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JOHN STRACHEY
Must not any thoughtful student of the post nuclear world do the
same?
The tone of hectic conspiracy-hunting which pervades not only
Professor Goodman's work, but also
his
whole school of thought, is
a great pity. For it may cause many people to refuse to reflect upon
several by no means new but still important considerations which his
school of thought advances. In the first place Professor Goodman, in
particular, emphasizes and documents the undeniable fact that original
communist doctrine looked forward not only to the dissolution of
all existing nations but to the re-integration of all peoples into a
World Federation of Socialist Republics of which the Soviet Union
was regarded as the nucleus.
Second, Professor Goodman by no means disregards the extent
to which the Soviet Union over the past forty years has appeared
to depart from its internationalist principles. He deals at length with
the Stalinist concept of building socialism in one country; with the
apparently ruthless sacrifice of the interests of the extra-Russian com–
munist parties to Russian national interest; and with the subjection
of the other nations of the Tsarist Empire to the dominance of the
Great Russians. But all these undeniable events are, he considers,
evidence of the extent to which the internationalist ideal has been
distorted, rather than of its abandonment. He is convinced that the
communists of the 1960's are as firmly determined as were the com–
munists of 1917 to build a world state upon the basis of the workers'
class solidarity. Only now, he writes, theirs has become a determina–
tion to build a "Russified" world state.
There is force in this contention. To the extent to which the old
universalist ideal is preserved at all, it has undoubtedly been heavily
Russified. But Professor Goodman does not seem to allow sufficiently
for the extent to which
this
very development has made the original
communist internationalism unacceptable and inapplicable outside
Russia. This is shown by
his
inability adequately to account for the
fact that the nations which became communist after 1945 have not
become members of the Soviet Union, but have either remained
"satellites" or become genuinely independent. He is convinced that
this is a mere temporary status on the way to their full incorporation.
But this conviction does not enable him to account for the fact that,
on the whole, the countries of Eastern Europe have in most cases
