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JOHN STRACHEY
gram also asserted that it contained "pacifism and even revisionism."
Evidently you can pay your money and take your choice: you
can regard the present Russian doctrine of the possibility of co–
existence as "a springboard to world power" or as a betrayal of the
whole program of international communism. Both views seem extra–
vagant. For my part I do not believe that the new evidence which
we now have has done more than confirm the commonplace con–
clusion that Russia is still a nation-state-with-a-mission, but that on
the other hand she now has a considerably lessened sense of that
mission. Only those with very special causes to plead will deny that
Russia still feels a mission to assist the spread of communism through
the world, or, on the other hand, that she feels this mission less
compulsively, and even less ardently, than once she did.
All this may be incontrovertible, but it may also
be
not very
helpful for the purpose of estimating Russia's intentions. What matters
for that is to form an estimate of
how much
the compulsive character
of the Soviet Government's mission to spread communism has cooled
and waned. And when we enter this quantitative field we enter a
field of speculation indeed. Lenin's revolutionary internationalism en–
visaged, as Trotsky wrote: "the territory of the earth ... as a coherent
field of combat," on which the class war could and must be fought
out to a finish. Mr. Khruschev, as we have seen, sometimes at least
envisages the world as a Noah's Ark of refuge into which all sensible
peoples will come in order, precisely, to avoid nuclear war to the
finish, not of one, but of both, sides. The question is how much of
the distance between these two standpoints has the Soviet government
in fact traversed? Again, how much is it simply the dread of nuclear
war, and how much a general maturing and civilizing process, which
has made the Soviet Government travel, in the direction at any rate,
of the acceptance of the possibility of co-existence? Both factors have,
in my view, been at work. But the effect of a realization of the con–
sequences of nuclear war should not be underestimated. It may well
be that Lenin himself in the nuclear age would have endorsed
Khruschev's Noah's Ark speech. But would Lenin have endorsed it
at its face value, or would he have merely regarded it as a shrewd
tactical move? In other words to what extent does the Soviet govern–
ment now sincerely agree that the world-wide struggle, which in-
