Q. How do you expect to eliminate this jungle by fighting on the side of the Bolsheviks?
A. We would not be “fighting on the side of the Bolsheviks.” We would be fighting disease with disease. As a youth I studied medicine for a while in Vienna, and one of my professors was the great Wagner-Jauregg, the discoverer of the malaria treatment for the tertiary stage of syphilis. Wagner-Jauregg observed that some of his paretic patients who contracted another disease accompanied by high fever would after the recession of the fever often be almost cured of their syphilitic disabilities. He began to inoculate his syphilitic patients with malaria and thus by using one disease against another won a considerable number of victories over the more dangerous of the two afflictions. After curing the syphilis it was relatively easy to cure the malaria. Nazi Germany is at this moment as much more dangerous than Bolshevik Russia to our world as syphilis is more malignant than malaria.
Q. So you think Bolshevism, after it has helped eliminate Nazism, will be as easy to cure as malaria?
A. Probably not, but we may entertain reasonable hopes that in case the Red Army as distinct from the Bolshevik Party is victorious, or even semi-victorious over the invading Germans, it will have more to say in the affairs of Russia than ever in the past.
Q. Do you consider that would be an improvement?
A. Decidedly. Armies are usually conservative and pacifist. If we want to get rid of the Communist International and have Russia re-enter the family of nations, let the Red Army take hold of affairs in the Kremlin. Stalin is afraid of it.
In the purge of 1934-1938 Stalin arrested no less than 30,000 officers according to an estimate quoted by Louis Fischer. He started by executing the head of the army, Tukhachevsky, and seven other of the highest generals, then three more, and so on until there were left of the original staff only Voroshiloff and Budenny. Some may have been guilty of wishing to cooperate with the Nazis, but most were killed because Stalin feared they were plotting against him.
Stalin’s principal instrument of espionage against his own army is the system of political commissars, whereby a Stalin party man is allocated to each Red commander, with the prime duty of watching his every move, listening to his every word, and if possible trapping him into an indiscretion. This obviously hinders military efficiency, and in times when Stalin feels safe or when he wants military efficiency more than an immediate sense of personal security, he gives it up.
When he attacked Finland, for example, he felt strong enough personally to give it up, and the Red Army improved sufficiently to win. There was much boasting among Communists that the Red Army now no longer would need political commissars again, but to their disappointment, shortly after the German attack on Russia, Stalin reinstalled his commissars. This at the moment when the Soviet Union was more gravely threatened than ever in its history meant that Stalin felt himself less menaced by the defeat of the Red Army than by the Red Army itself.
Is it farfetched to imagine that since Stalin has played the part of a super-Robespierre, the time may come when he will suffer Robespierre’s end?