LENIN'S HEIR
65
comes late at night to the Kremlin conference chamber, softened and
kneaded, like the lamb which a python prepares for swallowing, by
the pounding he has taken in the day's dispatches.
From 1939, Stalin's political moves have been marked by a
previously unsuspected boldness and dash. They have been not at all
the cautious, largely defensive shuffiings which every previous analysis
of Stalin, not only Trotsky's, has counted as following from his charac–
ter. What makes the boldness of these moves especially remarkable is
the fact that they have been executed, often, from a foundation of
comparative weakness, material and moral, in Soviet resources; the
politics have leapt beyond the "material base."
The first in this new series was the Hitler Pact itself, with its
brazen timing and the open effrontery of the Ribbentrop-Molotov–
Stalin photographs. Then followed the dramatic absorption of the
Baltic nations, Bessarabia and Bukovina. Equally sharp was the inter–
national political about-face of June, 1941, when traitors became
patriots overnight. Nearly everything since then is in the same style,
even at the very bottom of Soviet military fortunes: the destruction
of Mikhailovitch and the creation of Tito, the Czechoslovak Pact, the
treaties with Japan, the handling of Polish affairs, the fantastic Orle–
manski episode, the Second Front campaign, the bloc with sur–
rendered Junkers in the Free Germany movement, the formal liquida–
tion of the Comintern, the transformation of communist parties in the
American hemisphere, the maintenance of an independent com–
munist government in China, the
de facto
recognition of de Gaulle
and Badoglio, the wonderfully managed overthrow of the Iranian
government, the refusal, even when military defeat was a considerable
probability, to yield anything to the Soviet allies, even to accept the
life-saving gifts of British and American Lend-Lease on any but the
Kremlin's own and complete terms, the sealing of the fronts to
American and British observers-never in history, over a short five
years, has there been such a political display.
During these war years, Stalin has never once lost the political
initiative. He has moved first; the others have followed. The others
come to him, not he to them. In politics the initiative is two thirds of
the battle, and the results of these years have proved the rule. It will
some day seem incredible that Stalin should have been able to do so
much, so often, with so few chips left in his stack, that his bluffs were
never called, that the other players were rivals in their eagerness to
lose to
him.
Through an unexampled propagandistic wizardry, Stalin has led
the bulk of world public opinion into the acceptance of a double
