THE OUTER WORLD AND THE SOVIETS 273
industry are the decisive factor—the "vast advantages'* to be
obtained from trade with Soviet Russia. This attitude is mainly
dictated by the special interests of a group of American leaders
of industry. For if they succeeded in their plan of obtaining
permanent Government guarantees for exports to Russia, the
interests of these branches of industry in the maintenance of
trade with Russia would cease to depend on the actual economic
relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Yet this economic factor alone would not suffice to explain
the changed attitude of the United States, which had refrained
longer than any other country, on grounds of principle^ from
recognising the Soviet State dejure. As in the case of France,
there was also an important political consideration; for just
as the German change of regime drove France into the arms
of the Bolsheviks, so Japanese aggressiveness in the Far East
had a similar effect on the United States. The Soviet Union and
the United States are equally interested in preventing Japanese
expansion in the Far East. Consequently, what, amid en-
thusiastic applause, a few years ago would have seemed the
wildest fancy has become a fact, and Litvinov was able to
describe the principles and achievements of Soviet Russia
to 2,000 American millionaires and bourgeois, as well as
their wives.
To-day American capitalism and Moscow Communism work
together hand in glove. On March 3, 1934, Pratfda published
on the same page an appeal for the support of Austrian Com-
munists, an eloquent summons to the fight against the bourgeois
world, and a triumphant telegram from Chicago reporting that
the Bankers' dub had given a dinner in honour of the Soviet
delegate, Troyanovsky, which over five hundred representatives
of American trade and industry attended. With barely dis-
guised irony the names of these "sharks5* of capitalism, as
Pravda usually calls them, are revealed to the paper's readers.
And what had Troyanovsky to tdl the representatives of
American capital in his loudly applauded speech? Naturally