268 HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
Treaty of Rapallo with Germany are correctly described by
Berland: "The entente with the Reich meant for the Soviet
Union a strong guarantee against the formation of a coalition
between the so-called Capitalist Powers, the nightmare of Soviet
diplomacy." Berland forgets to add that the same cause which
underlay Soviet-German collaboration is the chief reason for
the change in the Soviet attitude to the once so-hated bourgeois
French Republic. The thought of a Franco-German under-
standing and., through it, a union of the non-Communist states
absolutely terrifies the Moscow rulers. For Moscow there can
be only one line of action—a fight against the non-Communist
states,, with or without capitalist support, until a victorious
conclusion is reached. For eighteen years the Kremlin's one
hope has been that the population of the non-Communist,
states—thanks to the quarrels and strife between them—may
become ripe for the Communist revolution.
Anyone who has observed the inexorable persistency of
Communist policy in dealing with the bourgeois world, and
its contempt for the bourgeois regime and its institutions in
Germany, France, Italy, England and elsewhere, can imagine
the triumph felt by Moscow at this change in France's Russian
policy. The struggle between the great peoples of Western and
Central Europe will become, Moscow hopes, a permanent
state of things. It is true that even now there exist in France
circles and parties which see in a collaboration with Moscow
a great danger. The more influential factors in the country,
however—those who finally decide the policy—take up a
different position.
Thus it comes that in the French press at the present time
almost nothing is written about the negative side of life in the
Soviet Union and of the conditions under which the unprivileged
categories of the population live. "The moral judgment/' as
the Temps so lucidly explained, "has to give way to the political
necessity." In view of this attitude, what is the use of a few
French papers, such as the Matin, treating objectively the