The basic reason for this is that the political processes of Russia are strange and inscrutable. They contain nothing that is simple, and nothing that can be taken for granted. Rarely, if ever, are the colors straight black or white. The present communist apparatus of power probably embraces a large proportion of those persons who are fitted by training and inclination to take part in the processes of government, Any new regime will probably have to utilize the services of many of these people in order to be able to govern at all. Furthermore, we are incapable of assessing in each individual case the motives which have brought individuals in Russia into association with the communist movement. We are also incapable of assessing the degree to which such association will appear discreditable or criminal to other Russians, in retrospect. It would be dangerous for us to proceed on the basis of any fixed assumptions in such matters. We must always remember that to be the subject of persecution at the hands of a foreign government inevitably makes local martyrs out of persons who might otherwise only have been the objects of ridicule.
We would be wiser, therefore, in the case of territories freed from communist control, to restrict ourselves to seeing to it that individual ex-communists do not have the opportunity to reorganize as armed groups with pretenses to political power and that the local non-communist authority is given plenty of arms and help in any measures which they may desire to take with respect to them.
We may say, therefore, that we would not make it our aim to carry out with our own forces, on territory liberated from the communist authorities, aпy large-scale program of de-communication, and that In general we would leave this problem to whatever local authority might supplant Soviet rule.