It is coming to be taken for granted that, next to Wall Street, the present Soviet government has more bad guesses on international issues chalked up to its credit than any other important body extant. This time they were not guilty of picking the wrong horse: they seem to have escaped it by ignoring the race altogether. Though the orators at the meeting of the Third International and again at the All-Union Congress of the Party aired the customary phrases concerning the world revolution and the deepening contradictions of the capitalist order, the government either was not fully aware of the crisis in Austria or chose to disregard it in favor of the Japanese threat on the eastern border. There were two predominant, reasons for this negligence, I think; one is the obvious and much-publicized Russian nationalism which is afraid to jeopardize its economic arrangements with foreign countries by "meddling" in their internal affairs; the other is the Bolshevik scorn of the Viennese Social Democrats, antipathy which long outdates the present series of that party's collapses. Bound by the toils of the Marxian dialectic, the Stalinites could not consistently admit the presence in Austria of a revolutionary movement. It did not bear the approved brand, it preserved a united from of reds and pinks (which was no slight triumph of leadership), and it took no orders from the Kremlin.

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The followers of Jo Stalin may relapse now into a state of complacent triumph, for they have won the debate. The Austrian Socialists depended on leaders so imbued with the glories of constitutionalism that they compromised themselves into a hopeless position; nor were they, as the fugitive Bauer admits, goaded to a policy of spineless inaction by the conservatism of the rank-and-file; on the contrary, Dr. Bauer relates the difficulty the Party heads encountered in substituting "wise" and "cool" tactics for the "impetuosity" of the workers, who disliked seeing their organization being hamstrung without resistance. And when the Socialists did take up arms it was against the orders of their leaders--too late, as was evident, almost from the first. Moscow wins the debate, the Social Democrats lived up to their reputations, made the customary strategical mistakes; but--was the debate worth winning? The Kremlin has scored its point, but it has lost Vienna. Surely it would have been more worthwhile to discard this prim sectarian attitude and to have played ball with the Socialists, more worthwhile to cooperate, underground if necessary, with the Austrian government and to bring all possible pressure for direct, speedy action to bear upon the Central Committee, rather than smugly to tell the defeated Viennese, "We told you so."