Books: Life Without Russia

GANDHI AND STALIN (183 pp.)—Louis Fischer—Harper ($2.50).

The subtitle of Gandhi and Stalin is Two Signs at the World’s Crossroads. Leftish Correspondent Louis Fischer has been at those crossroads once before. That time he took the road marked Stalin. He lived in Russia for 14 years, raised his children there, wrote pro-Stalin pieces for Manhattan’s pink Nation that warmed the fellow travelers like letters from home. By 1938, Fischer could no longer stomach the excesses of the Communist dictatorship. When he left Russia, his wife and two sons stayed behind. They later got out with Mrs. Roosevelt’s help.

In Men and Politics (TIME, May 12, 1941), Fischer, like many another unblinkered convert, sang the blues of disillusionment. Gandhi and Stalin is the logical outcome of his about-face: a warning of what Stalin is up to and a prescription for stopping him. It is also an awkward plea for Gandhi’s “method of nonviolent yet dynamic and direct action which fuses the impatience of revolutionists with the scruples of idealists.” Fischer admires Gandhi as uncritically as he once admired Stalin. Like the Mahatma, he “wants to improve the system by improving man.” Yet it was Gandhi himself who (a year ago) brushed aside Fischer’s suggestion that Gandhi preach his doctrine to the West: “How can I preach nonviolence to the West, when I have not even convinced India? I am a spent bullet.”

Beyond Diplomacy. If Fischer sounds bemused as a Gandhi-man, he is somewhat more lucid as a critic of Stalin. To him, the “political war is visible and tangible. Every day’s newspaper is a battle bulletin of that war. … It is easy to say ‘We must meet Russia halfway.’ We have met Russia 90 percent of the way. But Russia does not meet us even 10 percent of the way. . . . The entire problem of the relations between Russia and America, or between dictatorship and the democracies, has gone beyond the field of diplomacy. . . . This is the political war and it cannot stop until Russia or democracy wins.” Yet Fischer does “not believe Stalin wants a world war” now, or is planning a “violent world revolution.” Stalin’s strategy is to fasten his dictatorship on the countries Russia now dominates, to expand wherever possible by an incessant ideological war of nerves, against the West. But a war in ten years, says Fischer, is altogether possible.

To avoid it, he prescribes internationalism—a U.N. with Russia counted out: “The veto must be abandoned. … It is the dictatorship of one nation ruled by one man. That kind of U.N. cannot save democracy. Stalin is not yearning to save democracy. . . . Russia will employ it as a weapon to divide and ultimately crush the democracies. . . . The U.N. is not an international government. It must be remade to become one. It is very likely that the moment the nations begin reshaping the U.N. they will be on the way to an international government without Russia.

“This is regrettable. But what is the alternative? Refrain from establishing an international government and thereby deprive ourselves of a desperately needed means of saving peace and democracy? That is too high a price to pay for Russia’s formal, obstructionist membership in U.N.”

Fumbled Ideology. Fischer proposes to offset Communism, not with capitalism, but with a kind of quasi-socialism which he describes as “mixed-economy planning.” “When the government and private capital are both in industry there can be competition. . . . The democratic world cannot prosper unless the British Labor Government succeeds.” At times Author Fischer fumbles all over the ideological map: “Farmland should be as free as air. It should not be bought or sold . . . equality of wealth would eradicate the power advantage now inherent in wealth.. . . Marx and Gandhi might make a fruitful combination.” In his honest but disjointed eagerness to defeat “Stalin with Gandhi,” Fischer defeats the coherence of his anti-Communist thesis.