old Bolshevik leaders, probably convinced authoritarian idealogues, to use Napoleon's contemptuous phrase. I should like to suggest that this is what we ought to keep our eyes on in China too, because what the world is looking at is not so much a competition in economic methods. The economic me.thods of large scale production are very much alike in all countries, and Professor Rostow was quite right in saying that in some ways the United States is a more communist society than Russia is. What is different is this control of the whole state by a handful of people using a small minority party as the instrument of power. It seems quite easy to us, quite natural to us, to regard with horror and to some extent with contempt, the submission of a thousand millionjeople to rule of this type. All our Western instincts an all our Western educated biases are against it, but we must remember that there is no real reason to believe that the outside world, the millions, the tens of millions, the hundreds of millions uncommitted, the parts of Asia which are not under Communist rule, the whole of Latin America, India, Africa, you must not assume that we are on a seller's market now as we were in 1914, or that these countries will necessarily turn to us for leadership, and will necessarily be on our side when the chips are down, if they ever are down. I used not to believe this myself. I was optimistic even as late as 1945 about the automatically expanding powers of the free society. Today, fifteen years later, I am both wiser and sadder. I don't think we are automatically going to win the cold war. I think it is going to continue, and I don't think we are automatically going to export all, or perhaps even most of our political and social institutions to the new world which, to use the brilliant Rostow metaphor, is now in a state of "take-off." Why is this so? We underestimate- and here the historian has something to contribute - we underestimate the
on the other. We must, therefore, not only accept this element of accident, but the fact and kind of accident that occmTed, and why the United States is not only faced with these great technical problems, but a much narrower, very important political problem. If the progress of 1914 had gone on, the technological world would be about as advanced as it is today, Russia might be just as advanced a scientific society as it is today, because Russian economic "take-off," (I dare not to use the word because Professor Rostow is present) because the preliminaries to the "takeoff" were well under way before the Russian revolution. However, because of the success in taking over one of the great land masses of the world, the easy promise of inevitable victory for our democratic way of life has proved false or, at any rate, highly misleading. The next thing to notice, and it is a very important thing to notice, is that the special character of Russian society is not economic, but political. The special character of the Bolshevik revolution was not that a body of people impregnated with Marxian doctrine took over society, took over the state and remolded it according to the recipes of Karl Marx. It is how it was done. The recipes of Karl Marx for future society, as anyone knows who has tried to read him, are very meager. Where he predicts anything, he predicts not very plausible idealistic Utopian solutions. Lenin is even worse. There can be few less prophetic works than State and Revolution which he published in the year 1922 when he took power. The great Bolshevik find, the great Bolshevik device, was the one monolithic authoritarian absolutist party. What we are mostly concerned about in Russia today is not the fact that Russia is a great technological power, but that that technological power is wielded, as both of our speakers have reminded us, by small, dedicated, and in this generation of
Three Trinity Trustees among the spectators: right to left: Newton C. Brainard, Han. '46, Convocation's Honorary Chairman; G. Keith Funston '32, former Trinity President; John R. CooK, Jr. '10
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