"Dizziness From Success"

If last week's news had no other effect, it certainly pepped up diplomatic gossip. Around the embassies went the story about Yang Chieh, Chinese Ambassador to Moscow: The day before the German-Russian pact was announced, Yang Chieh called on Russian Premier Viacheslav Molotov and asked what was up. Said he with Oriental suavity, he had heard rumors of a German-Russian plan to dismember Poland. . . . Thunderstruck, Premier Molotov gasped, drew back, while the veins of his forehead stood out in his apoplectic fury: this, he reminded his visitor, was the Soviet of Socialist Republics, the fatherland of the toiling masses, the vanguard of the antifascist struggle; that any ambassador could believe such a slander of the Socialist State made him, Molotov, wonder if he was the proper ambassador to be accredited to it. The Chinese Ambassador left, to read in Pravda the next day the laconic notice that the agreement had been made. Molotov hadn't been told.

Premier Molotov, whose name in Russian means Hammer (Stalin means Steel), whose pretty wife Paulina is Commissar of Fisheries and is very close to Stalin, may well have been taken by surprise. If so, his astonishment last week must have mounted hourly. No sooner had the German-Russian pact been hailed as thwarting the foul design of British Tories to direct German expansion to the East than the German Army did what (in the Russian view) Tories had failed to accomplish--i.e., directed German expansion to the East.

Across the plains of Poland, getting closer every minute, hurried Russia's new friends, 1,000,000 of them, armed with tanks, planes, propaganda equipment, armored cars, machine guns, and complaining every minute about the atrocities of the Poles who delayed them. On they hurried, capturing cities, blowing up bridges, destroying old military theories, shooting down Polish airplanes, dropping bombs on fleeing ambassadors, machine-gunning refugees, going twice as fast as the Russians did when they invaded Poland in 1920.

Snug in the workers' fatherland, Premier Hammer and Secretary Steel watched their friends approaching. To the rest of the world the race-rout through Poland looked like a bloody blur. To Poles it was just bloody. But to Russians it was coming closer all the time. Over the plains, around the swamps, through the cities, past Cracow, Lwow, Brest-Litovsk, into Galicia, down to the Polish Ukraine, hurried the approaching friends, grabbing the industrial region and the coal mines in passing, looking as big and as powerful as an express train seems to a motorist stalled in the middle of the track. Hammer and Steel put their heads together.

History. Everybody thought the Germans were fast, but Russians found them particularly impressive. Nineteen years ago last August Russians, too, were knocking at the gates of Warsaw. In the spring of that year Pilsudski had invaded the Russian Ukraine, been driven back so far that on August 12 Marshal Tukachevsky, following a plan worked out by a Tsarist general in 1831, circled Warsaw to the North; SimeonBudenny,with the Red Cavalry, had taken Lwow; a third force was ready to encircle Warsaw from the South; Dzerzhinsky, Polish-born nobleman, ruthless organizer of the Cheka, waited outside Warsaw to spring the uprising of the Warsaw proletariat.

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?

"These causes are rooted in the inner weaknesses of the Polish State. Poland is a multi-national State.*The Poles constitute only about 60% of the population of Poland. . . . Poland is inhabited by no less than 8,000,000 Ukrainians and about 3,000,000 White Russians. ... It would appear that the Polish ruling circles should have established normal relations with such important national minorities. . . . Instead the national policy . . . was characterized by suppression and oppression of national minorities. . . . Regions in which the Ukrainians form a majority of the population were subjected to extremely rude and unscrupulous exploitation by Polish landlords. . . ."

Thus with great circumspection the Dictator told the people what part of Poland Russia intended to get--i.e., the Polish Ukraine, the northeast area south of Lithuania. Hurriedly Russia called up 4,000,000 troops. Hurriedly Russia called an armistice in the Russo-Japanese War (see p. 24). Then suddenly, as the Germans struck southward toward Polish oil fields, cutting off Polish retreat to Rumania, getting within 80 miles of the Russian frontier, Russian troops crossed the Polish border on a 500-mi. front (see p. 28).

But even after Russia's troops were haltingly emulating Germany's great drive, with 2,000,000 troops in motion against a fragmentary Polish defense, Russian leaders continued to murmur against the perfidy of the Poles in being whipped so soon. When Russia's military machine began to move, more than 3,000,000 well-equipped, well-trained German-Russian troops were driving in opposite directions against the forlorn remnants of Poland's scattered, shattered, fragmentary armies. Still dizzy with successes, Premier Molotov made a radio address: "Comrades," said he, "men and women citizens of our great country, events arising out of the Polish-German War have revealed . . . the obvious impotence of the Polish State."

But mostly he shook his head over its speed and his bewilderment: "All this has happened in the briefest space of time . . . mere fortnight has passed . . . Poland already has lost her industrial centers . . . no one knows the whereabouts of the Polish Government."

In this perplexing situation, Russia formally denounced its non-aggression treaty with the missing government, worried because Poland had become "a fertile field for any accidental and unexpected contingency which may create a menace to the Soviet Union," found its sacred duty to "extend the hand of assistance to its brother Ukrainians and brother Byelo-Russians inhabiting Poland."

But Premier Molotov soon came back to the big problem: "Nobody could have expected the Polish state would have such impotence . . . collapse is a fact . . . Polish statesmen have revealed their utter bankruptcy."

Therefore, the Premier was convinced, "our Workers' and Peasants' Red Army will display its combative might," and Russia was still neutral. Notes saying the same were handed the diplomatic representatives of the U. S., Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, China, Japan, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Finland, Bulgaria, Latvia, Denmark, Estonia, Sweden, Greece, Belgium, Rumania, Lithuania, Norway, Hungary, the Mongolian People's Republic, and the Tuva People's Republic.

To Each. . . . Communists could recall the old ideal of Karl Marx's perfect state: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." Trouble was that in the fifth partition of Poland, Russia got what she did not need (agricultural areas). She needed industry, which Germany got--and did not need--while the needs of Poles were completely left out of the picture, and their abilities were better forgotten.

No one, perhaps not even the Dictators themselves, knew what the final line-up would be. But at week's end as the Red armies poured over the Polish frontier to occupy Wilno, Baranowicze, Tarnopol, Zaleszczyki, last Polish capital, it appeared that Russian strategy was directed toward three objectives: a position that would insure her future position on the Baltic; control of the Pripet Marshes; a defense line along the Rumanian frontier. A map published in Izvestia showed the projected Russian frontier: a line extending from a point on the East Prussian frontier north of Osowiec south through Brest-Litovsk and Lwow to a point just west of Rumania's western frontier.

This line roughly paralleled Tsarist Russia's frontier. It would include an area of some 67,000 square miles. Its inhabitants (before deaths resulting from war and Russian occupation) numbered about 10,000,000. Sandy soil, impoverished peasants, made land-rich Russia's economic gain negligible. The region's strategic value told more of Russia's needs, suggested that her greatest need, as she saw it, was defense against her new friend, if their friendship got more pressing, or a jumping-off place for an attack on some small Baltic state, if the two big friends could continue to aggress together.

Although a joint German-Russian communique announced a common aim in Poland (restoring order) and hinted at a buffer state between their frontiers, it gave no outlines of the geographical position of that unhappy country of the future. Nobody expected Germany to give up Drohobycz, Jaslo and Stanislawow, which produce 500,000 tons of oil annually, the potash at Kalusz and Kukawy, the zinc-lead smelters at Katowice, the salt deposits between Wieliczka and Bochnia, Upper Silesia's coal or the sugar factories near Poznan. Nor was Germany likely to give up West Poland, source of fat and pork, needed in Germany as much as oil.

Germany seemed likely to get:

P:An inferior defensive line in the event of future hostilities with Russia, loss of possible support from the Baltic states in the same eventuality.

P:The biggest minority problem in Europe: 23,000,000 Poles, who faced the prospect of extremely rude exploitation.

From Each. . . . Each got what she deserved, in the hard language of power, according to her ability to take it. Division looked like a fair index of the relative power of the two dictatorships. In the broad sweep of the forces involved, Russia got relatively no more than Poland got when, Germany dismembering Czechoslovakia last year, Poland grabbed Teschen.

But Russia's grab last week did not look like Poland's small-boy attempt to run off with a stick of candy while the big boys were killing the proprietor. It looked more like a step in a program of world redistribution whose outlines were consciously obscured, whose possibilities were unknown, perhaps even to the partners in the enterprise. Nothing suggested that Russia faced a fate like Poland's, the last country to share a grab with Germany, except the haunting recollection of Russia's new friends coming in her direction, armed to the teeth, as fast as tanks, planes and armored cars could carry them.

*Russia has 189 nationalities inside her borders.

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