Lo.ndon Letter
London, Aug. 17, 1941.
Dear Editors,
You asked me to send you another London letter, and though you left
me free to choose what I should write about you added that your readers
might be interested to hear some more about the Home Guard. I will give
you some notes on the Home Guard, as much as I have space for, but I
think my main subject this time ought to be the USSR's entry into the war.
It
has overshadowed everything in the last seven weeks, and I think it is
now possible to make some sort of rough analysis of the state of British
cpinion.
THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE
The most striking thing about the Anglo-Soviet alliance has been its
failure to cause any split in the country or any serious political repercus–
sion whatever. It is true that Hitler's invasion of the USSR took everyone
here very much by surprise.
If
the alliance had come about in 1938 or
1939, as it might have done, after long and bitter controversies, with the
Popular Fronters shouting on one side and the Tory press playing Red
Russia for all it was worth on the other, there would have been a first-rate
political crisis, probably a general election and certainly the growth of an
openly pro-Nazi party in Parliament, the Army, etc. But by June 1941
Stalin had come to appear as a very small bogey compared with Hitler, the
pro-Fascists had mostly discredited themselves, and the attack happened
so suddenly that the advantages and disadvantages of a Russian alliance
had not even had time to he discussed.
One fact that this new turn of the war has brought out is that there
are now great numbers of English people who have no special reaction
towards the USSR. Russia, like China or Mexico, is simply a mysterious
country a long way away, which once had a revolution, the nature of which
has been forgotten. All the hideous controversies about the purges, the
Five Year Plans, the Ukraine famine, etc., have simply passed over the
average newspaper-reader's head. But as for the rest, the people who have
some definite pro-Russian or anti-Russian slant, they are split up into
several sharply-defined blocks, of which the following are the ones that
matter:
The rich.
The real bourgeoisie are subjectively anti-Russian, and
cannot possibly become otherwise. The existence of large numbers of
wealthy parlour Bolsheviks does not alter this fact, because these people
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