The invention of Soviet foreign policy
Lenin’s diplomacy
In November 1920 Lenin surprised Western observers and his fellow Bolsheviks alike by declaring that “we have entered a new period in which we have . . . won the right to our international existence in the network of capitalist states.” By 1921, the generally accepted turning point in Soviet policy, Bolshevism had made the transition from a revolutionary movement to a functioning state. The Civil War was won, the New Economic Policy ended the brutal “War Communism” and restored a measure of free market activity to peasants, and the Soviet government was organized along traditional ministerial lines (though subject to the dictates of the Communist Party). Russia was ready—needed—to pursue traditional relations with foreign powers in search of capital, trade, and technology for reconstruction. The emergence of what Stalin called “Socialism in one country” therefore obliged the Soviets to invent out of whole cloth a “Communist” foreign policy.
That invention took shape as a two-track approach whereby Russia (from 1922 the U.S.S.R.) would on the one hand continue to operate as the center of world revolution, dedicated to the overthrow of the capitalist powers, and yet conduct an apparently regular existence as a nation-state courting recognition and assistance from those same powers. The first track was the responsibility of the Comintern (Third International) under Grigory Zinovyev and Karl Radek; the second, of the Narkomindel (foreign commissariat) directed from 1920 to 1930 by the timid and cultured prewar nobleman, Georgy Chicherin. The Comintern enjoyed direct access to the Politburo, whereas the Narkomindel had no voice even in the Central Committee until 1925. In practice, however, the foreign policy interests of the U.S.S.R. dominated even the Comintern to such an extent that other Communist parties were not factions in their own country’s politics so much as Soviet fifth columns operating abroad. When subversive activity flagged, diplomacy came to the fore; when diplomacy was unfruitful, revolution was emphasized. The goal was not to encourage “peace” or “progressive reform” in the West, but solely to enhance Soviet power. Thus Lenin instructed Comintern parties “to unmask not only open social patriotism but also the falseness and hypocrisy of social pacifism”; in other words, to do all that was possible to undermine Moscow’s rivals on the left as well as on the right through the infiltration and subversion of Western labor unions, armed forces, newspapers, and schools. Yet Moscow readily ignored or confounded the efforts of local Communists when diplomatic opportunities with foreign countries seemed promising. The scent of betrayal this caused made mandatory the secrecy, discipline, and purges demanded of Communist parties abroad.
At the third congress of the Comintern in 1921 even Trotsky, the impassioned advocate of world revolution, admitted that the struggle of the proletariat in other countries was slackening. At that time the mutiny of Russian sailors at Kronshtadt and widespread famine in Russia impelled the party to concentrate on consolidating its power at home and reviving the economy. The Soviets, therefore, turned to the capitalists who, Lenin jeered, would “sell the rope to their own hangmen” in search of profits. Indeed, Western leaders, especially Lloyd George, viewed the vast Russian market as a kind of panacea for Western industrial stagnation and unemployment. But he and others misunderstood the nature of the Soviet state. Private property, commercial law, and hard currency no longer existed in Russia; one did business, not in a market, but on terms laid down by a state monopoly. What was more, by 1928 the whole point of trade was to allow the Soviet economy to catch up to the West in the shortest possible time and thus achieve complete self-sufficiency. It was, in George Kennan’s words, a “trade to end all trade.”
The Anglo-Russian commercial pact of March 1921 and secret contacts with German military and civilian agents were the first Soviet openings to the Great Powers. Both culminated the following year in the Genoa Conference, where the Soviet representatives appeared, to the relief of their counterparts, in striped pants and on good behaviour. Indeed, having seized power as the minority faction of a minority party, the Bolsheviks sought legitimacy abroad as the most adamant sticklers for etiquette and legalism. But the Western powers insisted on an end to Communist propaganda and recognition of the tsarist debts as prerequisites to trade. Chicherin countered with a fanciful claim for reparations stemming from the Allied interventions, at the same time denying that Moscow bore any responsibility for the doings of the Comintern. As Theodore von Laue has written, “To ask the Soviet regime . . . to refrain from making use of its revolutionary tools was as futile as to ask the British Empire to scrap its fleet.” Instead, a German-Russian knot was tied in the Treaty of Rapallo, whereby the U.S.S.R. was able to take advantage of Germany’s bitterness over Versailles to split the capitalist powers. Trade and recognition were not the only consequences of Rapallo; in its wake began a decade of clandestine German military research on Russian soil.
Upon the occupation of the Ruhr the Soviets declared solidarity with the Berlin government. By August 1923, however, with Stresemann seeking negotiations with France and German society disintegrating, revolutionary opportunism again took precedence. The Politburo went so far as to designate personnel for a German Communist government, and Zinovyev gave German Communists the signal to stage a putsch in Hamburg. When it proved a fiasco, the Soviets returned to their Rapallo diplomacy with Berlin. The political victories of the leftists MacDonald in Britain and Herriot in France then prompted recognition of the Soviet government by Britain (February 1, 1924), Italy (February 7), France (October 28), and most other European states. Later in 1924, however, publication during the British electoral campaign of the infamous (and probably forged) “Zinovyev letter” ordering Communists to disrupt the British army created a sensation. British police also suspected Communists of subversive activities during the bitter General Strike of 1926 and launched the “Arcos raid” on the Soviet trade delegation in London in May 1927. Anglo-Soviet relations did not resume until 1930.
Stalin’s diplomacy
Lenin’s incapacity and death (January. 21, 1924) triggered a protracted struggle for power between Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. In foreign policy their conflict seemed one of an emphasis on aiding the European peoples “in the struggle against their oppressors” (Trotsky) versus an emphasis on “building Socialism in one country” (Stalin). But that was largely a caricature meant to discredit Trotsky as an “adventurer.” During the intraparty struggle, however, Soviet foreign policy drifted. The “partial stabilization of capitalism in the West” through the Dawes Plan and the Locarno treaties was a rude setback for Moscow. When Germany later joined the League of Nations, the Soviet press warned Germany against this “false step” into “this wasp’s nest of international intrigue, where political sharpers and thieving diplomatists play with marked cards, strangle weak nations, and organize war against the U.S.S.R.” But the Germans were not about to throw away their Russian card. Negotiations to expand the Rapallo accord produced the Treaty of Berlin (April 24, 1926) by which Germany pledged neutrality in any conflict between the U.S.S.R. and a third power, including the League of Nations. Germany also provided a 300,000,000-mark credit and in the late 1920s accounted for 29 percent of Soviet foreign trade.
From 1921 on, the Politburo judged Asia to be the region that offered the best hope for Socialist expansion, although this required collaboration with “bourgeois nationalists.” The Bolsheviks suppressed their own subject nationalities at the first opportunity, yet declared their solidarity with all peoples resisting Western imperialism. In 1920 they paid homage to the “great and famous Amīr Amānollāh” in cementing relations with the new Afghan leader, and they were the first to sign treaties with Nationalist Turkey. In September 1920 the Comintern sponsored a conference of “the peoples of the East” at Baku. Zinovyev and Radek presided over a contentious lot of Central Asian delegates, whose own quarrels, of which the Armenian-Turkish was the most vitriolic, made a mockery of any notion of regional or political solidarity. Thereafter, Soviet Asian activity went underground, alternately aiding Communists against nationalists like Reza Khan and Mustafa Kemal, and aiding nationalists against the European powers.
The centerpiece of Soviet designs in Asia could only be China, whose liberation Lenin viewed in 1923 as “an essential stage in the victory of socialism in the world.” In 1919 and 1920 the Narkomindel made much of its revolutionary sympathy for China by renouncing the rights acquired by tsarist Russia in its concessionary treaties. But soon the Soviets were sending troops into Outer Mongolia, allegedly at the request of local Communists, and concluding their own treaty with Peking (May 31, 1924) that granted the U.S.S.R. a virtual protectorate over Outer Mongolia—its first satellite—and continued ownership of the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria.
The political disintegration of China, and their own devious tactics, inevitably complicated Soviet policy. While pursuing superficially correct relations with Peking, the Politburo placed its future hopes on the Canton-based Nationalists (KMT), whose members were impressed by the Bolsheviks’ example of how to seize and master a vast undeveloped country. In 1922 the Comintern directed Chinese Communists to enroll in the KMT even as Adolf Yoffe renounced all Soviet intentions of importing Marxism into China. The Communist presence in the KMT grew rapidly until, after Sun Yat-sen’s death in March 1925, Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin became the main strategist for the KMT. Still, the Soviets were uncertain how to proceed. In March 1926, Trotsky counseled caution lest precipitate attacks on foreign interests in China impel the imperialists—including Japan—into anti-Soviet action. Indeed, Stalin did his best to woo Tokyo, noting that Japanese nationalism had great anti-Western potential.
On March 20, 1926, Chiang Kai-shek turned the tables with a coup that elevated him within the KMT and landed many Communists in prison. Ignoring the outrage of the Chinese Communists, Borodin remained in Chiang’s good graces, whereupon Chiang staged the northern expedition in which he greatly expanded KMT power with the help of Communist organizations in the countryside. But Borodin also advised leftist KMT members to leave the south for a new base in the Wu-han cities to escape Chiang’s immediate control. This “Left KMT” or “Wu-han Body” was to steer the KMT in a Communist direction and eventually seize control. The Soviet Party Congress in January 1927 even declared China the “second home” of world revolution, and Stalin confided to a Moscow audience that Chiang’s forces were “to be utilized to the end, squeezed out like a lemon, and then thrown away.” But Chiang preempted again by ordering a bloody purge of Shanghai Communists on April 12–13, 1927. Trotsky blamed Stalin’s lack of faith in revolutionary zeal for the debacle, declaring that he should have unleashed the Communists sooner. Instead, the Left KMT eroded, many of its former adherents going over to Chiang. With the party thus fractured, Stalin changed his mind and ordered an armed revolt by Communists against the KMT. This, too, ended in carnage, and by mid-1928 only scattered bands (one under Mao Zedong) remained to take to the hills.
Stalin’s triumph at home and failure in China ended the formative era of Soviet foreign policy. The Politburo had expelled Zinovyev, Radek, and Trotsky by October 1926; the Party Congress condemned all deviation from the Stalinist line in December 1927; and Trotsky went into exile in January 1929. Thenceforth Soviet foreign policy and the Comintern line reflected the will of one man. Communist parties abroad likewise purged all but Stalinists and reorganized in rigid imitation of the U.S.S.R.’s ruthless dictatorship. The Sixth Party Congress (summer 1928) anathematized social democracy in the strongest terms ever and strengthened its call for subversive activities against democratic institutions. Above all, Stalin declared after an ephemeral war scare of 1926 that the era of peaceful coexistence with capitalism was coming to an end and ordered vigorous measures to prepare the U.S.S.R. for war. The New Economic Policy gave way to the First Five-Year Plan (October 1, 1928) for collectivization of agriculture and rapid industrialization, which condemned millions of peasants to expropriation, starvation, or exile to Siberia, but enabled the regime to sell wheat abroad to pay for industrial goods. Stalin imported entire factories from the United States, France, Italy, and Germany as the basis for the Soviet steel, automotive, aviation, tire, oil, and gas industries. In 1927 he launched the first of the show trials of industrial “wreckers” who had allegedly conspired with reactionaries and foreign agents, and in 1929 he purged all those—the “Right Opposition”—who questioned the Five-Year Plan.
The Bolsheviks interpreted their survival and consolidation in the 1920s as confirmation of their reading of the objective forces of history. In fact, Soviet foreign policy could boast of few successes. It was the Allied defeat of Germany in 1918 and the Red Army’s military prowess that permitted the revolution to survive; the Versailles restraints on Germany and cordon sanitaire in eastern Europe that sheltered Russia from the West as much as it sheltered Europe from Bolshevism; American pressure on Japan that restored Vladivostok to the U.S.S.R.; Anglo-French recognition that opened much of the world to Soviet trade; and Western technology that enabled Stalin to hope for rapid economic modernization. The link with Germany was a Soviet achievement, but even it had a double edge, for it helped Germany to prepare for its own remilitarization. Of course, Stalin was ultimately right that a crisis of capitalism and new round of imperialism and war were just around the corner, but in part it was Comintern assaults on Western liberals and Socialists that helped to undermine the fragile stability of the 1920s.
