Beginning "Peaceful Coexistence"

When he issued the Decree on Peace shortly after coming to power in October 1917, Lenin did not expect that a lengthy period of "peaceful coexistence" would follow the outbreak of proletarian revolution in Russia. Because he expected the existing governments of Germany, England, and France to be unable to accept the Soviet peace offer, the new leaders of Russia would be obliged to "prepare and launch a revolutionary war," as he had written in 1915, and "to systematically incite all those peoples now downtrodden by the Great Russians, all the colonial and dependent countries of Asia (India, China, Persia, etc.), and also...call to insurrection the socialist proletariat of Europe against their governments...."^[19] However, when the German High Command did not accept the Bolshevik peace offer, both Lenin and Trotsky recognized the impossibility of transforming Russia's war with Germany into a European-wide war of revolutionary proletarians against their capitalist oppressors. Instead Lenin gathered support within the party for a separate peace with Germany while Trotsky conducted an all-out campaign of propaganda directed at the peoples of the Central Powers and the Allies alike. It was in the context of this nonmilitary struggle against imperialism, which took place during the negotiations with Germany leading to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, that Trotsky—in the first public use of the term—called for "peaceful coexistence" among all peoples.^[20] Lenin, during the same period, associated the concept of peaceful coexistence with a respite from military conflict, with peredyshka , a brief "breathing spell," or, perhaps more aptly, a "peace break," during which proletarian revolution would be preserved in Russia while it spread to Europe. Thus "peaceful coexistence" between revolutionary Russia and the rest of the world, the initial foreign policy stance

adopted by the Bolshevik leadership, began as a measure of revolutionary security, as a policy designed to protect proletarian revolution from the superior forces of the German army.

Beginning in late 1919, what was then called the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel or NKID) conducted what it termed a "peace offensive" directed at the peoples of Europe and, in particular, at the more progressive and pacifist segments of the populations of the Baltic states and Great Britain. The objective was to put an end to the economic blockade, the diplomatic isolation, and the military intervention to which the new Soviet state was subjected. The first breakthrough came when Estonia requested peace negotiations in November and concluded a treaty of peace with Moscow in February 1920. Lenin called the conclusion of this agreement—Soviet Russia's first permanent arrangement with a European state—an event of "gigantic historical significance" and shortly thereafter employed the phrase "peaceful coexistence" for the first time. He does not seem to have meant the term to denote a stable and durable settlement between the two states but rather stated instead that "we do not want to shed the blood of workers and Red Army fighters for the sake of a piece of territory." More diplomatically, Georgii Chicherin, Trotsky's successor as people's commissar for foreign affairs, called the Estonian treaty "the first experiment in peaceful coexistence with bourgeois states" and "a dress rehearsal for understanding with the Entente." Soon afterward he began to call for "peaceful coexistence with other governments no matter what they are."^[21] Agreements followed with Lithuania in July and Latvia in August. All three treaties were negotiated by Leonid Krasin, who more than any other Bolshevik at the time favored forgoing revolution in Europe and ending the state of war with the bourgeois states in order to repair, restock, and revive the Russian economy.^[22] Thus, Trotsky initially used the term "peaceful coexistence" to refer to relations among oppressed peoples; Chicherin employed it to mean normal interstate relations between the Soviet government and the governments of the capitalist states; while to Krasin "peaceful coexistence" meant trade agreements and commercial relations as a means of rescuing the Russian economy.

By the spring of 1920, Lenin's concept of peaceful coexistence was evolving from that of a short "peace break" in the imperialist war to something more developed. With the defeat of the forces of General Anton Denikin and his evacuation from the Crimea on a British destroyer in March, Lenin envisioned an end to the Civil War; following the failure of insurrectionary soviets in Hungary and Bavaria, he called for the disciplining of "infantile leftism" within the international communist movement in April; with the lifting of the Allied naval blockade in January, he aimed at a

trade agreement with England. Thereafter he seems not to have wavered from a policy of stabilizing the Soviet regime in Russia and improving relations with capitalist states, although the diversity of policy preferences within the party leadership compelled him to speak and act ambivalently.^[23] The crucial debate among the leadership took place at the Ninth Party Congress in September over whether the Red Army was to be utilized to support proletarian revolution in Europe, with Trotsky, Kamenev, Dzerzhinskii, and Bukharin in favor, and Lenin, Radek, and others opposed.^[24] When the Red Army was driven back from Warsaw and the Civil War came to an end—marked by the withdrawal of Wrangel's forces in November, escorted from the Crimea by the French—Lenin determined that what the international situation offered to the revolution in Russia was no longer a "peace break" but what he called "a new and lengthy period of development." During the months that followed, as he reevaluated the international situation, he concluded that Soviet Russia had won the right to an independent existence within the capitalist world system, and his concept of peaceful coexistence took on the form it would retain for the remainder of his active political life.

The historic purpose to which the "new and lengthy period" was to be put, as Lenin saw it, was the restoration and development of the infrastructure of the Russian economy, for which he thought it necessary to acquire the investment, the machinery, and the expertise of the industrialized economies of Europe and America. The new leaders of Russia wanted to establish economic relations with the advanced capitalist economies of Europe and America, Lenin told the Eighth All-Russian Congress of Soviets in December 1920, "because we realize [their] necessity—our chief interest is in obtaining as quickly as possible, from the capitalist countries, the means of production (locomotives, machines, and electrical equipment) without which we cannot more or less seriously rehabilitate our industry, or perhaps may even be unable to do so at all, because the machinery needed by our factories cannot be made available." "We must turn all our efforts to achieving this." Lenin's stated objective was to close the gap between Russia and the advanced capitalist states by 25 to 50 percent. Without machine purchases from abroad, he concluded, "we shall be in a very difficult position indeed, and shall be unable to overtake them without superhuman effort."^[25]

Thus in late 1920, Lenin announced the readiness of the party to take on the task of economic reconstruction. However, five years of the World War, Civil War, and War Communism had left the Russian economy near collapse. And by February 1921, destruction of the economic infrastructure, diminished resources, shortages of goods, lack of services, and, above

all, low farm production and famine threatened the survival of the regime itself. The peasantry was in open rebellion against the grain requisitions of War Communism, and even the navy, the vanguard of the October Revolution, was in revolt. In response to this crisis, Lenin formally introduced what came to be called the New Economic Policy at the Tenth Party Congress in March.

As the New Economic Policy developed over the next two years,^[26] it constituted first and foremost an effort to revive agricultural production by ending government grain requisitions, allowing a legal market in agricultural commodities, and eliciting grain sales from the peasantry by providing consumer merchandise for purchase. Limited private enterprise in retail trade and small manufacturing employing less than twenty persons was restored, while the "commanding heights"—major industry, transportation, banking, and foreign trade—remained nationalized, and the economy stayed under government supervision.

Foreign technology and capital were invited to participate in the Soviet economy on a concessionary basis, for NEP was intended to promote the conditions in which Soviet Russia could conduct foreign trade and gain access to the technology of Europe and America. In the words of a resolution of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) passed subsequently (in 1922), the New Economic Policy was "the expression of the solution of the task of incorporating the proletarian state in the chain of international relations."^[27] To this end, Russia concluded a commercial agreement with Britain the same month NEP was announced, and this was followed by similar agreements with Germany (May), Norway (September), Austria and Italy (December), Sweden (February 1922), and Czechoslovakia (June).^[28]

The prospects for obtaining "the means of production" from Europe looked favorable at this time. Trade between Russia and Europe had developed rapidly since early 1920 in what amounted to a foreign trade explosion. In 1920 Russian foreign trade was ten times larger than in 1919, albeit only one percent of what it had been before 1914. Made possible by the lifting of the Allied naval blockade, this revived trade involved primarily purchases of equipment and materials for the Russian railways. It was financed by expending some of the gold reserves accumulated by the tsarist regime which were reminted in Sweden to escape the restrictions placed by the United States and Britain on the acceptance of Russian gold.^[29] Purchases of heavy machinery from abroad continued to be funded with gold until mid-1922. Eventually Soviet economic planners would look to grain exports and to foreign loans to pay for imports from Europe and America. However there was no question of grain exports in 1921, for the

proclamation of a new economic policy coincided with one of the worst famines in modern history.

The famine was centered in the drought-prone Volga region and extended east into the Urals, west into the Ukraine, and south into Caucasia. The regions affected contained 37.5 million persons; however, no reliable figures exist for the number of persons directly affected.^[30] Reports of drought and crop failures brought the famine to the attention of the party/ state leadership in November 1920, and again in the following January with reports of large-scale peasant migration from the Volga. By early 1921 it was apparent that government grain reserves would be inadequate and that the railway system was so badly devastated that what food supplies existed could not be delivered. This situation raised critical political problems. To acknowledge the extent of the famine would encourage "the enemies of Soviet power," as anti-Bolsheviks at home and abroad could lay responsibility for the disaster at the door of the regime itself.^[31] Consequently the seriousness of the problem was publicly acknowledged and brought to the attention of the world only in July. At that time the Central Committee admitted that the situation was desperate, and, in an effort to attract foreign assistance, it appointed an All-Russian Famine Relief Committee composed of well-known non-Bolshevik personalities as well as of party members such as Kamenev and Krasin. Urgent appeals for international aid were issued first through the writer Maxim Gorky (13 July) and then by Chicherin (2 August).

The famine undermined the basis on which NEP was premised—a free market in grain. It also made peaceful coexistence a matter of life or death for the people of the Volga. To the Soviet regime the famine posed a dilemma of survival. On the one hand, foreign famine relief seemed indispensable; on the other, intervention conjured bad memories for the Bolsheviks. Allied food relief had been deployed on the side of counterrevolution during 1919, both in Central Europe and in the Russian Civil War. Russian émigrés spoke of transforming the All-Russian Famine Relief Committee into a new provisional government. Assistance would be accompanied, the Soviet leadership believed, by the danger of renewed intervention—what Lenin called "new plans for further invasions, interventions, and counter-revolutionary conspiracies."^[32]

In the spring of 1921 news of economic difficulties in Russia sent the international standing of the new regime into a severe decline. By August, however, there occurred what the NKID subsequently referred to as "a turnabout."^[33] The regime was rescued from its dilemma by Herbert Hoover, the American secretary of commerce, who, ignoring the All-Russian Famine Relief Committee, quickly offered directly to the Soviet

government the assistance of the American Relief Administration (ARA) in return for the release of all American prisoners and full freedom in administering relief. Hoover promised that the ARA would not engage in political activities. He himself hoped that this action would increase the influence of the United States in Russia and eventually induce transformations in the Soviet system that would go beyond those of NEP. American farmers were inundated by a huge grain surplus due to the end of wartime demand, the end of price controls, and the resumption of foreign competition. Supplies arrived quickly. Eventually, at the height of its efforts in 1921-22, the ARA sustained 10 million people, and Congress appropriated $20 million for the project.^[34] At the same time, the line put forth by the foreign press shifted 180 degrees, from one predicting that the famine would bring an end to the Soviet regime, to one that saw in famine relief the beginnings of closer economic relations between Russia and America and Europe. Lloyd George discussed the famine in the House of Commons, where he linked up relief and an economic rapprochement with the Soviets. The Supreme Allied Council, meeting in Brussels in early October, approved private philanthropic assistance but linked famine relief to a comprehensive reconstruction of the Russian economy, and it made government credits dependent on the willingness of the Soviet government to reverse its cancellation of the foreign debts of previous Russian regimes.

In response, Chicherin announced in a note to the Allied powers on 28 October the willingness of the Soviet government to recognize the prewar debts of the tsarist regime "as part of a system of agreements" providing for economic aid to Russia, for full recognition of the Soviet regime as the legal government of Russia, and for an international conference to settle differences between the two sides and to effect "a final reconciliation" between the Allies and Soviet Russia. We know little about what debate may have taken place within the Politburo and the NKID regarding the decision to take this step. The report of the NKID for the year, made to the Ninth Soviet Congress two months later, and published only in 1990, states only that "recognition of the debts of the Tsarist regime followed from the current policy of the Russian government, which is aimed at cooperating with capitalist countries in the economic sphere, tackling the economic rehabilitation of Russia as a priority task, and using Western capital to this end."^[35]

With this demarche, "peaceful coexistence" reached a new level of importance in Soviet policy. By October 1921 it had become a means of exploiting the prospective benefits of the new international equilibrium for two interrelated purposes. One was to normalize relations with Europe and America, to put an end to the diplomatic isolation that had persisted after

the end of the Civil War, to reduce the potential for further anti-Soviet coalitions, and thereby to provide the security necessary for the consolidation of Soviet power in the lands of the former Russian Empire in Asia. The other was to obtain the technology, the machinery, and the expertise necessary to reconstruct and develop the war-torn Russian economy. With this security and these resources, the RCP(B) would be able to stabilize Soviet power in Russia and to prevent a relapse into capitalism and a restitution of bourgeois rule. A policy of such historic importance deserves full analysis.

Lenin consistently rejected autarky as an economic objective of the New Economic Policy. "It would be absolutely ridiculous, fantastic, and utopian," he stated, "to hope that we can achieve complete economic independence."^[36] There is every indication that he and other economic "integrationists" among the party/state leadership expected the concessions granted to foreign capitalists along with the New Economic Policy to last for decades, perhaps half a century.^[37]

However, the interdependence of the economy of socialist Russia and the capitalist economies of Europe and America, on which the strategy of economic recovery and reconstruction propounded by Lenin in 1921 was premised, was partial. The projected integration of Russia into the global economy was limited by the nationalization of foreign trade decreed in April 1918 (as a measure of War Communism) and by a foreign trade monopoly that took a definitive form in March 1922. By controlling imports through this monopoly, the Foreign Trade Commissariat could and did limit the import of consumer goods and allocate foreign exchange to the purchase of the machinery and raw materials necessary for economic reconstruction. Controlled exports prevented foreigners from buying up cheaply national treasures, natural resources, and agricultural produce. More broadly, the foreign trade monopoly was designed to eliminate profiteering foreign middlemen and to prevent outside capitalist interference in the socialist development of Russia. In London, Paris, Berlin, New York, and elsewhere, special trading companies were formed that operated as branches of Soviet trade delegations. So that no questions could arise regarding the enforceability of the contracts they negotiated, the trading companies were incorporated under the laws of the countries in which they operated.^[38]

Among the top party/state leadership, Lenin stood as the main advocate of the foreign trade monopoly and as the main supporter of the strategy of limited integration into the capitalist world economy, although on neither issue was there complete agreement. Other consistent supporters of inte-

gration among the Bolsheviks included Rykov, Krasin, and Sokolnikov. Aleksei Rykov became head of the Supreme Economic Council in 1923-24 and when Lenin died he replaced him as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. As a member of the Politburo from 1922 to 1930 he was the most persistent spokesman for economic integration within that body. Grigori Sokolnikov, a Central Committee member since 1917, became commissar for finance in 1922, a position in which he remained until 1926. He was mainly responsible for framing the integrationist strategy, and he was its major proponent during the years 1921-1926. The financial reform he engineered in 1922 made Soviet currency convertible and thus the whole New Economic Policy possible. For this "economic miracle" the foreign press referred to him as "the Bolshevik Count Witte."^[39] He subsequently became ambassador to London (1929-32) and deputy commissar for foreign affairs (1933-34). Leonid Krasin, a fervent supporter of the foreign trade monopoly, saw long-term low-interest development loans from the capitalist powers as the solution to the problems of economic development.^[40] He was commissar for foreign trade from 1920 to 1924 and as such negotiated the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement in March 1921 and attended the international economic conferences at Genoa and The Hague in 1922. The Bolshevik most respected by European governments, he handled the sensitive negotiations with Britain following the "Curzon ultimatum" in 1923 and represented the Soviet government in Paris in 1924-25 and in London in 1925-26.

The program of the integrationists—to grant concessions to Russia's natural resources, to conclude trade treaties, and to integrate partially the economy of Russia with those of Europe and America—had political purpose. Indeed Lenin represented the benefits of economic relations with capitalist states as primarily political. Commercial relations would win over a section of the capitalist world "to our side," he stated, and would serve to accentuate the antagonisms among them and to prevent them from "forming an alliance among themselves for the struggle against us." The Japanese, he thought, could be divided from the Americans, the Americans from the Europeans, and the Germans from the Entente. All the conflicts among the capitalist states generated by the World War could be used to protect Russia while the technology acquired from them was used to restore and develop the Russian economy to the point where it could resist future efforts by its enemies to overwhelm it.^[41] Foreign trade became the means to the security of an isolated and militarily vulnerable Socialist Republic in a postwar world.

By what means would the aims of the integrationists be attained? "Before the October Revolution," Chicherin later stated, "no attempt was

ever made to work out a program of the foreign policy of the socialist state in the midst of capitalist states."^[42] However, Soviet foreign relations came to be guided by a complex set of coherent and interdependent expectations that can be discovered in the statements of Lenin and the other integrationists. By late 1921 Lenin had come to expect that commercial transactions with the capitalist powers, whether explicitly approved by the governments involved or not, would lead to a diplomatic breakthrough and to recognition of the Soviet regime as the government of Russia. Normal diplomatic and commercial relations would in turn provide access to the industrial technology necessary to restore and reconstruct the Russian economy as well as reduce the likelihood of resumed military intervention. Military security and economic reconstruction would then promote the further political consolidation of the new regime. Economic exchange was presumed to lead to diplomatic recognition; both were prerequisite to security and to reconstruction required for regime stability. Military security, political consolidation, and economic reconstruction were in turn linked to the advance of international proletarian revolution. The economic development and political consolidation of the first socialist republic would both inspire by example the working classes of the capitalist, colonial, and semicolonial countries and make possible economic assistance to proletarian revolutions abroad.

In the context of these expectations, what did "peaceful coexistence" mean? The term became a part of the vocabulary of Soviet foreign relations at a time when it was believed that the capitalists would find no relief from proletarian revolution and that the revolutionaries of Russia would have but a short "peace break" in which to catch their breath before the military onslaught of the imperialists resumed. However, with the Red victory in the Civil War and the revolutionary recession of 1920-21, the term gained new meaning. Chicherin perhaps spoke too candidly, if he did indeed state in November 1921 what has been attributed to him, when he said: "Our foreign policy is a mere expression of the new economic policy, which is as a matter of fact a proletarian Thermidor."^[43] As Lenin explained it in his programmatic statements of 1920-21, "peaceful coexistence" described the status of relations between Russia on the one hand and Europe and America on the other at a specific moment in history, when the forces of socialism and capitalism had come to the point of equilibrium with neither able to overcome the other Looking at that equilibrium, he perceived something much more significant than the Brest-Litovsk "peace break" in the midst of the imperialist onslaught; he envisioned "a real chance of a new and lengthy period of development." This notion of a lengthy period was stated more fully in a resolution adopted by the Central Committee in May

1922, following the Genoa Conference: "the whole course of international relations recently bears witness to the inevitability, at the present stage of historical development, of the temporary coexistence of the communist and bourgeois systems of property."^[44] Thus, after 1921 the notion of peaceful coexistence was associated with something other than a short "peace break" or a simple tactical expedient. It did not, however, imply international reconciliation or a policy of "live and let live." In the Bolshevik theory of foreign relations, socialist and capitalist systems remained antagonistic; neither would nor could be transformed by coexisting peacefully.^[45]

Strictly speaking, "peaceful coexistence" referred to relations between socialist and bourgeois systems of property. In actuality, however, the NKID and Lenin himself used the term to refer to relations between states within an international system and, in particular, to normal, stable, and favorable diplomatic relations with the industrialized capitalist states and mutually beneficial trade and economic relations with them. Peaceful coexistence was a state of international relations, however, and not a policy. The policy conducted in the state of peaceful coexistence came to be called either "the struggle for peace" or "the struggle for peace and disarmament." The process by which both peaceful coexistence and the struggle for peace and disarmament became the central notions of Soviet foreign relations began in 1922, when Chicherin and Deputy Commissar Maksim Litvinov first put them forth in international settings at the Genoa and Hague economic conferences and then at the Moscow disarmament conference. There and thereafter the phrases served a variety of purposes. They linked Soviet Russia's foreign policy toward the capitalist powers with Marxist-Leninist ideology; they integrated the public presentation of foreign policy; they sloganized the interests of Soviet Russia within the international system; and they exposed "the hypocrisy of bourgeois statesmanship" in polemical form. In 1927 they became fixtures of Soviet foreign relations, when "peaceful coexistence" was installed as official party doctrine and Litvinov issued the Soviet plea for universal peace and disarmament at the Preparatory Commission on Disarmament at Geneva.^[46]