RUSSIA: What Joe Said

Joseph Stalin’s followers (and sometimes his enemies) hang on his every word as the pronouncement of a major oracle. Last summer Italy’s fellow-traveling Socialist Pietro Nenni went to Moscow to pick up his Stalin Peace Prize (worth $25,000), and got one of the rare invitations to talk with the oracle himself. On his return, Nenni glowingly reported that Stalin wants only peace, and that if Russia is allowed to keep what she took after World War II, Stalin will be satisfied.

Various accounts of what else the great man had told Nenni began appearing in the press. Last week, in London’s New Statesman and Nation, leftist Labor M.P. Richard Grossman—himself something of a minor oracle—announced that Nenni had found the reports regrettably inaccurate; Grossman, who had recently met his fellow leftist Nenni in Italy, then undertook to give the definitive, real McCoy version:

¶ Stalin showed great “serenity” over Western rearmament. While his staff agrees that air power and atomic bombs are terribly destructive weapons, they feel that they are not decisive. To win wars, the army of one side must occupy the territory of the other, and so far the U.S. does not have armies capable of such large-scale land warfare.

¶ Stalin and his colleagues are ready to face another 10 to 15 years of cold war, in the confident belief that the Eastern bloc can stand the strain better than the Western world. They feel certain that Russian economy can provide both guns and butter.

¶ Stalin is well satisfied with the results of the Korean war. He feels that U.S. methods in the struggle have swung Asiatic opinion against the Americans and have greatly strengthened the Russian position in the area.

¶ Stalin will not make any provocative moves that would cause a war, but neither will he surrender any Communist gains.

No sooner had word of the Grossman article reached Italy than Nenni announced that Grossman had not got it right, either. Grossman, said Nenni, directly attributed to Stalin some statements which Nenni had only inferred.