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PARTISAN REVIEW
equations. One can at the most analyze the conditions under which
the change, or the series of changes, can run its course in a relatively
peaceful and reformist manner; and those under which the reformist
phase would prove to be a mere prelude to violent upheaval. The
subject is too large, complex, and speculative to be tackled in this
contribution. Moreover, whatever the variant of the historic develop–
ment, the essential prerequisite for it is the same: the emergence of a
new and genuine political consciousness, which will be neither crip–
pled by the imposition of any monolithic pattern nor falsified by
totalitarian myths. De-Stalinization makes possible and even inevitable
the crystallization of such a consciousness. Therein lies its progressive
significance.
G.
L.
ARNOLD
"Communism now" is the sort of subject one would
gladly leave to the specialists, were it not that they have so frequently
proved mistaken. This may be due to ordinary human frailty, but
more probably it is a matter of being imperfectly aware of the pe–
culiar mechanism which makes the Communist orbit what it is. The
point can be illustrated by quoting a remark made in private not
long ago by a Communist leader who holds a key position in an
Eastern European country. He was discussing the prospects of de–
Stalinization with a Western Socialist, and in the course of conversa–
tion he casually remarked that of course all this related only to
Europe and perhaps the U.S.S.R.: the Chinese Communist Party, by
contrast, was only now about to enter its Stalinist phase, "and since
China is a more primitive country than Russia one must expect
Chinese Stalinism to be worse than Russian." His interlocutor, being
himself a Marxist, needed no elaboration of this point which some
people might have found surprising: every Communist realizes (even
if he does not say so) that Stalinism was the price the U.S.S.R. had
to pay for the policy of breakneck industrialization and wholesale
collectivization to which the Russian Communist Party committed
itself in the '30s. To deprive the peasant of his land and drive him
