Second Year (1949-1950): Toward Economic Growth ... - PDF, 101 mb

8 The Marshall Plan and Its Meaning
and more terrible world holocaust, the awesome portent of Hiroshima,
and the unmasking of Communist Russia as a vast new totalitarian
threat, the dream lingered on.
Each crisis, like a storm, had first filled the horizon, then passed
over and beyond-a seemingly transient phenomenon, however earthshaking.
Each was followed by the thought of returning, as quickly
as possible, to a more "normal" state of affairs in which men and nations
could again pursue their private interests in a world of assured
security and progress. Few, it seemed, entertained the thought that
the emergencies crowding upon each other during these tempestuous
years were not merely separate events but interrelated manifestations
of an era of crisis, and of a transition in history from which there could
be no turning back.
The Communists, of course, thought they understood the trend of
events. Stalin elaborated and amended the revolutionary theories of his
intellectual forebears who had sought to found a "science" of human
society that would enable men not only to predict but, within limits,
to engineer the course of history.
The strength of Marxist-Leninist theory [he wrote] consists in the fact that
it enables the Party to orient itself in a situation, to grasp the internal connection
of surrounding events, to foresee the course of events and to discern
not only how and when events are developing in the present but also how and
when they must develop in the future. S
Western scholars, by and large, rejected the dogmatic premises on
which Stalinist theory was built, and they found it full of errors when
checked in the laboratory of contemporary history. But the Communists
retained an" important advantage: they possessed a long-range
concept of the nature of crisis in the modem world, a concept which,
though distorted, provided an expectation of recurrent upheaval and a
broad frame of reference to which developing events and policies
could be related. Backed by long and cool calculation, world communism,
despite expedient shifts, acquired a relentless forward motion.
In contrast, the policies of the democratic powers, responsive to the
will of their peoples, oscillated widely. Periods of intensive activity,
if successful, tended to be followed by phases of exhilaration and of relaxation
in vigilance and effort. For example, Sir Winston Churchill
3 Historicus, "Stalin on Revolution," Foreign Affairs, January 1949, p. 177, citing
Voprosy Leninizma (11th ed.; 1945), p. 598.