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PARTISAN REVIEW
communist regime and the Polish workers' movement were
suppressed, Afghanistan was invaded, the greatest arms build-up
in Soviet peacetime history took place, and an unsuccessful plot
to assassinate the Pope was undertaken. There are Soviet–
watchers who think that Stalin, for all the horrors of his domestic
rule, would never have been so bold and incautious as to order
some of these actions (though he would undoubtedly not have
permitted his Eastern European satellites to reach the point of
insurrection). One can be thankful for the "liberalization" under
Khrushchev and that it was not totally reversed under Brezhnev,
without assuming that an aggressive, militarized foreign policy
must coincide with peak intensities of domestic repression in the
Soviet Union. Peter Brooks says he grew up accepting "the reali–
ties of Soviet totalitarianism and imperialism," but he then veers
off into talking about alternative models for socialism without
ever saying whether Soviet imperialism might not have some
implications for American foreign policy simply because the
Soviet Union is a great power, as imperialistic Iran or Libya
(d.
the Sudan) or Indonesia
(d.
East Timor) or Guatemala
(d.
Belize)
or North Vietnam
(sic)
are not.
Contending that for his generation "the 'socialism' of the
Soviet Union was never any sort of viable political or intellectual
option," Brooks neglects to mention that it has not been present–
ed as an option even by American communists since at least
Dimitrov's speech to the Seventh World Congress of the
Comintern in 1935. Dimitrov was the inventor-or first promul–
gator-of what later came to be described as "different roads to
socialism" and, still later, "Eurocommunism." The Soviet
Union has ever since been
primarily
an issue in foreign policy: in
the Popular Front era, during the Stalin-Hitler pact, through the
war, and for the continuing period of the cold war to the present
day. (There have not been several cold wars, only one, an en–
during condition marked by occasional cautious interludes of
detente of which the early 70's was only the most recent.) The un–
avoidability of treating foreign policy towards the Soviet Union as
a central issue in its own autonomous terms is, I take it, what
Phillips meant to stress in his editorial to which Brooks is
responding.
Brooks, however, thinks it was correct of the left to insist
"upon linking domestic issues to international ones," but the
