It was the first time the Germans had come up against a people more savage than themselves. The Bolsheviks were ahead of the Nazis in pronouncing that the end justifies the means, and the oriental Russians surpassed the occidental Germans in cruelty. The Germans have known Hitlerism only since 1933 and until that time they had normal contacts with the outside world. The Russians have known nothing but Bolshevism since 1918 and from that moment on have been hermetically sealed from the outside world. For war-making this savage insularity has its uses. The Red Army is even more fanatically homogeneous in its political faiths and hatreds than is the Nazi Army. Everybody under the age of forty in Russia today has experienced either throughout life or in adult life nothing but the Soviet regime. The Russians have the advantage that they have been practicing totalitarians all their lives and are used to it. For the civilian population not immediately in the path of the battles there was less change in the move from peace to war in the Soviet Union than in any other belligerent state, because the Russians have been living on a war footing since 1918. During this generation of hardships their Asiatic characteristics have been deepened, their fatalistic contempt for death increased. They are content to let the Party guide their emotions. There are no Hamlets among them. The Russians Dostoevsky wrote about, who dreamed and sorrowed and could not act--all these have long been eliminated. Also no living inhabitant of the Soviet Union has been corrupted by ease or luxury! Yet because they are completely cut off from the outside world the Russians think the Soviet Union superior to any other country. This is an advantage in war. Isolated and youthful, the Russians after twenty-three years of suffering and historically unparalleled loss of life through revolution, famine, and terror, still were not disillusioned by a political, social, and economic system which had given them a standard of living and culture beneath that of any large white community in the world. There were no ideological divisions to rend the nation, since all who differed with the ruling clique were liquidated the moment the difference became apparent. Hence there was no Fifth Column in Russia. Since Soviet justice or Stalin policy goes on the principle that it is better to execute a hundred innocents than to let one guilty escape, the purge of 1934-1938 probably did eliminate important Fifth Columnists, together with many valuable military and industrial leaders.