Lenin, International Relations, and Revolution in Russia

By the time he led the Bolsheviks to power in Russia in 1917, Lenin had developed a highly sophisticated concept of international relations.^[1] In a number of works written in the years immediately before the October Revolution, most prominent among them Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Lenin identified what he regarded as the most significant features of the political economy of the early twentieth century. In its imperialist stage, the capitalist mode of production became monopolized on a global scale; financial and industrial capital merged; a powerful oligarchy of "finance capital" appeared; the further development and survival of the world economy depended on the export of capital as well as of commodities; global monopolies appropriated the world's markets; and imperialist states completed the territorial division of the globe.^[2] Once they had taken over the less developed areas of the world economy as colonies or semicolonies, the imperialist powers could continue their competition for resources, markets, and investments only by taking them from one another. An interimperialist war of redistribution, the ultimate contradiction of capitalism, would then weaken the imperialist system to the point of collapse. In this, Lenin's social theory of history, the crisis of capitalist development, was not confined to contradictions within the domestic economy, as it was in classical Marxism. It was a matter of global economics and world politics.

So too was Lenin's theory of revolution. Because monopoly-finance capitalism developed unevenly from country to country, socialist revolutions would not start simultaneously everywhere in the world. Instead, capitalism would fail at a single point, or perhaps at several points—at the weakest link or links in the imperialist chain. Revolution would begin in

several countries, or even in one separate country; it would not be instantly international. For this reason, different states with opposing social systems would exist at the same time after the inception of proletarian revolution. Here Lenin's theory is significant in two ways. With it he made national differences a crucial element in the causation and inception of socialist revolution, and he created theoretical space for postrevolutionary relations between socialist and capitalist countries.

Lenin's critique of imperialism (much of which he shared with the German Social Democrat, Rudolf Hilferding), his theory of the unevenness of capitalist development (which he shared with Trotsky), along with the importance he attributed to the global economy, to the state, to national diversity, and to conflict among nations, represented significant contributions to socialist thought. Karl Marx had left an ambiguous legacy to his ideological heirs. While in his more journalistic writings he tended to be "state focused, politically oriented, and open ended," Marx's more theoretical work was "class-oriented, economics-grounded, and determinist."^[3] In the latter, he located the main contradictions of capitalism in the internal workings of developed industrial societies. In his inaugural address to the First International, he called upon workers to "master the mysteries" of international politics,^[4] but Marx himself did not do so. It was Lenin's adaptation of Marxism that placed distinct national societies and global relationships alongside class conflict within advanced capitalist countries at the core of revolutionary theory. Thus, the Bolsheviks came to power with a leader who was ideologically predisposed to think in terms of international relations.

As it happened, those who led the new Soviet state engaged intensively in international relations from the moment they came to power. "From the very beginning of the October Revolution," Lenin later stated, "foreign policy and international relations have been the main questions facing us."^[5] During the months from October 1917 to November 1920, the Soviets made peace with the Central Powers; Finland, the Baltic states, and Poland became independent nations; much of the remainder of the former Tsarist Empire was reconquered; the Red Army defeated the forces of counterrevolution in a long civil war; the military intervention of the Allied powers was turned back; and a war with Poland carried the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw.^[6] Only in October-November 1920, with the preliminary Treaty of Riga terminating the Soviet-Polish War, and with the defeat of the forces of Baron Wrangel, the last of the White generals, did three years of violent, international, ethnic, and class warfare come to an end. As civil war and international relations merged to present the new regime with its major problems, Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership of necessity gave

considerable attention and thought to foreign affairs. This period of conflict also left an indelible mark on their concept of foreign relations.

The Bolsheviks had come to power with two central expectations. They believed, first of all, that the imperialists would attempt to overthrow the revolution in Russia and that, with their combined forces, they were capable of doing so. The revolution in Russia would therefore not be secure until the threat of imperialist intervention had been eliminated by the spread of proletarian revolution to several, if not all, of the major powers of Europe. Second, they expected that the Russian Revolution would detonate a chain reaction of socialist revolutions that would spread throughout Europe and the world in a single movement, putting an end to socialist-capitalist opposition and rendering nations and national institutions obsolete, thus obviating the need for conventional interstate relations. None of them were certain how long the entire process would take, but they were convinced that the October Revolution could not survive in isolation. Its fate depended on what happened in Europe. Ultimately, socialist revolution and a system of capitalist states could not exist side by side. Either proletarian revolution would spread to Europe or the revolution in Russia would be defeated by international action.

In the months after the end of the World War in November 1918, revolution did sweep through Central Europe. By the spring and summer of 1919, the Bolshevik leadership from Lenin to Zinoviev was predicting that a European Soviet Republic lay only months, a year at the most, in the future. However, local security forces and foreign intervention crushed the Soviet elements in the Central European revolutions. And the Soviet-Polish War of 1920, which General Mikhail Tuchachevskii—but not most of the party leadership—regarded as a revolutionary war and an opportunity to establish soviets in Poland by military force,^[7] ended without victory. Neither a Soviet Germany, nor a Soviet Hungary, nor a Soviet Poland—much less a European Socialist Republic—became established. And by November 1920, just after the end of the Soviet-Polish War and the defeat of Wrangel, the last prospect of proletarian revolution in Europe—factory occupations conducted by workers in Italy—died out. On the other hand, revolution in Russia was not extinguished. The Red Army defeated its class enemies, divided its opponents along ethnic lines, and turned back the intervention of the British, the French, and the Americans. (The Japanese remained at Vladivostok until October 1922.) These three years of revolution and civil war confirmed the Bolsheviks in their basic beliefs that the leading capitalist powers were fundamentally hostile to Soviet power and at the same time highly vulnerable to it.

Revolution and war also left an international situation that sharply

contradicted the initial expectations of the party leadership. The revolution in Russia was surviving in isolation without the support of successive proletarian revolutions in Central Europe, and this situation seemed likely to continue for the next few years at least.^[8] For this situation the Bolsheviks were prepared neither by Lenin's prerevolutionary theory of capitalist crisis nor by the initial expectations of the party leadership regarding relations between revolutionary Russia and the imperialist powers. It necessitated an agonizing reappraisal of the world political situation and the formulation of a foreign policy for the new Soviet state. Both took place from November 1920 to July 1921, the first nine months of peace following the three years of revolution, civil war, and intervention.

The central feature of the post-Civil War situation was, as Lenin stated it during these months, an equilibrium between the forces of capitalism and socialism, a balance that he termed "temporary" and "highly unstable," "but one that [was], nevertheless, certain, obvious, indisputable." "Our predictions have not materialized," he admitted candidly. "Neither side... has gained victory or suffered defeat." "It is very strange for those of us who have lived through the revolution from its inception... to see how things have now developed .... Probably none of us expected or could have expected that things would shape out like this." There existed, he determined, "a highly protracted situation, without any final decision one way or the other." Nevertheless, a significant objective had been achieved, he believed. The capitalist powers had been forced to abandon armed intervention without defeating the Soviets and without extinguishing the flame of socialist revolution. Proletarian rule and the Soviet Republic survived although "world revolution" was delayed. The result was, Lenin concluded, that

without having gained an international victory, which we consider to be the only sure victory, we are in a position of having won conditions enabling us to exist side by side with capitalist powers.... We have won the fight to an independent existence.... Today we can speak, not merely of a breathing spell [peredyshka ], but of a real chance of a new and lengthy period of development. Until now we have actually had no basis in the international sense. Now we have this basis.

The Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), or RCP(B), led what could exist as a viable, independent state within the capitalist world system. This, Lenin affirmed, was "something much more significant" than the "breathing spell" won in March 1918 with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ending the war with Germany.^[9]

The defeat of counterrevolution and military intervention was one of two essential elements in the international equilibrium of 1921, as Lenin saw it. The demise of European proletarian revolution was the other. Following the suppression of the Communist revolutions in Munich and in Hungary in mid-1919, he began to express doubts about specific revolutionary situations in Central Europe, and by the spring of 1920 he was attacking the "infantile disorder" of "leftism" within the German Communist Party (KPD). However, Lenin continued to speak and write confidently and often of the imminence of world proletarian revolution through November 1920, until the last prospects for immediately extending proletarian revolution to Europe had died. He did so for the last time on 6 November, at the celebration of the third anniversary of the October Revolution. Thereafter he acknowledged in his public speeches that he had given up the expectation that revolution would soon spread to Europe. Beginning on 21 December 1920, when he spoke of "world revolution," it was to say that it would not come in the near future.^[10] By March 1921 he was informing the Tenth Party Congress that "it would be madness on our part to assume that help will shortly arrive from Europe in the shape of a strong proletarian revolution.... In these past three years, we have learned to understand that placing our stake on the world revolution does not mean relying on a definite date."^[11] It remained for Trotsky to justify what he would soon call "the strategy of temporary retreat" to the assembled Communists of Europe, America, and Asia at the Third Comintern Congress in June-July. "At that time, in 1919," he said in a statement that was to become famous, "we said to ourselves: 'It is a question of months.' Now we say: 'It is a question of years.'"^[12]

In the context of this emergent international equilibrium the Bolsheviks took actions in February and March 1921 that proved to be of major consequence for the foundation of Soviet foreign relations and the formation of the Russian Socialist Republic. Treaties of mutual recognition were signed with Persia (26 February), Afghanistan (28 February), and Turkey (16 March)—the latter being the first treaty between Soviet Russia and a state of major importance in the international system. Negotiations leading to the first commercial treaty with a capitalist power, Great Britain, were concluded on 16-21 March. On 18 March the Treaty of Riga with Poland was finalized. These agreements, all of which had been under negotiation for months, were important steps in the adoption of a foreign policy of diplomacy and commerce, as opposed to a foreign policy of revolutionary offensive, either by means of insurrection or conquest. During the same weeks, the Tenth Party Congress (8-16 March) heard Lenin propose the abandonment of War Communism and the adoption of what

would be called the New Economic Policy (NEP), and it approved measures to discipline the workings of the Russian Communist Party by forbidding intraparty factions.

Taken together, these measures have been referred to as Lenin's "new course." It has been argued that they were inherent in his political strategy from the time the Bolsheviks seized power, that, beginning at that moment, he made a series of deliberate compromises in foreign affairs by which he sacrificed international socialist revolution for the survival of the Russian Socialist Republic as a state.^[13] The more conventional argument maintains, however, that the steps taken in the spring of 1921 represented a retreat from previous policies and "a single integrated pull-back executed on... different battlefields in the same war."^[14] There can be little doubt that these actions were interrelated, although there is ample reason to question whether they were the result of a fully coordinated decision-making process at the highest levels of the party leadership.^[15] Open rebellion against the regime among both the famine-ridden peasantry of the Volga and the original supporters of the revolution at the naval station at Kronshtadt made reform necessary; the end of Allied military intervention and the new international equilibrium made it possible. The New Economic Policy, and in particular the restoration of market relations in the countryside, was aimed both at fostering relations of "peaceful coexistence" with the bourgeois states and at restoring the economy. Its purpose was, Lenin stated later, "to give the capitalists such advantages as will compel any state, however hostile to us, to establish contacts and to deal with us."^[16]

In these measures both sides of the legacy of Leninism to the development of the Soviet Union can be discerned. In the Lenin of NEP and "peaceful coexistence" historians have discovered a "farsighted and flexible genius" and "the grandfather of perestroika ."^[17] In the Lenin who prohibited intraparty factions, who suppressed political dissidence and diversity, who persecuted the Social Revolutionary Party, and who deported two hundred professors (the "philosophers' ship" to Germany), they have seen the founder of the authoritarian, single-party state incapable of reforming itself. Upon reflection it seems that one necessitated the other and that they were joined in a single dynamic. The retreats from prerevolutionary expectations in economic and foreign policy to positions previously occupied by anti-Bolshevik revolutionaries such as the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries necessitated that the party be disciplined and the alternatives to it repressed.^[18]

As this work will demonstrate, the new international situation of 1920-21—the survival of proletarian revolution in Russia without the support of similar, successful uprisings in Europe—had fundamental implications for

the theory and practice of Soviet foreign relations. Insurrectionary initiative in Europe was officially postponed until a majority of the working class there was brought under the influence of communist parties. Anti-imperialist revolt in Asia became the ultimate assurance of successful global socialist revolution. The security of Soviet Russia was made to rest on the capabilities of its diplomats and on solidarity with the European proletariat. The needs of what came to be called "the world revolutionary process" were coordinated with the requirements of Soviet national interest—the security and reconstruction of the socialist homeland, a supportive international communist movement made in the image of Bolshevism, and conventional foreign relations conducted within the norms of the international diplomatic community. These developments are considered in the remainder of this chapter and the three that follow.