic which, although rigid in its dialectical form, is in fact illogical. Mr. Molotov, for instance, began by assuring his audience that Generalissimo Stalin had, in the interview he gave last April to Mr. Harold Stassen, " profoundly elucidated" the relations between East and West. Stalin on that occasion had laid it down that the Soviet Union and the United States could well co-operate with each other. " The differences between us," he had said, " are not important so far as collaboration is concerned." Having made this assertion, and having quoted the actual words of his master, Mr. Molotov devoted the rest of his speech to convincing his audience that Russia and America were worlds apart and that any collaboration between them was an utter impossibility. The audience, I suppose, applauded the speaker's reference to the Stassen interview with that enthusiasm which any words by Stalin are expected to produce : but they also applauded the subsequent passages by which the Generalissimo's " profound elucidation " was, in all seeming, exposed to ridicule and contempt.
* * * * Dialectic such as this convinces us that the Russian processes of thought are widely different froth our own. It is not merely that they have other ideas ; it is that they possess utterly dissimilar minds. The inheritors of Western civilisation, whose habits of thought have been formed by the lucidity of Athens and the sense of Rome, seek always in their responsible utterances to convey at least the appear- ance of reality. They are conscious that in their public pronounce- ments they must strive to maintain at -least the semblance of veracity. This is not for them solely a matter of ethics ; it is not only a question of intellectual integrity ; it results from a perfectly sensible realisation that if you tell a great many demonstrable untruths you lose credit and are not believed next time The Russians, fortified as they are by their own arrogant revelation, suffer from no such inhibitions. Thus Mr. Molotov on November 6th informed his audience that Great Britain and the United States had violated the agreements reached at Yalta and Potsdam. Had America and Britain, he asserted, adhered to the " democratic principles " established at those two conferences, then collaboration between the three Great Powers would be producing the same excellent results as it produced during the war. Now it is perfectly correct to say that at Yalta certain principles were established for the introduction of democratic systems in the countries liberated. The Declaration on Liberated Europe laid it down that Governments should be established in those countries " representative of all democratic elements in the population and pledged to the earliest possible establishment, through free elections, of Governments responsive to the will of the people." That Declara- tion was applauded at the time as a new charter of liberty. Yet in the countries subjected to Russian influence these important pro- visions have been disregarded with a flagrancy which is overt and avowed.
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One of the most vital provisions agreed to at the Potsdam Con- ference was that Germany should be treated as an economic unity. Yet from the very first week the Russians refused to treat their own zone as anything but a separate area isolated from the rest of Ger- many by that iron curtain of which we have heard so much. It may well be that some of the misunderstandings which have arisen are due to the misconception by the Russians of certain English phrases. Much confusion, for instance, was caused at one stage by the Russian assumption that if a man said, " I accept this as a basis of discussion," he accepted the formula as a basic or fundamental agreement. The word " eligible " at another stage was assumed by the Russians to mean " elected." It is necessary again to discount much of the invective in which Russian statesmen indulge. They are accustomed to over-statement, and polemics with them have become part of the ritual with which they appease their gods. Yet even if we make allowances for their rhetoric it is difficult to accept as a clear definition of the Marshall proposals the statement of Mr. Molotov that they represent " the striving of American imperialism to take advantage of the post-war difficulties of certain States and to pave the way for the world domination of the United States." The ordinary English- man, when he reads these assertions, asks himself inevitably for what purpose they are made. Are they seeking, as dictators always seek, to impress their own people with a sense of imminent danger and to render them thereby more amenable -to discipline and sacrifice? Are they seeking to intimidate the Western democracies? Or do they, in some odd tortured tortuous manner, really believe that they are telling the truth? Or is it that they have become the prisoners of their own unhappy dialectic?
* * * * One of the main tenets of their dogma is that the capitalist world
is bound from its very nature to pass through a succession of booms and slumps which in the end must produce either war or internal collapse. They may well be correct in supposing that a period of depression will before long afflict these islands and thereafter the United States.. But they are certainly not correct in deducing from this premise that war or disintegration must inevitably result. Our economy, after all, is not quite so unplanned as that. Yet it is this conviction, this rigid determinism, which explains their delaying tactics and all the obstruction which the West experiences from Korea to Lake Success. It is this which explains how a man such as Mr. Molotov, on the very eve of international discussions regarding Germany, can deliver a speech which, if taken literally, would mark the end of all agreement between the three Powers. And it is this which explains why, at a moment when Communism is losing ground in the West, the Russians should adopt a policy which strengthens their enemies and embarrasses and disconcerts their friends. To this doctrine of the inevitable must be added their blind, self-pitying, boastful, cantankerous and frustrated fury at our obstinate refusal to collapse. I was reading the other day Alexander Werth's report in The Manchester Guardian of an article Written about Oxford by Professor Palladin, president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Professor Palladin had attended last July a congress of physiology organised by our older university. The professor, although he could speak German, insisted upon addressing the congress in the Russian language. His obstinacy upon this point seems to have filled him with pride. He felt that he had defended the " honour and dignity " of Holy Russia and had furnished a glittering example of how a Soviet citizen can resist any temptation "to toady to the West."
* * * * It is quite evident that Professor Palladin came to this country
determined to disapprove. He complains of the squalor of our buses and our underground trains ; he complains of the number of bombed- out buildings which he observed in London ; and the austerity and discomfort imposed upon the Oxford undergraduate filled him with indignation. He found that in the rooms occupied by these young men there was no running water but " only a basin, a jug and a pail." Moreover they were obliged to have their meals sitting "at plain, heavy tables without any cloth and with long, massive, unupholstered benches." Such, he indicates with scorn, are the conditions of squalor in which the sons of capitalists are educated. How different were the luxuries of Leningrad and Moscow! "Proudly we thought of all this as we looked back on our visit to Oxford." I am ready to believe that Professor Palladin was giving what to him was an
accurate description ; his eyes were blinded by a cloud of arrogance and hate.
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