66
PARTISAN REVIEW
standard of political morality. There is now one code for the judg–
ment of Soviet affairs, and its opposite for
all
other political judg–
ment. Without a stutter, the Kremlin thunders against the anti–
democratic acts of Hitler, Franco, Chiang Kai-shek-and Pierlot,
Hoover, yes, and Switzerland, while it maintains at home the most
anti-democratic regime in world history. Aggression and annexation
are denounced in the midst of Soviet aggression and annexations.
Communists everywhere demand- and receive-as elementary right,
not only freedom of political organization and participation in gov–
ernments, but even license to maintain independent armies and
counter-centers of
de facto
sovereignty, while within the jurisdiction
of the Red Army and the G. P. U., as always, the slightest breath of
political opposition means death. "Slave labor" is howled about by
the state whose economy rests integrally on fifteen or more millions
of slave laborers in its work and concentration camps. The most
totalitarian state that exists and that has ever existed not only claims
to be, but is everywhere accepted as-the world leader in the struggle
against totalitarianism.
We must, finally, now recognize also that Stalin has proved his
possession of creative political imagination, the quality which, more
than any other, Trotsky was concerned to deny him. This was still
in doubt prior to 1939. The conception of the Five Year Plans was,
it might have been properly argued, only borrowed by Stalin from
others- from the general Marxist tradition and more directly from
the Trotskyist opposition itself, or forced on Stalin by practical
exigencies at the close of the NEP period. But two developments of
the new war are enough to settle any dispute, and, perhaps, to re–
quire a revision of the earlier appreciation of Stalin's role in the
Five Year Plans.
First is the clarity and concreteness with which Stalin has specified
what might be called a geopolitical vision. Out of this war, out of the
very defeats in the first years of the war, Stalin has translated into a
realistic political perspective the dream of theoretical geopolitics:
domination of Eurasia. It is this that gives coherence to each of the
detailed continental moves, that sets the pattern for the quick shifting
acts that would otherwise seem arbitrary improvisations to meet the
needs of the moment. Starting from the magnetic core of the Eurasian
heartland, the Soviet power, like the reality of the One of Nco–
Platonism overflowing in the descending series of the emanative pro–
gression, flows outward, west into Europe, south into the Near East,
east into China, already lapping the shores of the Atlantic, the Yellow
and China Seas, the Mediterranean, and the Persian Gulf.
As
the un-
