THE LEGACY OF STALINISM
II. FOREIGN AFFAIRS
The contrast between the beginning and the close of the Stalin era is equally striking when we consider Russia's attitude towards the world and her foreign policy during that period.
It will be remembered that by the middle of the 1920's the Bolshevik mind had become profoundly disturbed by the isolation of the Russian revolution. It then began to reconcile and to adapt itself to isolation, and even to glory in it. This mood found its apotheosis in the slogan ‘socialism in one country’, the dogma with which Stalin proclaimed the self-sufficiency and self-containment of the Russian revolution. Henceforth, adherence to this dogma became the test of loyalty to Bolshevism. Any deviation from it was branded as treason; and those who represented the revolutionary internationalism of earlier days were marked as apostates.
The halcyon days of ‘socialism in one country’ lasted until the Second World War.
Throughout the late 1920's and 1930's Stalin's diplomacy sought, implicitly or explicitly, to preserve the international status quo and to enhance Russia's position within it. ‘We do not want a single square yard of foreign land’ was the maxim of Chicherin and Litvinov, the two Foreign Ministers of the time.
‘Not a square yard of foreign land’ might also be said to have been the watchword inspiring the Communist International, which continued to claim, however, that no land on the globe was foreign to it.
The main purpose of the Stalinized Comintern was to do political guard duty for the ‘only proletarian State’ so that the building of socialism in ‘one-sixth of the earth's territory’ should not be disturbed by capitalist pressure or — by revolutionary developments in the remaining five-sixths, which might interrupt the Soviet Union's ‘peaceful coexistence’ with capitalism.
The Communist Parties refrained from moves which might have embarrassed Soviet diplomacy in its dealings with foreign governments. They backed all and every one of Stalin's diplomatic manoeuvres either indirectly by exercising pressure upon the bourgeois governments, or directly by lending open support to the successive manoeuvres on the ground that no matter how contradictory these might be, they also expressed the quintessence of international proletarian interest. It was no longer Bolshevik Russia which waited for world revolution — world revolution now had to wait until Russia had built up her socialism.
The records of the Stalinized Comintern are, of course, full of fantastic battle-cries, wild forecasts of imminent world revolution, and the most rabid upbraiding of all bourgeois and Social Democratic Parties. The records also speak of some ‘putschist’ incidents, stray forays in insurrectionist tactics, and displays of pseudo-revolutionary trigger-happiness. It is enough to recall here the Canton rising of 1927, or the bombastic resolutions of the Sixth Congress of the Comintern (1928), which instructed all member parties to direct their fire primarily against the social democrats in preparation for an imminent assault on the bastions of world capitalism.
However, these diversions did not affect the main trend of Soviet and Comintern policy. The communist following could not be kept inactive for an indefinite time without a consequent breakdown in its morale. When the General Staff would not allow it to engage in genuine fighting, it had to permit at least some mock battles. The need for these was the more pressing the more the communist ranks became aware that they were ordered either to render yeoman service to ‘class enemies’ or merely to mark time. The ‘ultra-left’ turns of the Comintern came, as a rule, after spells of ‘rightism’, which had usually left the aftertaste of self-abasement in the mouths of the rank and file.
But whenever Soviet diplomacy was engaged in serious dealings with foreign powers, the Comintern always sounded the cease-fire to its mock battles and switched back to rightist, ‘opportunist’ policies in which it sometimes persisted with suicidal consequences. This was true of the Communist Party of China in 1925-7; on Stalin's orders, it remained subservient to the Kuomintang up to the moment when Chiang Kai-shek ordered a massacre of the communists, and even during the massacre itself. This was also true of the French and Spanish Communist Parties during the Popular Fronts of 1936-8, when the policy of ‘collective security’ and of the anti-Hitler alliance with the West demanded that the radicalism of the rank and file in the Popular Fronts be kept in check. Then, in the period of the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement (1939-41), the Comintern sought to gain acceptance of that agreement by the world's working classes by telling them that not the Third Reich but France and Britain were their chief enemies. At the next turn the Comintern became the mouthpiece of the anti-Fascist Grand Alliance, until Stalin, anxious to prove his reliability to Churchill and Roosevelt, rose up early one morning, in April 1943, and ‘clave the wood for a burnt offering’. Unlike the Biblical Isaac on the way to Moriah, the Comintern did not even ask ‘Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’
Was Stalin then the great Saboteur and betrayer of world revolution, as Trotsky saw him?
Yes and no. He certainly did his best to destroy the potentialities for revolution abroad — in the name of the sacred egoism of the Russian revolution. But how real and important were those potentialities between the two world wars? Trotsky saw that period as one sequence of great but missed revolutionary opportunities. The historian of the period cannot be so sure about its latent possibilities. He can gauge only its actuality, not its potentiality.
Stalin worked on the assumption that there was no chance of a communist victory in the West or in the East. If that was so, then he was sacrificing to the selfishness of Bolshevik Russia the shadow, not the substance, of world revolution. He believed that by building up the Soviet ‘citadel of socialism’ he was making the only contribution towards world revolution which could be made at the time. This conviction allowed him to treat the labour movements of the world with boundless cynicism and contempt.
He hoped that ‘socialism in one country’ would be his life's work and his party's philosophy for a whole historical epoch.
That epoch came to an end much earlier than he expected. It was brought to a close by the Second World War and its aftermath, in which the dynamics of the Soviet State and the genuine social ferment in the world combined to open a new and momentous chapter of revolution.
Conservative minds in the West have seen in Stalin the evil plotter responsible for all the revolutions of our day, because to the conservative mind revolution is always the result of plotting and conspiracy. The impartial historian will take a somewhat more complex view of this chapter in Stalin's career. He will record that in the last decade of his life Stalin struggled desperately and unavailingly to save his policy of self-containment, or what remained of it, from the tempest of the time.
He was guided by motives of orthodox strategy, not of international revolution, when, in 1939-40, he sent his armies to the Baltic lands and to the Ukrainian and Byelorussian marches of Poland. He sought to deny to Hitler these jumping-off grounds for an attack on Russia.
He could not and would not risk leaving the tiny Baltic States as independent buffers between his and Hitler's war machines. He had to incorporate them in the Soviet Union — or eise, he was convinced, they would be absorbed by Greater Germany. But the Soviet Union could not effectively absorb those countries without bringing their regimes into line with its own. So Stalin's armoured brigades rolled to the Baltic coast and to the River Bug to occupy strategic outposts; but they carried revolution in the turrets of their tanks.
Even then Stalin produced the Tsars' title deeds to the annexed lands and claimed to have collected for Russia merely her old patrimony. He was still anxious to intimate that this departure from self-containment was only incidental and local in character; and that it had been dietated by national-Russian, not by international-revolutionary motives.
Then he reverted to self-containment. This was the basis of his war-time cooperation with Roosevelt and Churchill. Soviet self-containment was the very premiss of joint allied policy, written into the paragraphs and clauses of the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam agreements.
However, those agreements also divided spheres of influence between the Allies; and the whole of Eastern and much of Central Europe was allotted to victorious Russia. It was stipulated that this was to be the sphere of influence of Russia, not of communism. In retrospect, it appears extraordinarily shortsighted of the great statesmen of the West to have believed that Russia's personality could be thus split and her national-power ambitions separated from her social and political outlook. But the illusion was not merely Roosevelt's and Churchill's. It was shared by Stalin.
It may, of course, be argued that Stalin's behaviour during the war was nothing but make-believe, and that all his solemn vows of non-interference in the internal affairs of neighbouring countries were dust thrown into the eyes of his allies, On the other hand, Stalin's deeds at the time lent weight to his vows. Had this not been so, how is one to account for the strange circumstance that Churchill, the inspirer of the anti-Bolshevik Crusade of 1918-20 and the future author of the Fulton speech, could say in the House of Commons as late as towards the end of 1944:
‘Marshal Stalin and the Soviet leaders wish to live in honourable friendship and equality with the Western democracies. … I feel also that their word is their bond. I know of no government which Stands to its obligations even in its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government. I decline absolutely to embark here on a discussion about Russian good faith.’
The point is that both Churchill and Roosevelt had solid evidence that Stalin's policy was in fact geared to self-containment. They saw Stalin acting, not merely speaking, as any nationalist Russian statesman would have done in his place — they saw him divested, as it were, of his communist character. He was approaching the problems of the Russian zone of influence in a manner calculated to satisfy nationalist Russian demands and aspirations and to wreck the chances of communist revolution in those territories.
He prepared to exact and did in fact exact heavy reparations from Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Finland, and Eastern Germany. This, he knew, would make the name of communism as well as that of Russia odious to the peoples of those countries, to whom it did not even occur to distinguish between the two. With a zeal worthy of a better cause he insisted on slicing territories away from Poland, Hungary, and Germany, and on expelling many millions of their Citizens from their homes.
From Stalin's viewpoint these policies made sense only if he assumed that in all those countries bourgeois regimes would survive, that is if he had no design to impose communist governments on them. If he had been viewing those countries as future provinces of his empire, it would have been the height of folly on his part to insist on levying in the most unrelenting manner heavy reparations and enforcing expulsions. He expected, of course, that victorious Russia would enjoy a position of diplomatic and economic preponderance in neighbouring countries ruled by ‘friendly governments’, to quote the insipid cliche then fashionable. But he also expected that those governments would remain essentially bourgeois.
The fact which emerges with equal clarity from the internal evidence of Stalin's own moves and from the numerous memoirs of Western statesmen is that Stalin gravely underrated the revolutionary ferment which was to engulf Europe and Asia towards the end of the war and after. In his calculations he either made no allowance for it or, if he did, he took it for granted that through his Communist Parties he would be able to master and calm the ferment. He looked at the post-1945 world through the prism of the pre-1939 era.
The state of the world in the decades between the wars had convinced him that he had been right all along in discounting or disregarding the revolutionary potentialities of foreign communism; and he continued to disregard them. He saw every foreign nation as a bulwark of social and political conservatism. He tried to persuade Roosevelt that the overwhelming majority of the French were loyal to Petain. ‘Communism would fit Germany as a saddle fits a cow’ — in this mordant phrase he expressed his view of Germany's revolutionary potentialities to the Polish politician Mikolajczyk. He urged the French communists to take their cue from General de Gaulle at a time when they were the chief driving force behind the French Resistance. He urged the Italian communists to make peace with the House of Savoy and with the government of Marshal Badoglio, and to vote for the re-enactment of Mussolini's Lateran pacts with the Vatican. He did his best to induce Mao Tse-tung to come to terms with Chiang Kai-shek, because he believed, as he said at Potsdam, that the Kuomintang was the only force capable of ruling China. He angrily remonstrated with Tito because of the latter's revolutionary aspirations, and demanded his consent to the restoration of the monarchy in Yugoslavia.
Nothing could sum up Stalin's mood better than this war-time dialogue with Tito:
‘Be careful, [says Stalin] the bourgeoisie in Serbia is very strong!’
‘Comrade Stalin, [says Tito] I do not agree… The bourgeoisie in Serbia is very weak.’
‘The bourgeoisie is very strong!’ not only in Serbia but in China, Poland, Rumania, France, Italy — everywhere! This might have been the pivot of Stalin's policies.
He stared with incredulity and fear at the rising tides of revolution which threatened to wash away the rock of ‘socialism in one country’, on which he had built his temple. This so-called prophet of Marxism and Leninism appears at this moment as the most conservative statesman in the world.
He was still confident that he could stem the rising tides — he still wielded the magic wand which made these tides ebb and flow. It did not occur to him that the magic wand might break in his hands and that its fragments might soon be tossing about on the currents and cross-currents of contemporary history.
How Stalinist self-containment was subsequently wrecked, partly by forces beyond Stalin's control and partly by Stalin himself, is a complex story which can be only briefly summarized here.
The Yugoslav revolution inflicted the first telling blow on Stalin's policy. In the Teheran-Yalta period Yugoslavia had not been allotted to the Soviet sphere of influence — it was to have been a border zone between the British and the Russian spheres. Stalin was therefore doubly anxious to keep in check the revolutionary forces of Yugoslavia, whose ascendancy threatened to compromise his relations with the Western Allies. For long he disparaged Tito's partisans and extolled the counter-revolutionary Chetniks of Drazha Mikhailovich as the alleged heroes of anti-Nazi resistance. The embittered Tito, still one of the most faithful agents of the Stalinist Comintern, implored him: ‘If you cannot send us assistance, then at least do not hamper us.’ Stalin, so Tito relates, ‘stamped with rage’ and tried to induce Tito to agree not merely to the restoration of the monarchy but to a possible British occupation of Yugoslavia, which would have secured the monarchy's survival. Then, at Yalta, he forced Tito into a coalition with the men of the old regime, a decision which, according to Tito, ‘provoked the deepest indignation among the supporters of the National Liberation Movement in Yugoslavia’. Tito's unruly revolutionary moves were to Stalin a ‘stab in the back of the Soviet Union’.[14]
Stalin's ‘rage’ and ‘anger’ can easily be understood. It came to him as a shock that he was beginning to lose control over the revolutionary ferment and even over his own Communist Parties. He had been confident that he could at any time use them as pawns in his great diplomatic game of chess. The pawns were now showing a life of their own and beginning to play their own game. The great chess master, confounded and furious, could not even lay hands on them. For one thing, the Communist Parties concerned were not always within his reach. For another, he had to save his reputation as the friend, inspirer, and leader of world communism — he could not afford the odium of an open betrayal. He had to yield to the will of the pawns and then pretend that it was he who moved them.
This inevitably produced deep cracks in the Grand Alliance. Was it perhaps after all Stalin who was moving the pawns? Roosevelt and Churchill began to wonder; and they prepared and made their own counter-moves. Was it perhaps Stalin after all? we may still ask. Even now, eight or nine years later, it is still impossible to say exactly what happened in each particular case. The ‘accident’ of Tito's break with Moscow has brought to light a few significant episodes in Stalin's struggle to preserve self-containment, which might otherwise have remained hidden in the archives for a long time to come. How many such incidents relating to other East European countries still remain hidden?
What is certain is that as Stalin began reluctantly to identify himself with the rising forces of foreign communism his Western allies also began to identify him with those forces. The Grand Alliance was giving place to the Great Enmity. Stalin then sought reinsurance against the West; and communist regimes in the Russian sphere of influence promised to provide it. And then it was without a doubt he who moved the pawns.[15]
This departure from self-containment was caused, however, not only by the new international tension but also by the latent forces of revolutionary dynamics within the Soviet Union. The Grand Alliance had kept those forces in check; the break-up of the Alliance released them.
The urge to carry revolution abroad ‘on the bayonet points’ is alive in any revolutionary State which has been compelled first to defend itself against a foreign aggressor and then to send its armies to conquer the aggressor's lands and dominions. In Napoleon's France the urge was even stronger than in Stalin's Russia. In both cases armies raised in the climate of revolution came to dominate and administer countries where the ancien regime was still intact. At home, officers and men had been taught to abhor the ruling classes, the institutions, and the customs and habits of the ancien regime. Then they were ordered to meet with obliging smiles the same old ruling classes in the conquered lands, to supervise with impartial detachment the working of their institutions, and to adjust themselves to alien customs and habits. This was an almost impossible demand.
Stalin's generals and colonels had from their earliest years imbibed hatred and contempt of capitalist enterprise; they had been taught to consider bourgeois and Social Democratic Parties as implacable enemies; and had been conditioned to think and act within the framework of a single party system. Is it to be wondered at that as Military Governors of Saxony, Brandenburg, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania they were little inclined to administer these countries in such a way as to allow capitalist business to function as usual and non-Communist Parties, whose leaders did not even conceal their hatred and contempt of the communist conquerors, to carry on their activities without hindrance?
From the beginning, the Soviet Military Governors were caught up in a conflict between their own ingrained beliefs and their new duties. They could not sincerely carry out these duties without betraying their upbringing and outlook, or even without becoming disloyal to their own government, as some of them did. If they were to remain loyal Stalinists, they had to treat the demand of ‘non-interference in domestic affairs’ as mere make-believe. It would have been miraculous if they had managed to adjust their own minds to that demand; but even a totalitarian regime cannot work psychological miracles in its citizens.[16]
Stalin could well promise in all sincerity that he would not strive to impose communism on the occupied countries, but the men deputed to give effect to this promise on the spot could not but act in a way which made his words sound like deliberate falsehoods.
Thus at least three factors combined to undo Stalin's policy of self-containment: genuine revolutionary ferment abroad; the revolutionary urge in Stalin's own armies; and the jockeying for positions among allies rapidly turning into potential enemies.
The expansion of communism was facilitated by the fact that soon after the war the United States, in part relying on its monopoly in atomic weapons and in part responding to popular pacifism, disbanded its armies and left in Europe only a token occupation force. Stalin now knew that he could go ahead with the establishment of communist regimes, without exposing Russia to effective retaliation from the West. Had he had any ground to fear such retaliation, he would hardly have risked the drift away from self-containment.
So far, the expansion of communism was still confined to the countries which had by common Allied agreement been allotted to the Soviet sphere of influence —
Yugoslavia being the only exception. The terms of the Teheran-Yalta-Potsdam pacts had been so ill-defined and vague that Stalin could still maintain that he was acting within his rights and that it was the Western powers who illegitimately tried to interfere in the internal affairs of the Soviet zone. Once again he tried to go back to self-containment, self-containment, that is, within an area expanded in agreement with the Western Allies. He was still confident that beyond that area no revolutionary development would upset or disturb the balance of power which had resulted from the war. He cold-shouldered the embattled Greek communists; and he bluntly urged Tito to withdraw support from them. He believed that he still wielded the magic wand, cracked and split though it was, which would enable him to control the tides of revolution.
Then, in 1948-9, the magic wand finally broke in his hands. The Chinese revolution overtook him; and at a stroke it threw his calculations out of balance and upset the whole international s tatus quo.
In February 1948 Stalin confided to Kardelj, Tito's Foreign Minister, that after the war he ‘bluntly’ told Mao Tse-tung that the Chinese revolution ‘had no prospects’, that Mao should ‘seek a modus vivendi with Chiang Kai-shek… join the Chiang Kai-shek government, and dissolve the [communist] army’. With an Oriental slyness which matched Stalin's own, Mao listened reverently, nodded approvingly, and, disregarding Stalin's counsel of wisdom and caution, kept his armies in being, raised new ones, and led Chinese communism to its triumph.
Yet Stalin's part in the Chinese revolution was somewhat more complex than his own confidences to Kardelj might suggest.
After Japan's capitulation the Russian armies in Man-churia and Northern China handed over Japanese Stores of munitions to Mao's partisans. Without these supplies Mao might not have been able to hold his ground against Chiang Kai-shek, whose troops were equipped and supported by the United States. Thus Stalinist Russia made a direct material contribution to the victory of Chinese communism.
There remains the strange fact that having helped to equip Mao's armies Stalin then urged Mao to disband them. How is this paradox to be accounted for?
Psychologically and morally it was almost impossible for the Soviet troops in Manchuria and Northern China to debar Mao's partisans from the Japanese army stores. The partisans were taking possession of those stores on their own initiative and interference might have led to clashes. Once again Stalin had to surrender to the revolutionary dynamics of the Soviet State and to his own communist reputation.
And once again he was still confident that he was arming merely his pawn, not a force that would make its own revolution. A fairly strong communist army in North China might be a useful instrument of pressure against Chiang Kai-shek and the United States — an expendable bargaining counter. When Stalin thought the moment had come to expend it, he told Mao to lay down arms and to submit to Chiang Kai-shek. But once again the ‘pawn’ played its own game.
In February 1948, Stalin admitted to Kardelj his ‘mistake’ over the Chinese revolution. Yet six months later, just before the last phase of the civil war, he repeated the ‘mistake’ and made a last attempt to hold Mao back.
‘As late as July 1948, the Russians neither expected nor desired an immediate communist victory in China. In that month the Chinese Communist Party held a conference to discuss plans for the coming autumn campaign. The advice from Russia was to continue guerrilla warfare for the coming year in order to weaken America, who was expected to continue to pour arms into China in support of the Kuomintang. Russia opposed any plan to end the civil war by taking the large cities. Russian advice was rejected by this conference, the contrary policy was adopted…’[17]
Overtaken by the Chinese revolution, Stalin had to keep after it, to adopt it, father it, and give it all his ideological tenderness. The tenderness had to be all the more effusive because the child knew very well what desperate efforts the ‘father’ had made to bring about an abortion.
Statesmen in the West at once believed in Stalin's paternity and took at its face value his display of parental virtue. Even after Stalin's death, Mr. John Foster Dulles stated that ‘In Asia, Stalin's plans, laid twenty-five years ago, achieved a dramatic success through the communist civil war’. If this were true, Stalin would indeed have deserved to be called the greatest political genius in history. But it is not true.
The appearance that Stalin's fiat made and unmade revolutions was kept up by the fact that the victorious Communist Parties rallied to Russia and submitted to the Stalin cult. To Stalin this accretion of power in the middle of his conflict with the West was of course most welcome; and it flattered him to be the Rising Sun over half of Europe and half of Asia, and not just over Russia. The Chinese and Eastern European communists rallied to him because he still represented to them the tradition of the October Revolution that had inspired international communism. An even more decisive motive was their fear of domestic counter-revolutionary forces, or of the counter-revolutionary potentialities of Western policy, or of both. The Communist Parties in power felt that in a divided world they could not stand on their own feet; that they had to lean on Russia, and to accept the Stalin cult. They did so, more often than not, with a trembling heart and fearful forebodings; and they had to sacrifice some of their own leaders to the Moloch of Stalinism.
Tito alone dared to rebel (rather late in the day), because he could rely on strong domestic support, and also because he hoped to find security in a neutral recess between the two blocs. The other communist leaders had neither Tito's self-confidence nor his illusions. Some of them had an acute sense of their own weakness at home; and none appeared to believe that it would be possible for them to survive in a no-man's-land between East and West. Incidentally, the West as well as the East did its utmost to reduce the no-man's-land, with the result that while Stalin inadvertently worked long and hard to produce many Titos, the West did its best to ensure that he should produce but one.
Thus came into being the vast realm of Stalinism which stretches from the Elbe to the Chinese Sea and is inhabited by nearly 800 million people, five times the number of Russia's population at the beginning of the Stalin era. There was originally no design for this gigantic structure. It piled up while the supposed master builder suffered frequent bouts of absent-mindedness. The edifice grew seemingly of its own accord by a series of historical ‘accidents’, through which the revolutionary trend of the age performed its work.
Stalin had been willing to content himself with ‘socialism in one country’. He had wished to keep Russia in her place and to refrain from antagonizing the world by international revolutionary aspirations. All that he had expected in return was that the world would leave him alone with his Russia. But the tempest of the time drove Russia out of her national shell; and it let loose the furies of revolution which drove Stalin from his retreat, hoisted him to a dizzy eminence, and from there forced him to throw down a challenge to the world.
As the expression of Bolshevism's isolation and self-isolation, Stalinism had been dead and buried long before Stalin died. It fell to Stalin himself to make the long overdue funeral oration on ‘socialism in one country’, for this is what his last public speech at the Nineteenth Congress of the party in October 1952 amounted to. In it he recalled the far-off days when Soviet Russia had been the only ‘Shock Brigade of international communism’ and he welcomed and extolled the many new ‘Shock Brigades’ in Europe and Asia which had since taken their place by Russia's side.
Yet even at this stage he attempted to escape the consequences of a destiny which, he feared, might ruin if not himself then the far-flung realm he was leaving behind.
He tried to revive his old formula of communist self-containment. But this was to be self-containment ‘on a higher level’, as he himself might have put it — ‘socialism within one-third of the world’ instead of within one country.
He had come to realize that any further expansion of communism would almost certainly lead to a world war, for which Russia was not ready. It is difficult to indicate the last critical point in the development of his policy. It may be that the war in Korea gave him a warning signal of the dangers ahead. But it is by no means certain that the initiative for the attempt to carry communism into southern Korea had come from Stalin — it may have come from Mao. At any rate, in the Korean war Stalin aimed at an international stalemate which would allow his camp to keep its positions without retreating, but also without advancing.
He was anxious that his party, having swallowed so much more than he had intended, should gain the time needed for digestion. He was not the type of conqueror who tries to cure indigestion by swallowing more.
He estimated that two more decades or so were needed to allow Russia to catch up with and surpass the United States industrially, to attain a standard of living that would assure popular contentment, to raise Eastern Europe to an industrial level superior to that of Western Europe, and to allow communist China to develop its economic resources up to the present Russian standard.
He believed that once those goals had been attained, the attraction of communism would become so overwhelming that nothing could stop the whole of Europe and Asia from turning communist. He saw that it was primarily American economic superiority, operating through the Marshall Plan and the Mutual Security agencies, that had defeated communism in Western Europe without much direct political intervention by the United States. On the other hand, Russia, because of her economic inferiority, maintained her preponderance in Eastern Europe primarily by the direct use of political and even military force. She had had to send out her political police to fight ‘dollar diplomacy’.
In what we may suppose to have been Stalin's vision of the years 1965-70 the picture was reversed. He saw a self-sufficient bloc of 800 million people, toiling within the framework of an integrated planned economy, which should in time be able to produce such wealth and attain such high standards of living that communism could rely on its economic preponderance rather than on political or military coercion; while a stagnant or decaying bourgeois West would be losing its power of attraction and would come to rely more and more on the use of force.
Stalin apparently held that to attain this goal it was, on balance, worthwhile for communism to adopt in the meantime a broad policy of self-containment within its third of the globe, especially as the rulers of the other two-thirds were bent on containing it.
These ideas emerge from between the lines of Stalin's last published writings (‘The Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.’). In these he came down heavily on the ultra-leftists, the Utopians and the adventurers, as he called them, who were ‘dizzy’ with Soviet economic power. Against their views, he insisted that the solution of the main economic problems confronting the Soviet Union was a long-term task. Time, time, and once again time was required. The unspoken yet inescapable conclusion of his argument was that in her foreign policy Russia must bargain for a long, a very long breathing space.
It may be assumed that he argued out these ideas in detail and handed them down to his Russian successors, to Mao Tse-tung, and to a few chosen communist leaders of Eastern Europe.
In his last writings one can almost hear the echoes of the debates which Stalin's views provoked among his entourage. ‘But will the West give us such a breathing space?’ was one obvious objection. Another seems to have run as follows: ‘Would it not be more realistic to assume that war in the near future is inevitable? That Russia would not, as in the Second World War, have bourgeois allies to whom she would need to make political concessions? Would she therefore not be better advised, in the interest of self-preservation, to press on with world revolution and to encourage further communist expansion?’
To such arguments and objections Stalin replied with an explicit and emphatic ‘No’. He argued publicly and at great length that the capitalist countries would cut each other's throats rather than attack Russia. War between the capitalist countries was still ‘inevitable’, he said; but their joint crusade against the communist bloc was not. In itself the argument was incongruous and scholastic, as Stalin's argumentation usually was. But in this particular context it had a definite meaning and it pursued a practical aim. It was an argument in favour of buying breathing space from the West, in favour of communist self-containment.
Thus Stalin's last writings might be described as his political testament. He said in effect to his heirs: Your estate is one-third of the world. Keep it, preserve it, and build it up into a power which will eventually daunt all your enemies. In the meantime beware of hotheads and adventurers. Do not take risks. Do not rush into revolutionary enterprises in which you may dissipate what you possess.
In this shrewd caution Stalin remained true to himself to the end. During his life-time history sometimes proved him right; but more than once it mocked his caution and made of him the strangest of adventurers. Is history perhaps for the last time going to mock his caution post-humously? Will Stalin's successors be willing or able to carry out his political testament?