THE BIG BLACK BEAR

At the conference between President Roosevelt and M. Litvinoff one of the most persistent of the American demands will be that the soviet rigorously eschew all Communist proselytizing in this country; there seems to be but little doubt that the Russians will accede to this. All over the world Red activity directed from Moscow has almost ceased, and the Soviet seems to have abandoned the idea of the world revolution for the time being, at least.

This willingness on the part of the Communists to discard what was originally their fundamental ideal shows that Russia has passed from a state in which the revolution was considered only in so far as it was capable of universal application to one in which the revolution has been identified and merged with the traditional policy of Russia, and has assumed the attributes of Russian nationalism. Here there is an exact analogy to the development of France in the last decade of the eighteenth century, when the Republic slowly deserted its universalist notions for strictly nationalist ones. The decline of the Third international in power and prestige until it has reached a point where the Trotskyites propose to establish a Fourth International shows how this tendency has manifested itself in Russia. The original Bolsheviks placed the furtherance of the world revolution above all else; this has now been superseded y a realistic foreign policy assiduous in advancing the interests of Russia. While a great deal of verbal balderdash about the international proletariat still goes on, it is soft-pedalled and nationalism is encouraged.

The Soviet and the League were long the sole anomalies in a world system which was centered around nationalism. Now that the League is little more than a ghost and Russia has discarded her central idea, a startling similarity of national ideals and state structure prevails. Unfortunately, to the disinterested observer, this international uniformity is unpleasantly suggestive only of that which characterizes a madhouse.