36
H. STUART HUGHES
Asia and Mrica, and, most pervasively, the thermonuclear balance
of terror between the Communist and the Western worlds.
During all these phases, I have never remotely thought of be–
coming a Communist. My sympathies have mostly been with demo–
cratic socialism-although I have been subject to disconcerting at–
tacks of conservative regression-and I have only infrequently found
myself saying something that happened to be the current Com–
munist line. At the same time I have never been a strenuous anti–
Communist; even in the periods when I saw the rulers of the Soviet
Union pursuing a particularly brutal policy-in the late 1930's and
again in the last years of Stalin's tyranny-I have found it difficult
to concentrate my energies against them. I think this is because I
have never felt that opposition to Communism was the main matter
at hand;
it
was always secondary to some greater battle, and one in
which we might well need the Communists as allies. In the first three
phases of my ideological journey, the enemy was Nazism, which I
continue to regard as almost wholly evil, .as opposed to Communism,
in which I discover some potentiality for good. More recently, the •
enemy has been the threat of thermonuclear war itself, and I find it
difficult to imagine how one could regard the points at issue between
ourselves and the Soviet Union as transcending our common interest
in preventing a catastrophe beyond repair.
Specifically, I differ with the militant critics of Communism
in not regarding the system as all of a piece. I think its economic
practices can be distinguished from its terrorist features--that the
former are tolerable (and sometimes even admirable) while the latter
are not. I
also
believe that the system as a whole is capable of evolv–
ing in a liberal direction and that under Khrushchev such an evolu–
tion has in fact been in progress. Admittedly it has been confined to
Europe and it has several times been interrupted or reversed, but
the net effect over the past eight years has been a cumulative shift
toward a more bearable life. In this change, I think, lies the still
dim but ever more discernible hope for humanity in the next half
century. It is obviously a change that we should welcome and en–
courage. And one way of encouraging it is to refrain from needling
the Soviet Union or its representatives on their day-to-day authori–
tarian routines-to restrict our condemnation to the most notorious
incidents, like the repression of the Hungarian revolt in 1956, in which
