THE COLD WAR AND THE WEST
35
rather than dangerous displays of military strength. This means a
policy of tacking and veering, of trying to contain the Communist
thrust while avoiding nuclear war, of gaining time for new and
promising developments in both camps, and of caring not so much
for a total victory by the West as for a decisive check to the expansion
of the East.
7) I have no patience or sympathy with those who cry "better
red than dead" and those who cry "better dead than red." It is
conceivable that the extreme choice-nuclear war or surrender to
Communism-may have to be made. But it is pointless now to make
the choice as a speculative anticipation, when there still remain a
good many courses of action that can help us avoid that terrible
choice. We should try to use our wits and keep our nerve, and if
we do, there is a chance to break past the intolerable dilemma this
question poses.
H.
STUART HUGHES
In the quarter century that has passed since I came to
ideological awareness, I have traversed five successive phases in try–
ing to cope with Soviet and Communist behavior. During the mid–
thirties I endorsed the Popular Front idea. After that came four
years of growing animosity, starting around 1937, when people
like myself awoke to the horror of the great purge, and punctuated
by the catastrophe in Spain, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and the winter
war in Finland, until in 1941 the German invasion of Russia
at length cast the Soviet Union in a more attractive role. The
third phase was one of renewed Popular Front-the left-ideological
counterpart to the military alliance against Hitler-which was al–
ready breaking up in the weeks between the Yalta conference and the
end of the European conflict and which had totally expired by 1948.
There followed the years of cold war hostility until the death of
Stalin in 1953, and, finally, the present phase, whose ultimate out–
lines are necessarily unclear, but whose salient characteristics derive
from the mitigation of authoritarian rule within the Soviet Union
itself, the emergence of China and the newly-liberated nations of
