Russia After The War

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 152, 22 May 1942, Page 4

Russia After The War

HE resumption of the attack on Russia looks like the beginning of a movement that will shake the world. If Russia is overwhelmed, civilisation will rock on its foundations. If Russia stands, Germany will totter and fall. But no nation so powerful as one or the other falls, even temporarily, alone. What happens is what takes place in our bush when a storm brings down a century-old tree. Everything resting on it and near it comes down too. And it will be the same in Europe. One half of it or the other will lose its life and its shape. That in fact is Hitler’s strongest card. When he ordered his armies West he told them to go forward and secure Germany’s "future for a thousand years." When he turned them East it was to "blot out for ever" the hordes of Bolshevism. Now that he must order them East again he tells them, and all their friends and relatives at home, that it is victory now or annihilation. He knows that what a nation will not go through for gain it will endure to live. And he knows too that victory for the United Nations makes Russia one of his judges. Britain and the United States are soft. Russia is realistic. It will neither gloat, if it wins, nor forget. It will set to work coldly to make another German attack impossible. What this means in detail we do not know. What it means in broad outline has been clearly stated by Sir Stafford Cripps on the authority of Stalin himself. Europe, if Germany is beaten, is to be "reconstituted" upon a basis that will allow the Soviet Government to develop its country in safety and peace. In addition, Russians think that there must be punishment of individuals. Those "responsible for the brutalities of the present war" must feel the world’s anger. Those who have been the willing agents of aggression must become the wards of civilisation till they come, internationally, of age. In short, the destruction of the Nazis and all their works is Russia’s paramount war aim. Her peace aims, according to the same authority, are as little interference as possible from the rest of the world, and as little as may be with it. Sir Stafford is emphatic that it is no longer Russian policy to export Bolshevism. It is not even certain any longer that world Communism interests the Kremlin. But it is certain, he insists, that to attempt to spread Communism by interfering in the internal affairs of other countries is the very opposite of Russia’s present policy, and gets no support at all from Stalin or his closest associates.