RUSSIA: Dizziness From Success

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But the proletariat did not uprise. Marshal Tukachevsky drove on north. Budenny waited at Lwow. French General Weygand got to Warsaw (creating a lot of bitterness because Poles were always sore at French claims of saving the city), and the Bolshevik armies pounded home faster than they came in.

Confused, disputed, the Russian defeat before Warsaw had one plain effect on Russian intellectual life. Ranked as one of the decisive battles of the world, it changed Comintern policy, stopped plans to employ the Red Army to work with the European proletariat, forced Lenin to give up immediate hopes of world revolution, directed Comintern agitation to China and the Far East. Russians decided that they had underestimated Polish national aspirations, and nationalist ambitions everywhere; when Trotsky fell, the defeat was blamed on him, when Tukachevsky was purged, he was called responsible; latest official history of the Communist Party, the Mein Kampf of Russia, holds both guilty of collaborating with Polish landlords and French imperialists.

Underlying all these explanations, however, was the conviction that the Poles were magnificent fighters. If Sheridan's victorious armies at the end of the Civil War had driven into French-dominated Mexico, reached Mexico City, then been driven smack back to Denver, the legend of Mexican fighting strength might have been as firmly rooted in U. S. life as the legend of peppery Poles was ingrained in Russian thought. That was one of the reasons why, last week, Russians had a lot of trouble explaining the German advance and their own defeat.

Minorities. As the Germans reached Bialystok last week Comrade Stalin came out with his answer. Reputedly closer to Stalin than Molotov is A. A. Zhdanov, who as director of Russia's press, runs Pravda. To Zhdanov's Pravda went the honor of answering the riddle, but Pravda's editorial bore the unmistakable stamp of Stalin's heavyhanded, question-and-answer style so plainly that it unquestionably belonged with such Stalin masterpieces as his famed "Dizziness from Success" article on the collective farms. In some respects it suggested that such monumental successes as last week's had left Russians even dizzier.

"One finds it difficult," began the pensive dictator, "to explain such a defeat [the 14-day advance of the German Army] only by the superiority of German military technique . . . and by the lack of effective assistance ... of Great Britain and France. The Polish State has proved so impotent and inefficient that it began to crumble . . . with the first military set backs. What are the causes of the situation which brought Poland to the verge of bankruptcy?