Background for War

Three recent books that light up the background of Europe's war:

> THE REVOLUTION OF NIHILISM--Hermann Rauschning--Alliance ($3). Already famous in Europe, where it appeared in 1938, The Revolution of Nihilism predicted the Nazi conquest of Czechoslovakia and an eventual German-Russian alliance.

Son of a Prussian officer, himself trained in a military school, Rauschning is an East Prussian Junker who joined the Nazis in 1931 because he could see no other way out for Germany's desperation. He became President of the Danzig Senate, Hitler's go-between in his off-stage talks with Poland's late President Pilsudski. But when the Fuehrer ordered Rauschning to persecute Danzig Jews and Catholics, he quit the Nazis, took refuge in Poland, where he wrote his expose.

Hair-raisers among Dr. Rauschning's revelations: 1) Nazi theories are so much window-dressing for befuddling the masses: 2) Germany's real rulers, a small Nazi inner circle or "elite," have one program--power, one plan--plunder, one tactic--terror; 3) this inner plunderbund secretly laughs at Nazi claptrap about race, blood, soil, considers Mein Kampf oldfashioned; 4) they plan to make Germany a base from which to conquer the world; 5) they expect a socialist "second revolution" which will destroy the last remnants of Christianity, individual freedom, reduce the German people to collective serfdom; 6) in alliance with Russia's "Genghis Khan fascism," National Socialism will then carve up the world.

Dr. Rauschning's own wording of the Nazi horrorscope: "The new [National Socialist] social order will consist of ... blind obedience to an absolute despotism . . . a progressive economic destruction of the middle class, and the all-pervading atmosphere of barracks and prison . . . desolation, impoverishment, regimentation, and the collapse of civilized existence."

> POLAND: KEY TO EUROPE--Raymond Leslie Buell--Knopf ($3). History has now severely blue-penciled certain passages* in Poland: Key to Europe, by the ex-head of the Foreign Policy Association, now Round Table Editor of FORTUNE. Wonder is, however, that so much of the text can still stand. Candid, exhaustive, lucid, this is still by all odds the best available book on Poland, Europe's "Great Unpredictable."

Key to understanding Poland, says Author Buell, is its peculiar domestic and external problems. They are numerous and acute. Poland has 1) an unfortunate place on the map, between two countries which have more than once collaborated in partitioning it; 2) no natural frontiers; 3) desperate agrarian problems, aggravated by lack of markets and a surplus population; 4) explosive minorities (approximately 3,300,000 Jews, 750,000 Germans, 1,500,000 White Russians, 5,000,000 Ukrainians in a population of 34,500,000) ; 5) precarious political conflicts, kept in check only by the Poles' fervent nationalism. Thus traditional suspicions of Germany and Russia have determined Poland's "unpredictable" foreign policy; unhealthy world economic conditions have determined its domestic ills.

Main warning by Author Buell is that the democracies must guarantee an independent Poland as a guarantee of their own survival. Last week Democracy's big guns were okaying that advice. His second warning: that the democracies must also go to work on Poland's formidable economic and social snarls in order to keep it democratic.

> STALIN--Boris Souvarine--Alliance ($3.75). The ironies of history with which this book deals are even exemplified in its publication. Five years ago, even one year ago, English and U. S. readers would have found it more profitable if less pat. Souvarine's Stalin, published first in French several years ago, the work of a onetime member of the Executive of the Communist International, is practically unique among latter-day Bolshevist or ex-Bolshevist writings in carrying authority for the sane Western mind. With the knowledge of an insider and the detachment of a historian, Souvarine shows how Stalin succeeded to Lenin's power, how Socialism miscarried in his hands, and why the Soviet-German non-aggression pact (TIME, Aug. 28) was no surprise at all.

Born Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, known as Sosso, then Koba and finally Stalin, the future dictator of Russia was until 1917 an obscure Georgian revolutionary with a talent for intrigue. Souvarine indicates that he practiced even on

Lenin during the Civil War, but Lenin and Trotsky together were too smart for him. In Author Souvarine's sober account of these years following the revolution, the predicament of Lenin stands out painfully: plunged by his own victory into a chaos which compelled him to backtrack step by step on the Socialist program, sick, knowing his closest henchmen to be politically imprudent, like Trotsky, or unscrupulous, like Stalin. After his death it took Stalin just two years to make himself impregnable.

General Secretary of the Communist Party, Stalin constructed under him a bureaucracy of secretaries, "a hierarchy of secretaries, a psychology of secretaries." For that and for the ruthless use of the secret police his talents sufficed, says Souvarine, for the wise reconstruction and administration of Russia they were pitiful in face of the task with which Lenin himself could scarcely cope. The implacability of a good bomb thrower (TIME, Sept. 4) showed itself inappropriate, to say the least, when Stalin collectivized agriculture at the attested cost of 5,000,000 peasant lives. Lenin continually and publicly admitted his mistakes; Stalin gradually would tolerate nothing but adulation. And behind the fac,ade of the U. S. S. R., the great Socialist world power, a late Roman corruption grew fantastically until to the west the fac,ade seemed torn open by the "purge" of 1936-37, blasted by the Pact of 1939.

Among earlier volumes, published since Munich, the following, although badly out of date in spots, stand out as the most competent:

EUROPE IN RETREAT--Vera M/c/)e/es Dean--Knopf ($2). Origins of Munich, by a Foreign Policy Association expert, for whom the pros & cons add up thus: the need of "fundamental transformation of the existing international economic order."

EUROPE ON THE EVE--Frederick L. Schuman--Knopf ($3.50). A night-must-fall account of Europe's power politics in the tragic era, 1933-39, by a thoroughgoing scholar whose hatred for Naziism (with which, he claims, British Tories made a prearranged deal at Munich) leads to wishful-thinking.

SURVEY AFTER MUNICH--Graham Hut-ton--Little, Brown ($2.50). Brief, fact-filled political and economic surveys of the countries now caught between the Nazi anvil and the Russian hammer & sickle, by a former editor of the London Economist.

BETRAYAL IN CENTRAL EUROPE--G. E. R. Gedye--Harper ($3.50). Fluent, heated, colorful account of Austria from 1925 through Anschluss, with a bitter windup on Czecho-Slovakia, by the much-expelled foreign correspondent of the New York Times.

*Examples: "Soviet Russia is the chief obstacle to Nazi ambition." A German-Russian alliance "will prove difficult of achievement until after the death of Stalin."

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