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PARTISAN REVIEW
by another characteristic theme in Wallace's speech: his inclusion
of the U.S.S.R. among the freedom-loving nations. This is a his–
torical insight-which would hardly have occurred to him before
June 25, 1941. (No one can be more opportunist than the naive
man of high principles.) The resistance of the Red Army to Hitler
offers the Democracies at once their greatest material asset and
their worst ideological embarrassment. In the last war Russia
presented a similar ideological awkwardness, but there was no
attempt to pretend that Czarism was a variant form of democracy.
This time it is different. When Roosevelt first outlined his "five
freedoms," he warned against "ideological flirting with the cor–
porate state." "Too many people, he said, were wedded to the idea
of government by dictatorship, as in Germany, Italy and Russia.
. . . Mr. Roosevelt said there could be no compromise, even philo–
sophical, between the two concepts of government. To do so would
be to sacrifice the principles of the one to those of the other."
(N. Y. Times,
July 6, 1940) This high-minded attitude, however,
was rendered politicaly obsolete a year later by the Nazi attack
on Russia. Comrade Browder's shift on the war was no more
abrupt and thorough than Roosevelt's change of mind about the
Stalin regime. Within a few weeks of the Nazi attack, Roosevelt
was picturing Russia as a land of religious freedom. Far from
criticising the lack of democracy in totalitarian Russia, the Demo·
cratic leaders have adapted their ideological line to the Kremlin's
necessities, as in the notorious omission of two of Roosevelt's "four
freedoms"-freedom of speech and freedom of religion-from the
Atlantic Charter. To have retained those two freedoms would
have raised awkward questions in this country when Soviet Russia
came to be included in the Charter.
The extremely realistic attitude of the Democratic leaders
towards the Stalinist
and
the Nazi
dictatorship is best revealed
by
some observations by Foreign Secretary Eden on his conferences
with Stalin early this year: "Mr. Eden said that all difficulties
must be faced. There was a difference between the two forms of
government and a legacy of suspicion on both sides to be van–
quished. But he added that the whole point in foreign affairs was
not a nation's internal but its external policy. Reichsfiihrer Hitler
could have remained a Nazi if he had stayed a Nazi at home,
he said. [Direct quotation, according to
War Commentary,
Mid–
January 1942: "The trouble with Hitler, for instance, was
not
