ABSTRACT
For four and one-half decades people have waited for the Soviet Union to mellow. A review of the judgments of statesmen and analysts over these 45 years makes melancholy reading. The Soviet Empire is still the Eurasian heartland, subject to pressure from East or West or both at once, capable of exerting pressure on East and West-on one at a time under the tsars with their limited aims-on both at once under the Bolsheviks with their unlimited ones. The military advantage of the land power is its interior lines of communication. Another preoccupation of the power sprawling across the open Eurasian plain is the "rectification" of its frontiers to get more defensible lines. Finally, there is one aspect of the Communist ideology which distinguishes Leninism from all other varieties of Marxism and it is central to our problem: namely, Lenin's absorption not with the dream of socialism but with the mechanics and dynamics of organization and power.
