COMMUNISM NOW
517
and reduced to amorphousness the political mind of the Soviet people
is an oft-repeated truism. However, it is easier to repeat the truism
than to draw the consequences which inevitably follow from it. In a
society whose political consciousness has been atomized or reduced
to amorphousness any major political change, if there is an over–
whelming social need for it, can come only from the ruling group.
This is precisely what has happened in Russia. No matter how much
one may dislike Stalin's epigones, one must acknowledge that they
have proved themselves capable of a much more sensitive response to
the need for reform than was generally expected of them.
However, the present phase is one of transition. It can last
only as long as it takes to bridge or fill the historically formed gap in
the political consciousness of the Soviet people. The present degree
of liberalization is probably just sufficient to allow some- scope for
new processes of political thought and opinion-formation to develop
in the intelligentsia and the working class. By their nature these
are molecular processes, which require time to mature. But once they
have matured they are certain to transform profoundly the whole
moral and political climate of Communism, and to transform it in a
spirit of socialist democracy.
Only when the gap in the political consciousness of the Soviet
masses and of the Soviet intelligentsia has been eliminated can de–
Stalinization be brought to that ultimate conclusion to which Stalin's
epigones can hardly carry it. To some extent, the change in the politi–
cal climate is bound to coincide with a change of generations. It
must take a few years more before the results of post-Stalinist opinion–
formation show themselves and before new men come forward to
expound new ideas and to formulate new programs. By that time the
generation of Khrushchev, Bulganin and Co. will, in any case, be
making its exit; and it may well be replaced at the head of affairs
not by the men of the middle generation who have spent, and in part
wasted, their best years under Stalinism, but by much younger people
who are only now growing to political maturity.
Whether the change and replacement of ruling groups and
generations will proceed gradually and peacefully or through vio–
lent convulsions and irreconcilable conflict is a question which need
hardly and can hardly be resolved
a priori.
The whole development
is quite unprecedented; and there are too many unknowns in the
