The Communist said blandly that it was only to be expected, that it proved Russia was the dominant figure on the international scene, and so on. Then he added: “The only time I was worried was when I was listening to Churchill’s speech on the radio. For a minute, at the beginning, I thought he was going to rat on us.” So the Anglo-Soviet agreement is strictly one-way, but it has its uses. It may persuade Stalin that Churchill is not going to rat on him! Q. _Under what circumstances do you think Stalin would make a separate peace?_ A. At any time Hitler would let him have peace and remain in power and retain sufficient of the framework of the Soviet system to promise its continuance after the Western powers had defeated Hitler. It is plain now that, once the Germans had attacked, Stalin must have realized he had to fight or die, for Hitler was evidently sure of quick, complete victory. If Stalin had tried to capitulate, as some thought he would, without fighting, he could have obtained nothing better than obliteration of himself and his regime. Therefore Stalin fought, but this does not necessarily mean he intends to fight to the bitter end, with the Red Army backing up to the Urals, to Siberia, and the Soviet government moving to Sverdlovsk or Novosibirsk, as romantic enthusiasts would have it. Stalin probably defines his task to fight Hitler so well, make it cost the Germans so much, that Hitler will finally offer a peace Stalin could afford to accept on the basis of his expectation that Germany would in the long run lose the war. The Bolshevik surrender at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 was based on similar reasoning, that the Bolsheviks’ enemy, Germany, would eventually be removed by world revolution and that good Bolshevik strategy would seek first to preserve the structure, if only a skeleton structure, of the Soviet Socialist State, at any cost of immediate humiliation and suffering. The Russians have proved now by their destruction of the great dam at Dniepropetrovsk that they mean truly to scorch the earth before Hitler even if it means the destruction of their most precious possessions. The destruction of the Dnieper dam was to my mind the most important single event of the Russian-German war. Q. _Why was the blowing up of the Dnieper dam so important?_ A. Because Dnieprostroy was an object almost of worship to the Soviet people. Its destruction demonstrates a will to resist which surpasses anything we had imagined. I know what that dam meant to the Bolsheviks. I visited it in 1930 when it was being built under the supervision of the American engineer, Hugh Cooper. It was the largest, most spectacular, and most popular of all the immense projects of the First Five-Year Plan. It was the principal source of hydroelectric power for the Ukraine.