The Russians would probably have behaved toward Germany exactly as the Italians behaved toward France. In their anxiety to run no risks, the Italians waited until their intervention made no difference; the French were already defeated. So Stalin would probably have waited until the German Army was knocked out before he moved.
Q. But wasn’t it likely that Stalin would have attacked if Hitler attempted to invade the British Isles?
A. Not unless it had become apparent that the invasion had not only failed but that the German Army had lost practically all its Air Force and was about to collapse. If this contention is correct, there was no danger to Hitler from the Russians, and the material supplies he seeks could certainly have been obtained in greater quantity by peaceful coercion than by war.
Q. You have given us quite a number of strong points of the Soviet Union. Can you outline its weak points?
A. Without pleasure. It is no pleasure to expose the demerits of a force which for the time being, at any rate, is fighting against our major enemy, and has fought gallantly and has lost more blood than all the other opponents of our enemy put together. Yet it seems to me useful always to keep our eyes open and to know as much as we can about the characteristics of friend and foe and especially of the sort of ally which has the ambiguous role of the Soviet Union toward both Britain and America, neither friend nor foe, but possessed merely of the same enemy.
The fundamental weakness of the Soviet Union and the root of all its evil is the fact that the Bolsheviks believe and practice as their first rule of political conduct that the end justifies the means. This rule led to adoption of the Terror as the chief weapon in the struggle to establish Socialism, and the Terror in turn made it impossible to establish Socialism. The Terror destroyed democracy. Without political democracy, the vaunted economic democracy of the Soviet Union became a farce. Constant coercion of the masses through the Terror benumbed them. Production was concentrated on war materials and the output of consumption goods never rose above subsistence level. The Soviet Union became a permanent pauper state. The level from the standpoint of culture and comfort remained barbarian, but the Russians showed they had the virtues of barbarians. When the time came to fight they proved they could stand up better to their Nazi brother barbarians than any of the civilized folk of Europe.
The principle that the end justifies the means works in wartime as it is a barbarous principle and war is a barbarous business, and that is one reason why the Russians have done as well as they have against the Germans. In peacetime the principle that the end justifies the means defeats itself because peaceful processes are not promoted by violence. The Bolsheviks used the Terror to force every member of the vast community of Russia into a pattern of National Planned Economy, but after thirteen years of watching the Five-Year plans, now in the midst of the Third, we can scan the whole Russian scene and soberly observe that National Planned Terror plus Bolshevik zeal have not been able to produce anything like as much for the whole population as free capitalist economy running on the profit motive with a competitive labor market. I am not for Hoover capitalism, but even it is incomparably better than Stalin’s economy.
Q. What authority have you to speak about Russia?
A. Possibly no authority, but a good deal of experience. I was for two years a correspondent in Moscow, from 1925 to 1927—that was during the NEP—and thereafter made three long trips and visited every part of the country from Vladivostok to Odessa and Leningrad to Tiflis. I was the first correspondent to visit the huge industrial plants of the First Five-Year Plan from the Urals to the Caucasus, and after a 17,000-mile trip which lasted three months I wrote a series of twenty-four articles, which were given a Pulitzer prize. That was in 1930, and I made another study trip in 1934 and another in 1937. I keep up as well as one can by diligent reading and contact with friends fresh from the Soviet Union and it appears that the conditions there today, aside from the war, are about as they were when I was last there. Most capitalist critics of the Soviet Union oppose it because it has done away with the institution of private property and of profit, and substituted a collectivist system. It would not make much difference to these capitalist critics whether the Soviet collectivist system worked or not. What irks them is that it has eliminated the form of economic organization which has enabled them to become well to do.
This is not of any interest to me. The only thing that interests me about the Soviet collectivist system is whether it works or not. If it works better than ours, to bring more happiness to everybody in the community than our system, then let us have it. But the trouble with the Soviet collectivist system is that it simply does not work to make men happier. It’s only success has been to make men fight. That is what we need now, but it is not enough.