By the Tail

Some U.S. left-wingers who had eagerly grabbed up Russia's cause at war's end were beginning to suspect they had caught a bear by the tail. In Manhattan's fiercely leftist PM last week, Author-Editorialist Saul K. Padover, a militant member of the intellectual Left, tried to let go. Wrote he:

"In a generation perhaps the Russian people may have enough consumer goods to be able to afford the Nazi-like luxury, if they so desire, of an aggressive war. . . ."

"The internal situation in the Soviet Union is something else again. Russia is a dictatorship which no democrat can condone and no socialist forgive, and the fact that the autocracy is exercised in the name of a higher ideal neither minimizes its medieval harshness nor justifies its Byzantine intolerance. It is a tragedy that, in the name of socialism, a self-chosen elite should deprive men of their right to disagree, their right to speak freely, their right to think independently --rights without which there can be neither popular culture nor human dignity.

"Within the Soviet people and even inside the Communist dogma there are, however, seeds of freedom, and these, if not destroyed by wars or economic plights, might possibly sprout some day into genuine democracy."

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