BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
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in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: introduce the rule of
law.
A change of this kind, for which important elements in Soviet
society must now be yearning, would do the trick so far as Europe
is concerned. Few people here believe that Russia will ever in the
foreseeable future have liberal institutions of the kind the West
evolved over the centuries. But at least some well-informed people
feel that the new society is now sufficiently stable to afford a less
terroristic form of government. There seems to be no inherent reason
why the Oriental despotism which Stalin imposed upon his country
should harden into permanence. It is probably already an obstacle
to Russia's further economic growth, and it certainly vitiates the
Kremlin's efforts to make the new ruling stratum comfortable. It is
the Party and the Secret Police, .and they alone, who need this mon–
strous set-up to protect themselves, and they have recently taken
some knocks. Hence the extreme interest with which everyone in
Europe, from Cabinet Ministers downwards, has been following the
struggle for power since Stalin's death, in the hope that the totali–
tarian apparatus of terror and enslavement may at last be showing
signs of breaking up.
III
In trying to regard this scene in a reasonably dispassionate
manner one becomes aw.are of odd gaps in the expert understanding
with which events in Russia since 1917 have been followed in the
West. At first
all
one could see was the disappearance of the Old
Regime and a civil war which did not seem radically different from
the experiences of earlier European revolutions. Then came the period
of Five Year Plan illusions, followed-after the "purges"-by a sober–
ing realization that the new society resembled the old monolithic
Asian empires rather more closely than Socialists had thought possible.
The war against Hitler led to another outbreak of short-lived illusions
about the possibility of fitting the Soviet Union into the world setting
institutionalized by the United Nations, only to be followed by the
Cold War. At the moment we are experiencing the backwash of
Stalin's death, the Beria affair, the short-lived promise of liberaliza–
tion and the subsequent discovery that the regime is granting eco-
