COMMUNISM NOW
521
difficult for the Kremlin to maintain its organizational hold over
some of the mass movements it now controls. For that hold is in the
last resort determined by a community of outlook which has hither–
to been proof against the worst shocks administered to Communist
loyalties by the sanguinary record of Stalinism at home and abroad.
For practical purposes Communism since 1917 has implied not just
belief in the "October Revolution" as the starting point of a new
epoch in world history, but a commitment to the Soviet Union–
and latterly the Sino-Soviet bloc-as the chosen instrument of global
reconstruction. The socialist revolution is envisaged as a process in
which a certain group of countries, having climbed onto the new his–
torical level, confront and eventually absorb the shrinking capitalist
remnant. This concept is central to Stalinism, and it is all the more
difficult for Communists to abandon since it is already implicit in
Lenin's formulations on "uneven development" and the possibility
of socialist revolutions in scattered areas of the globe. In its semi–
conscious combination with Russian (and Chinese) nationalism–
cum-imperialism it supplies a motive-force so powerful that its
abandonment could hardly fail to produce a first-class crisis of con–
fidence among the inheritors of the Leninist tradition.
One is thus brought up against the problem of what is to happen
to the Communists once they let go the theoretical certainties which
have hitherto sustained them and armed them against doubt. Even
the Yugoslavs have not traveled very far down this dangerous road,
although one detects in their utterances a growing awareness that
Leninism-Stalinism may turn out to be a political pattern suited
only to certain backward countries
in
the throes of industrializa–
tion. ("It is our misfortune," they now tell the critical Western
visitor, "that Communists have hitherto come to power only in poor
and wretched countries.") From this admission to the realization
that Communism is wholly unsuited to rich and progressive countries,
there is only one step, and some of the party leaders seem to have
made it. But it is just on this point that the post-Stalin leadership
in the U.S.S.R. has proved most obdurate : backward Russia may have
been, thirty years ago (and this is now indeed put forward as an
excuse for Stalin's reign of terror), but today the Soviet Union is
proclaimed at least the equal of the United States in all respects save
material wealth, and tomorrow she is to excel in this domain too.
