The Bezbozhniks’ battle against God would be meaningless unless they thought, however subconsciously, that there must be something there to fight. Twice I have seen Stalin stand at the graveside of a lifetime comrade, once at the burial of Frunze and once at Kirov’s, and each time as the final words were spoken and the earth fell and the bells of the Kremlin tolled, I scrutinized his face for a sign of his thoughts and under the spell of the moment I always thought I could see the flicker of a question across his gloomy face. As a matter of fact I suppose he was absorbed in thinking how to finish the ceremony as quickly as possible in order to get back to his office and ensure that a good Stalin man succeeded the dead. Q. _Is it true that in order to curry favor with the outside world the Soviet government has restored freedom of worship?_ A. Freedom of worship in the Soviet Union was never frankly and publicly prohibited; it was merely quietly strangled. Today its public restoration is a gesture toward the outside world and an effort to canalize even the religious energies sleeping in the hearts of the older people, into national defense. All the old shibboleths of religion and patriotism and nationalism and local pride and mystic faith in Holy Russia which for two decades had been banned have now been revived. In the supreme trial of war the Russian people have returned instinctively to the deep primitive traditions common to man everywhere. Their Bolshevik masters have apparently recognized the desirability of kindling fighting energy from any fuel, and have permitted a veritable carnival of emotions which a short while ago would have been condemned as “bourgeois” and “counterrevolutionary.” Who knows what further changes the war may bring? Q. _American friends of the Soviet Union claim that her present resistance to the Germans entitles her now to our moral approval, and that we are obligated to give it to our “Ally.” Is this true?_ A. I am sure Stalin does not care for our moral approval. He would much rather have our material support. Those Americans who changed their views of the Soviet Union either when Stalin signed his pact with Hitler in August 1939, or when the Red Army attacked Finland, or when it marched into Poland, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia, or again when the Germans attacked Russia and the Red Army fought back--such observers only proved that their judgment of Stalin’s system was founded on mere day-to-day, surface events. When they approved of the Soviet Union it was for wrong reasons; when they disapproved it was for wrong reasons. None of the events just named meant any change in the nature of the Soviet regime. If one approved of it today for resisting Germany, one ought to have approved of it in August 1939 for having signed up with Germany. Both acts had the same motive: the self-interest of the Stalin regime.