550 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
familiarity with the history of their country during those 120 years had
associated the idea of federalism with the idea of progressively incor-
porating additional constituents; and against the historical background
of this domestic American precedent a suggestion that the American
people themselves might one day enter into a federation with other
peoples would not be startling even to Americans who found it un-
palatable. A federation between the peoples of the United States and
other English-speaking countries would, indeed, be very closely in line
with domestic American constitutional tradition. A proposal to extend
a federation of English-speaking Western peoples to Continental West
European peoples that were akin to the English-speaking peoples in their
way of life without being linked with them by a community of language
might, on the other hand, look, in American eyes, like a hitherto untried
venture for which no adequate precedent was to be found in the domestic
American experience of incorporating into the citizen body of the United
States a small French-speaking population in Louisiana in A.D. 1803 and
small Spanish-speaking populations in California and New Mexico in
A.D. 1848. Yet the United States' next-door neighbour Canada was a
successfully working model of a federation between two peoples, speak-
ing different languages and professing different religions, who were
approximately equal to one another in numbers; and another cue was
offered by the letter of the law officially in force in the Soviet Union.

In Western eyes the federal constitution with which the Soviet Union
had equipped itself might look suspiciously like a facade put up to mask
the retention or re-establishment of a centralized despotism that had
the momentum of six hundred years of Russian history behind it. The
Petrine Russian Empire from which the Soviet Union had inherited its
immense patrimony had been the heir of a Muscovite principality that,
from the fourteenth century of the Christian Era onwards, had added
field to field by extinguishing the independence of one after another of
its neighbours. Was not the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics merely
a disingenuous new title for a unitary autocracy of which no conceal-
ment had been made by Stalin's franker predecessors Peter the Great
and Ivan the Terrible? As far as any Western observer could judge, this
current Western critique of the constitution of the Soviet Union was
fair comment on the whole. Yet there was one point in which the Bol-
sheviM's professed constitutional new departure appeared to have some
substance, and this was a point in which Stalin's hand was credibly
reported to have been at work. Thanks to his own Georgian origin, Stalin
seems to have appreciated the strength of the nationalist opposition
aroused among the non-Russian subjects of the former Russian Empire
by a policy of Russification; and he seems to have drawn the conclusion
that, if this policy were not repudiated and reversed by the Tsardom's
Communist successors, the effect would be to alienate the non-Great-
Russian citizens of the Soviet Union from a Communism which they
would then write off as a new disguise for a familiar Russian imperialism.
Accordingly, when the constitution of the Soviet Union was being
worked out during the years A.D. I9I8-24,1 the internal administrative
i The constitution ia force in A.D. 1952 was that of the 6th December, 1936.