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and his doctrine that "for backward countries the road to democracy
leads through the dictatorship of the proletariat" -in other words, the
dictatorship of the Communist party. Lenin's defection in turn made it
easier for "Asiatic" Marxism, in our time, to reinvade the West in the
form of "Marxist-Leninism," as Maoism, Castroism, and various
Third World cults gain adherents among radical students and
intellectuals-themselves increasingly "backward" in their quasi–
illiteracy, their contempt for democratic institutions, and the religious
fervor with which they look to the East for deliverance.
Rahv's refusal to come to terms with the Leninist heritage in
contemporary Marxism made it possible for him to participate in the
anticommunist crusade of the late forties and fifties, to support
American foreign policy in its containment fixation, and to revile
"totalitarian liberals" like Henry Wallace without appearing to re–
nounce his own revolutionary credentials. In his own eyes, he re–
mained a revolutionary Leninist defending the revolution-or at least
the idea of the revolution-against those who had "betrayed" it. In
reality, his Leninism was now reduced to rehashing polemics against
the Popular Front-a task that absorbed energies that might better
have been devoted to a serious analysis of the postwar political scene.
At the end of the war, Rahv rightly criticized followers of Trotsky for
refusing to distinguish between democratic capitalism and Stalinist
totalitarianism, reminding them that Trotsky himself had "declared
that if the Second World War passed without bringing about a general
socialist revolution then the whole Marxist cheme would have to be
recast from the bottom up." Instead of addressing himself, however, to
the intellectual problem of "recasting the Marxist scheme," Rahv
conjured up a dark vision of Soviet expansionism (much at odds with
Russia's military and economic weakness at the end of the war) that
could only be read as an unconditional defense of the Cold War
policies already taking shape under Truman. Rahv condemned the
evils of "appeasement," moreover, without weighing the likelihood
that such arguments would be used to justify the militarization of
American society as the only force capable of putting down what he
called the "rising tide of Soviet totalitarianism." Ignoring the dangers
of a nuclear arms race; ignoring evidence that the "showdown"
strategy had already failed to modify Soviet ambitions in any case;
ignoring the self-defeating character of containment (pointed out by
liberal critics like Walter Lippmann), Rahv continued to fight the
cultural battles of the thirties without grasping their irrelevance to the
postwar situation. Absorbed in his rhetorical offensive against "totali-
