364
PARTISAN REVIEW
The Sixth Turn of the
Communist Screw
THE SIXTH
period of official
communism is now in flower,
with a scent ver,y attractive to
many a wandering and weary fly.
The list runs: ( 1) War Commu–
nism, 1918-21; (2) the NEP, 1921-
28; (3) the Third Period, 1928-
35; (4) the Popular Front, 1935-
39; (5) the Hitler Pact, 1939-41;
(6) the new period, dating really,
after an inter-regnum, from Stalin–
grad. No name for it has yet be–
come established, but it may well
be known as the Teheran Period.
We note an oscillation from left
to right. Even the period of the
Hitler Pact, in spite of what a
doctrinaire might argue, was in
form a swing from the right of
the Popular Front to a leftism,
with an international revival of
anti-war, anti-imperialist and pro–
letarian slogans, as well as of the
more provocative tactics which
had been dropped during the
Popular Front.
Nevertheless, the movement of
communist policy has qot been
pendulum-like. Though it swings
from left to right and back, it d e–
velops as it goes, in a spiral path
that leaves the origin ever farther
behind. Let us take, for example,
the three rightist periods (2nd,
4th and 6th) . The first of these is
5ymbolized by the Anglo-Soviet
Trade-Union Committee: i.e., a
united front with non-communist
labor organizations; the second, by
the Popular Front in France: i.e.,
a bloc with the liberal bourgeois
Radical Socialists; the third (the
present) , by the Free German
movement or the second Badoglio
Government: i.e., a bloc including
reactionary conservatives (von
Seydlitz) and fascists. It is ap–
parent that this new period is not
at all a Popular Front as this was
understood eight years ago. Earl
Browder did not praise the NAM
in those days, nor did communist
labor leaders (like Bridges today)
condemn
all
strikes.
As in the case of any spiral
motion, when a turn is completed,
you are
in
one sense back where
you started from, but in another
you are closer to where you were
a half-turn ago. So too with com–
munist policy. In form, a left
period seems to swing to the op–
posite pole from the preceding
right period, and to be back at
the position of the period before
last. But from another point of
view, the new period is closer to
the one immediately preceding it.
The Popular Front is closer to the
Third Period than to the NEP, in
spite of the rhetorical appearances;
the present period is in sociological
content closer to the Hitler Pact
than to the Popular Front; the
Third Period, closer to the NEP
than to War Communism.
What brings about these shifts
from period to period? There is
no single answer. Each seems to be
correlated with internal socio–
economic and political changes
within the Soviet Union, and with
alterations, or presumed altera–
tions, in world political conditions.
The recently published book,
Management in Russian Industry
and Agriculture,
suggests another
