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Ideology and Soviet foreign policy

Every state and regime is subject to the influences of geography and history. The Soviet Union, with all its Marxist–Leninist ideology and its revolutionary claims, occupied roughly the same geographical area as the old Tsarist Russia, and perforce inherited its concerns and constraints.

The Dardanelles and Bosporus still linked the Black Sea with the Mediterranean; and the USSR took a leading part in negotiating the Montreux Convention on the straits (1936), which gave her a generally favourable position, especially on the question of the passage of warships through the straits. The Soviet Union still sprawled across two continents, with one extremity in Europe and the other on the Pacific; and when Stalin met Anthony Eden in March 1935 he showed his visitor a map, with Germany on one side, Japan on the other, and the USSR in between.

A purely ideological foreign policy was out of the question for the USSR – any illusions on that score were shed by the time the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed in March 1918. Much of Soviet foreign policy, espe-cially under Stalin, was hard-headed and cautious in the extreme, going for material gain if it was available, and bargaining with great toughness.

At another meeting between Stalin and Eden, in December 1941, Stalin remarked that a declaration of principle was algebra, but a treaty was arithmetic – and he preferred arithmetic. This does not mean that ideology was abandoned, or had no influence, especially on attitudes to the world outside the Soviet Union; for the question is above all one of the spectacles through which that outside world was seen. Lenin, at whose name every knee in the communist camp continued to bow, left his successors with important assumptions about the nature of international relations.

The most significant was his view of the nature of war. Lenin read Clausewitz, and accepted his view that war was the continuation of policy.

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Moreover, he believed that the existence of capitalist states meant that they were in a state of war with socialist states; and that capitalism, and its most extreme stage, imperialism, inevitably produced war between capitalist states themselves. It followed that two types of war were virtually inevit-able: war between capitalist and socialist powers, as seen in the wars of intervention against the Bolsheviks; and wars between imperialist powers, usually over markets and fields for investment, as in the First World War.

The second type of war was bound to weaken the capitalist states and assist the advance of socialism, as in fact it did in 1914–18; and in logic it was therefore in the interest of a socialist state (the Soviet Union, in prac-tice) to keep out of a capitalist and imperialist war as long as possible, allowing the imperialists to destroy one another. This analysis had lasting effects on Soviet policy, as Silvio Pons concludes: ‘The concept of war as the inevitable consequence of inter-capitalist conflicts became firmly embedded in the Bolshevik mentality, and . . . exercised a long-standing influence on Soviet foreign policy and on the communist movement.’10

Lenin also believed that, strictly speaking, no lasting alliance was possible between socialist and capitalist states. They were fundamentally opposed to one another, so that socialists must consider all bourgeois cap-italists as enemies, just as the capcap-italists would regard them as enemies.

This did not rule out particular arrangements for specific purposes – the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Treaty of Rapallo with Germany in 1922, the scheme under which Germany developed weapons in the USSR; but they could not be expected to be permanent. (There was nothing singular, or even particularly Bolshevik, in this: Palmerston held that Britain had no perpetual allies – only her interests were eternal.) The making of such particular arrangements was a matter of tactics; and Soviet negotiators were naturally expected to drive the hardest possible bargain.

Lenin attached much weight to this kind of ideological analysis, and yet he also behaved in foreign affairs as a hard-headed realist, operating within the limits of the possible and the expedient. Much the same seems to have been true of Stalin. We cannot tell how fully he remained commit-ted to the ideology, but he used the language, and it is probable that he was influenced by its thought-forms. Above all, he was unavoidably cast for the role of leader of world socialism, and as such he had to be seen to lead it.

Yet at the same time he was a realist, with a power base to protect; and he had to be cautious, for that base was not yet of great strength. The result was a foreign policy in which ideology and realism were always mixed, and could always be reconciled with one another, because after all the power base and the Workers’ Fatherland were one and the same.

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Ideological analysis resting on the belief in the hostility of all capitalist states was prominent in 1927–28, when Stalin publicly referred to the threat of a new imperialist war. He claimed that various events in 1927 (the British raid on the Soviet trade mission in London, and subsequent rupture of diplomatic relations; the French request for the recall of the Soviet Ambassador in Paris; the assassination of the Ambassador in Warsaw) were all parts of a single plot, designed to culminate in an attack on the USSR by the imperialist powers. The same assertion followed the first of Stalin’s show trials, in 1928, when mining engineers at the town of Shakhty in the Don Basin were accused of sabotaging coal production on the instructions of foreign capitalists. (The only evidence was their confessions; five were shot.) Stalin claimed in a speech of 1929 that such

‘bourgeois wrecking’ was proof that the capitalists were preparing new attacks on the Soviet Union.

How far such claims were believed, even by Stalin, must be open to doubt. Those were the days of the struggle against Trotsky, and the ‘war scare’ was used to denounce those who sought to divide the country in the face of an outside threat. Equally, there was little sign of the capitalists keeping the Soviet Union in a state of siege, or blockade. Relations with Germany were good, in political, commercial, and military terms. After the Treaty of Rapallo, over 2,000 German engineers and technicians went to work in Soviet industry. Junkers, the German aircraft firm, had a factory at Fili, near Moscow; and Krupps were making guns in factories in central Asia. Despite the Shakhty trial, in 1929 the USSR still had technical agree-ments with many German and American firms, and Standard Oil won a contract to build an oil refinery at Batum. As Lenin predicted, the capitalist search for profits caused firms to contribute to building up the Soviet economy; and the Soviet authorities were willing to allow them to do so.

The assumption of capitalist hostility continued to exist; but for prac-tical purposes it seems unlikely that an actual attack was expected, and economic co-operation was the order of the day. The same was true of Italy, the first fascist power, with which Soviet relations were good in the 1920s. During the first Soviet Five-Year Plan large orders for industrial equipment were placed in Italy; and for its part the Italian government, despite its declared hostility to communism, guaranteed the long-term credit arrangements which firms offered to their Soviet customers. Early in 1934, addressing the Seventeenth Communist Party Congress in Moscow, Stalin remarked that the Soviets were far from enthusiastic about the new fascist regime in Germany, but pointed out that fascism in Italy had not prevented the establishment of excellent relations with that country. As

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late as July 1940, Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, told the Italian Ambassador in Moscow that their two countries could co-operate on a simple geographical basis, with the Soviet Union maintaining its legitimate rights in the Black Sea and Italy doing the same in the Mediterranean.11

Despite all this, the rise of fascism and Nazism presented a serious ideological problem to the Soviet regime, and the answer produced had important effects on policy. As early as 1922 Comintern publications identified fascism as a manifestation of monopoly capitalism. It was easy to find in the writings of Marx and Engels the view that the bourgeoisie sometimes protected its interests by renouncing the direct exercise of power in favour of a dictator – Louis Napoleon was Marx’s case in point.

The parallel with fascist dictatorships seemed simple: fascism corres-ponded to a phase in the decay of capitalism; the bourgeoisie was trying to prolong its existence and protect its profits by bringing in a dictator; fascist leaders were paid by, and were the instruments of, big business. For a long time in the 1920s and early 1930s this theory was accompanied by the view that the bourgeoisie was also in alliance with the social democrats, who were themselves in league with the fascists. In November 1923, for example, the German Communist Party declared that the true fascists were not in Munich, where Hitler had just attempted his coup d’état, but in Berlin, where the social democrats were in alliance with the military fascists of the German Army. In 1928 Thaelmann, the German communist leader, described the German government as a ‘social-fascist gang’; which was at the time a conventional term of abuse for the social democrats.

As late as 1930–33, facing the rapid rise of Hitler, the communists accepted that the Nazis had revolutionary aims, but refused to regard them as the greatest danger. The Nazi movement, which was the symptom of the decay of capitalism, bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

Even when Hitler came to power, the Comintern line was that he was merely hastening the coming of the proletarian revolution; and the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler crushed his rivals in the SA, was greeted as a demonstration that the Nazi movement was tearing itself apart. If all this was true, then Nazi ideology was only so much mumbo-jumbo and mystification to cover the nakedness of the Nazi alliance with big business and monopoly capitalism; and so it came about that the communists, look-ing at Nazism through their own ideological spectacles, misunderstood its nature as much as did the bourgeois liberal statesmen of France and Britain. Moreover, if a change of attitude and policy were to be made, and an alliance against Nazism/fascism attempted, the communists would have to get themselves out of an ideological box. Social democrats could no

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longer be social fascists, but would have to become allies against the fascists. How could this be done?

The answer was found by redefining fascism, at the Seventh Congress of Comintern, held in Moscow in August 1935 to proclaim the new doctrine of the Popular Front against fascism. The Secretary-General, Dimitrov, described fascism as the open dictatorship of the most reac-tionary, chauvinist, and imperialist elements of finance capital; which allowed it to be deduced that social democrats and even bourgeois liberals did not fall into this category. The former simple rule that fascism amounted to finance capital, the bourgeoisie, and their accomplices was tacitly abandoned.

These contortions, and in particular the long struggle against the social democrats/social fascists, showed both the real effect of ideology on Soviet and Comintern policy, and the way in which that effect could be reversed for tactical reasons. They were developments which influenced the move-ment towards war in two different ways. First, the division on the Left of European politics, and notably the long feud between communists and social democrats in Germany, assisted the rise of fascism in general and of Hitler in particular. Defeated and disgruntled German socialists claimed after 1933 that without Stalin there would have been no Hitler: which is doubtless an exaggeration, but not wholly without substance. Second, the swing to the Popular Front against fascism was one of the elements which helped to move left-wing opinion in Europe towards the idea of war. For those who took their line from Moscow, war in defence of one’s own country and a bourgeois social order was anathema; but war to protect the Soviet Union was an imperative.

From the point of view of the Soviet government (which in the last resort meant Stalin), ideological influences on foreign policy appear to have diminished during the 1930s. Ideological analysis of the international situation naturally continued. In his speech to the Eighteenth Communist Party Congress in Moscow, on 10 March 1939, Stalin’s discussion of the European position was authentically Leninist. He distinguished between the aggressive capitalist powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) and the non-aggressive capitalist powers (Britain, France, and the USA); but he was conscious that all were capitalist first and foremost. The non-aggressive powers were as great a threat as the aggressive ones, because they were playing a waiting game, hoping that the forces of Nazism and communism would become engaged in war and exhaust one another. Indeed, Stalin had more to say about Britain and France than about Germany; he argued that the Western powers had, in the Munich agreement, yielded Czech territory

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to Germany as an inducement to the Germans to attack the USSR, and that their policy amounted to an encouragement of the aggressor states.

This was both orthodox Leninism and a plausible interpretation of the facts. But, though we cannot see into Stalin’s mind, there is every sign that his foreign policy in the late 1930s was dominated by a cautious, and sometimes ruthless, realism. The great purges and the pursuit of industrialisa-tion were presumably decisive in this: while they were in progress, foreign war was unthinkable unless it was absolutely forced upon him. (When it was so forced, in the Far East, by the danger of Japanese encroachment on Soviet territory in 1938 and 1939, the Red Army stood and fought, in large-scale and notably successful actions.) Stalin took precautions against a German attack – the Franco-Soviet Pact (signed on 2 May 1935), and the Popular Front policy adopted by Comintern in the same year. But both stopped carefully short of advocating or preparing war against Germany.

The alliance with France was not followed up by a military convention, or even serious military conversations, and this was not just the fault of France. The Comintern Congress that adopted the Popular Front stopped short of calling for war against fascism; the object was the limited one of preventing European states from remaining neutral, or even joining Germany in a possible war between Germany and the Soviet Union.

Stalin said in January 1934 that the advent of the Nazi regime in Germany, though unwelcome, need not preclude good relations. He tried to keep open a line to Berlin, making approaches through the press attaché at the Soviet embassy in Berlin in 1935, and through David Kandelaki, a trade representative in Berlin (and reputedly a boyhood friend of Stalin), in the same year. Soviet policy in the Spanish Civil War showed no profound commitment. It was not until 4 October 1936, two and a half months after the war began, that Stalin sent a telegram to the Spanish Communist Party expressing his support for the republic. Most Soviet aid to the republic was channelled through Comintern, allowing the government to adopt a posi-tion of reserve and to adhere to the non-intervenposi-tion agreement. Soviet military ‘advisers’ were sent to Spain, but no regular units as in the case of Germany and Italy. In so far as there was ideological involvement in Spain, it was as much against Trotskyists and anarchists as against fascists; and the NKVD extended the purges from its home ground to Spain, where Spanish and other foreign communists were their targets. The Soviet attitude during the Czechoslovakian crisis of 1938 was similarly cautious.

The Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939 was a stroke of realpolitik, coming to terms with the highest bidder. It is often described as a denial of ideo-logy; but this is not so – it was perfectly compatible with an ideological

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stance. All capitalist and imperialist states were enemies, and there was no reason to regard the Anglo-French imperialists as more favourable to the Soviet Union than the Germans.

The Nazi–Soviet Pact, despite its horrifying appearance and the shock it created, was the result of a marriage between Leninist ideology and political opportunism. As such, it was in line with much Soviet foreign policy between the wars, which followed a double line of realism and ideological commitment. When one asks how far the ideological element contributed to the coming of war in Europe, the answer seems to be three-fold. First, the very existence of communism and its international organ-isation, Comintern, introduced a degree of permanent discord in Europe.

The liberal democracies (France, Britain, and the smaller states) had a declared enemy within their own boundaries as well as in a foreign state;

and it was natural for them to seek ideological allies in fascism and Nazism, underestimating the threat to themselves inherent in those regimes. It was also difficult to deal with the USSR simply on a basis of power politics: an alliance with her was seen also as an alliance with communism. Second, the excessively simple and blinkered communist interpretation of Nazism, and long insistence that the social democrats/social fascists were the greater enemy, helped to open the way to the Nazis in Germany, and almost certainly caused Stalin to underrate the danger posed by Nazi Germany in international relations. This was almost a mirror-image of Western attitudes, based on ideological misconceptions and hopes of ‘appease-ment’. Third, the Nazi–Soviet Pact, which was at least compatible with Soviet ideology and well within a Leninist analysis of the European situ-ation, helped to create the circumstances for a war between the capitalist and imperialist states, which should in theory have been favourable to the interests of the Soviet Union and of communism. These influences were of real significance; but it is hard to think that they place Soviet communism high among the ideological forces pressing towards war in Europe.

References

1 Quoted in Jonathan Haslam, ‘Soviet Russia and the Spanish Problem’, in Robert Boyce and Joseph Maiolo (eds), The Origins of World War Two:

The Debate Continues (Basingstoke 2003), p. 73.

2 Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: the man and his era (London 1973), p. 361.

3 Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge (London 1971), esp. pp. 333, 336.

4 Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (London 2004), p. 10.

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5 1928: 73.3 million tonnes; 1935: 75 million tonnes. Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (London: Pelican 1972), p. 186.

6 Jean-Piere Bardet and Jacques Dupâquier (eds), Histoire des populations de

6 Jean-Piere Bardet and Jacques Dupâquier (eds), Histoire des populations de