532 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
discovered a method of catching up with the Westerners by a forced
march, and had by this means transformed her own economy at short
notice with a success that had been registered in her victory in the
Second World War over a Germany who, next to the United States,
had been the strongest industrial Power in the Western World of the
day. The Russians could thus use their own striking technological
achievements under a Marxian dispensation as an impressive argument
when they were commending Communism to other peasant peoples
who still found themselves in the Russians' pre-Stalinian, or even in
their pre-Petrine, plight of individual poverty and collective impotence.
Russian propagandists could appeal in the same breath to an ancient
Asian peasantry's new aspiration to raise its standard of living, and to
a parvenu Asian intelligentsia's aspiration—which was as old and as
young as this intelligentsia itself—to make itself mistress in its own
house by throwing off the ascendancy of Western intruders who, for
their own purposes in Asia, had called this Asian intelligentsia into
being.1

At this point an alert Western counter-propagandist might try to put
a spoke in the Russian propagandist's wheel by pointing out to the
Asian intelligentsia that in reality the Russians were inviting them to
exchange a Western ascendancy for a Russian ascendancy, and not for
the national independence that the Russians were dangling before Asian
eyes, and by simultaneously pointing out to the peasantry that in reality
the Russians were inviting them to exchange the familiar woes of rack-
rented tenants, not for the Utopia of peasant proprietorship, but for the
prison-house of a mechanized collective farm.2 Such home truths, how-
ever, were likely to fall on deaf ears. The Asian peasants would not
easily be deterred from making the common human blunder of exposing
themselves to hitherto unknown evils in their eagerness to escape the
known evils from which they were suffering at the moment. As for
the Asian intellectuals, they might pay heed to a Western warning
against a Russian imperialism if they happened to be natives of Man-
churia, Outer Mongolia, or Soviet Central Asia, where this warning
would evoke an echo in their memory of their own experience; but the
voice of this handful of land-locked intellectuals would not carry far.
In the experience of an overwhelming majority of the Asian intelli-
gentsia of the day the typical alien imperialist was not a Russian; he
was an Englishman, a Frenchman, a Dutchman, or some other variety
of Frank. For the past 450 years the West European conquerors of the
Ocean had been taking advantage of the conductivity of their physical
medium of aggression to perpetrate indiscreet actes de presence in every
corner of the Oikoumen£—'going to and fro in the Earth, and . . .
walking up and down it'3 with the assiduity of Satan himself. These
ubiquitous Western mariners* Cossack contemporaries who had made
the toilsome trek overland from the Urals to the Sea of Okhotsk had
contrived hitherto to commit their aggression less conspicuously. In
A.D. 1952 the Russian imperialist, in his missionary warfare with the
Western imperialist, enjoyed the advantage of being relatively unknown

* See V. v. 154-8. 2 See IX. viii. 674-5. 3 Job ii. a.