THIS QUARTER
5
the Kremlin bureaucracy.
A
few weeks ago, the Comintem was
agitating for a world crusade against Hitler. Now that the crusade
has taken place, it is discovered to he an imperialist adventure.
Stalin has been transformed overnight from an international phil·
anthropist, whose pipe was an index of his philosophical henevo·
lence, into a Mettemichean power politician, his pipe-puffing now
signifying preternatural guile.
The liberals and fellow-travelers have been shocked at last
into recognizing that the Kremlin's interests are not those of the
international working class hut rather those of-the Kremlin. They
have been able to make this long overdue adjustment only because
Stalin has rejected democratic imperialism in favor of fascist im–
perialism. But to those of us who make no such fundamental dis–
tinctions between the various forms of imperialism, the Kremlin
years ago revealed the true nature of its foreign policy when it
entered the League of Nations and made common cause with the
Versailles powers.
There are many who insist that this final betrayal of the inter–
national working class was implicit in the 1917 Bolshevik revolu–
tion, that the logic of Leninism leads "inevitably" to Stalinism. We
believe, on the contrary, that the Soviet government has been
obliged to go in for power politics because it long ago abandoned
the Leninist conception that the defense of the Soviet Union was
inseparably hound to the liberation of the masses in other coun–
tries. The degeneration of the 1917 revolution is not to he under–
stood in terms of the free, unhampered working out of Bolshevik
theory to its "logical conclusion." The principal factors in the rise
of Stalinism, on the contrary, seem to us to have been the impact
of such largely uncontrollable phenomena as the
devasta~ion
and
demoralization caused by the protracted armed intervention of the
Allies, the economic and cultural backwardness of Russia, and the
failure of the revolution to establish itself in any other major
country. The isolation of the revolution led to the rise to power of
the Stalinist bureaucracy, which meant increasing clashes between
the interests of the bureaucracy and those of the masses, both inside
and outside of Russia, which in tum led to the bungling or the
outright sabotage of world revolution by the Comintem, from
China in 1927 to Spain ten years later. Since a successful revolu–
tion abroad would have had repercussion inside Russia which
