RUSSIA: Drivel!

A man stood in a large hall in Moscow one night last week and spoke with the dry air of a professor giving a lecture he has delivered several times before. He talked in a drowsy monotone, occasionally taking long pauses to sip mineral water. No foreign newspapermen were present. No radio apparatus was set up. The speech was dreadfully long. But when the session was over and official typewritten copies were handed out, correspondents rushed to cables and telephones.

Next day the lecture was reported in every big newspaper in the world. Reason : the quiet, didactic speaker was Joseph Stalin, and his well-behaved class was the 18th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Although nothing like the rants which Herr Hitler broadcasts to the world, the speech was a big event—both because Stalin seldom sounds off on Russian and international affairs, and because the Congress was the first in five long years during which the repeatedly purged Communist Party has come to look as little like its former self as a muzhik who has shaved off his beard.

The outside world had been curious about Stalin’s view of the German push to the East. Would he threaten Hitler? Would he talk about Russia’s armed strength? To everyone’s surprise his remarks were addressed not against Germany but against the democracies, whom he charged with “urging the Germans on to march farther East, promising them easy pickings and prompting them: ‘You start a war against the Bolsheviks and then everything will proceed nicely.’ ” Their ulterior motive, he said, was to get Germany and Russia into war, let them knock each other groggy, and then, he intimated, step in to knock them both out. This passage was widely quoted by those who believe Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin may somehow, someday get together.

After its purges, he said, the Party was stronger than ever. On this subject he came closer than anywhere in the speech to using strong language: “Some spokesmen of the foreign press have been telling idle tales that the purging of Soviet organizations of spies, assassins and wreckers like Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yakir, Tukhachevsky, Rozengolts, Bukharin and other monsters has ‘sapped the strength’ of the Soviet system and caused ‘demoralization.’ This inane drivel is worth nothing but ridicule.”