THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM
239
"The trouble with Russia," Schumpeter has observed with consid–
erable truth, "is not that she is socialist but that she is Russia."
If
the Romanovs had pushed through industrialization and ridden out
its political consequences, Russia would be confronting the world
with much the same immediate problems of expansion- with the
same thrusts into western Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle
East and China. But Czarist Russia would not have been able to
multiply its national strength with the tremendous political weapon
of Communism.
The exception makes a good deal of difference. Imperial Russia
could be dealt with like Imperial Germany; its objectives would have
been inherently limited by the clash of one nationalism with another.
But Nazism gave Germany a potent ideological weapon, and Com–
munism is infinitely more exportable than Nazism.
As
a social faith,
it can penetrate to every corner of the world and rally its fifth columns
wherever injustice and poverty exist. Communism gives Russian ex–
pansionism
its
warhead. On a pre-arranged signal, the Russian drive
can explode internally in every country on the globe.
Russian national objectives are limited; Communist international
objectives are not. Experience has shown that a nation can sustain
unlimited objectives for only a limited time. The fervor of a crusade
wears a people out; after a time the country relapses from the messiah
business into its national routine. The problem is to prevent the Soviet
Union from breaking out of the reservation during its period of mes–
sianic intoxication.
The Role of the Armed Truce
British policy under Chamberlain presents a model of how
not
to undertake a campaign of containment. The US is faced with the
same situation today, only. the geographical margins of tolerance are
greater with the USSR than they ever were with Germany. Reduced
to its fundamentals, the American problem is to arrange the equili–
brium of forces in the world so that, at every given moment of de–
cision, the Soviet General Staff will decide against aggressions that
might provoke a general war on the ground that they present too
great a military risk. At the same time, the US must not succumb
to demands for an anti-Soviet crusade nor permit reactionaries in
the buffer states to precipitate conflicts in defense of their own obso–
lete prerogatives. Fascism has receded, but it has not disappeared.
The US must maintain a precarious balance between a complete
readiness to repel Soviet aggression beyond a certain limit and com-
