Marche Slav

THE IMPERIAL SOVIETS -- Henry C. Wolfe -- Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Dozens of prophets predicted the Nazi-Soviet Pact. But so successful was Soviet propaganda in selling Communism as the great & good friend of its archenemy, democracy, that nobody listened. Among these unheeded Cassandras was Henry C. Wolfe, small, bespectacled foreign correspondent and lecturer, who had flitted around Russia and Central Europe, first for the Hoover Relief, then for the Columbus Dispatch. He had also written The German Octopus, prophesying that the Nazis would soon be doing what they were soon doing.

Last week Prophet Wolfe undertook his biggest assignment. He well knew that many a U. S. citizen tenaciously believes more evident untruths about Soviet Russia than he would ever permit himself to believe about any other government in the world. Most dangerous untruth at this time: that the hard-boiled bosses in the Kremlin are somehow longing to aid the democracies which they had been busily undermining for some 20 years.

Author Wolfe proposed to make U. S. readers see cynical, self-interested Soviet foreign policy not as it seems to Nazi-menaced democrats seeking anywhere for an ally, not as it appears in the radical and liberal press, but as it is in reality. He proposed to record the gulps by which Soviet imperialism swallowed Georgia, Outer Mongolia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and parts of Finland.

Sometimes Author Wolfe's record seemed too synoptic and sketchy. Sometimes he seemed to be writing in a library rather than from firsthand facts. Sometimes he seemed to be padding thin spots in his knowledge with chunks of William Henry Chamberlin and slices of Hermann Rauschning. Nevertheless, he made some important points tellingly:

>Russia, with the "most democratic constitution in the world," is really the oldest of the major dictatorships.

>In 1937 Russia became an outright fascist state. It accepted the leadership principle with Stalin as Fuehrer, executed all anti-fascist Bolsheviks who objected. >Until then Stalin could not have made a pact with Hitler. After 1937 (the Russian Purge) a pact between the Russian and the German fascists became almost inevitable.

Author Wolfe believes that Stalin signed the Moscow Pact with Oriental cunning. Others who read this book after the Nazi knockout of France may believe instead that the Red Army has become the Reichswehr's vast awkward squad, Russia itself a Nazi economic dependency. But last week, as the Red Army overran Bucovina and Bessarabia while Hitler gazed benevolently in other directions, it looked as if Prophet Wolfe might be right again, at least for a little while.

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