11
Foreign Relations During "The Great Turn"

Alternative Futures for the USSR?

The approximately one-year period from the spring of 1928 to the spring of 1929—from the intensification of "the extraordinary measures" to the adoption of "the optimal variant," from the time when Bukharin, Rykov, and the "moderates" separated from Stalin to the time when they were finally defeated—is sometimes referred to by scholars as "the great turning point" in Soviet history or, more briefly, as "the great turn." At this time the economic and political system of the USSR was set on a course of development, elements of which persisted for as long as the Soviet Union lasted. "The great turn," therefore, was one of the more significant events in the history of the twentieth century. Explaining how and why that turn was taken has been, and remains, an important endeavor.

One explanation has emphasized the potentialities and the failures of "the Bukharin alternative," or "moderate course," of gradual and harmonious economic development. Three elements comprise that explanation. First, the grain procurement crisis and the collapse of NEP did not constitute two elements of a single inevitable process. Both resulted from policy choices at the highest levels. The agrarian crisis could have been avoided, or its impact certainly mitigated, had different decisions regarding prices, imports, and exports been made. Subsequently, the New Economic Policy came to an end when Stalin and the "Stalinists" decided—without having any known feasible alternative in view—that they could not procure sufficient grain to accelerate industrialization under the partial market conditions of NEP.^[1]

Second, the process of economic development undertaken by the Stalin-led Central Committee beginning in 1928-29—rapid and ultimately autonomous industrialization financed by "tribute" brutally extracted from

the peasantry—was neither necessary nor efficacious, nor even feasible. It was a process that has been described as one "in which willful exhortations displaced actual planning, impossible goals were semi-achieved at unnecessarily great and enduring costs, and peasant agriculture was needlessly destroyed by a kind of collectivization that gave nothing to industrialization and probably impeded it."^[2] The results endured for sixty years. The Soviet economy was "plagued from the very beginning," Holland Hunter has stated, "by poor quality, a slow rate of innovation, sluggish management, and a repressed labour force."^[3] During the decade from 1927 to 1937, remarkable and even "dazzling" increases in gross industrial production were achieved, but they came with great difficulty and at tremendous cost, not only to the peasants, who were subjected to deportation, starvation, and death, but to the industrial working class as well. The period of the First Five-Year Plan was a time of critical economic instability, and the years 1932-1933 in particular were a time of acute crisis managed by the OGPU. Terror and repression were directed at factory managers and government and party officials alike, as they were removed from their posts, purged from the party, arrested, imprisoned, and put before firing squads. The costs of industrial production rose; labor productivity declined; national consumption fell. Hiroaki Kuromiya has determined that the real wages of Moscow industrial workers in 1932 came to only 53 percent of the 1928 level.^[4]

Third, Stalinist industrialization and collectivization were not the only possible strategies of economic development open to the USSR. Other potentially viable modes of socialist construction existed within the discourse conducted among the party/state leadership during the years 1925-1929. Bukharin in his writings put forth one such strategy. He conceived his theory of development and corresponding economic policies in opposition to the programs for rapid industrialization put forth first by Trotsky and the Opposition between 1924 and 1926 and then by Stalin in 1928-29. During the earlier period, Bukharin's affinity for gradualism and moderation and his dislike of coercion led him to disregard the imperatives for vigorous, state-directed industrialization. By 1928-29, however, he had rethought his development strategy. In a series of publicized statements made between November 1928 and January 1929—while the moderates stood on the verge of decisive political defeat—he criticized Stalin's notions of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization and espoused a program of accelerated but controlled and balanced economic growth.^[5]

These lines of interpretation are of historical as well as historiographical significance. During the thaw (1956-64), introduced by Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth and Twenty-second Party Congresses, scholars in the USSR undertook an extensive criticism of the rapid and

forced collectivization of the 1930s. Subsequently, between 1969 and 1973, Moshe Lewin and Stephen Cohen discovered the full extent of "the Bukharin alternative." This was revealed most fully in Cohen's biography of Bukharin, a work translated in the West into the Russian language and then circulated privately in the USSR. In the 1970s and 1980s, Bukharin's program for evolutionary industrialization and socialization out of the conditions of NEP came to be viewed by some non-Soviet scholars, by East European reformers, and by dissident intellectuals in the Russia of Mikhail Suslov and Leonid Brezhnev not only as the alternative to Stalinist repression and brutality but also as the model for a reformed Communism, one that would support the relative political relaxation, semimarket economy, social diversity, cultural pluralism, intellectual flowering, and scientific progress they associated with the Soviet Union of the 1920s.

During glasnost a number of Soviet writers, mainly playwrights and novelists, frankly espoused some of Bukharin's views as constituting both a humane and a viable alternative to Stalinism.^[6] Similar discussions took place among academicians who were largely unaware of the more technical and complex debates in America and Europe over the causes of the grain procurement crisis and the feasibility of the Five-Year Plan.^[7] Bukharin was legally rehabilitated and reinstated in the Communist Party in February 1988, and soon thereafter a number of his writings were republished in the USSR. During the three and one-half years that preceded the August 1991 coup, NEP was enshrined in party publications as the true Leninist way to socialism (along with "peaceful coexistence"),^[8] and Bukharin was held up as the most legitimate Leninist of the 1920s, one who at the same time appreciated the capabilities of capitalism—as opposed to Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Stalin, all of whom regarded capitalism as "rotten," "decadent," and "moribund."^[9]

The rehabilitation of NEP did not go uncriticized, however. Even before the end of perestroika , some Soviet scholars argued that Lenin had no substantive notion of a humane road to socialism through a "social order of civilized cooperaters," or through any version of market socialism, and that he had no coherent idea of a developed socialism evolving out of NEP from which "the Bukharin alternative" could have been launched.^[10] Other Soviet scholars questioned whether a "Bukharin alternative" actually existed in the real world of policy choices, that is, whether he had any clearly defined plans for the economic future of the USSR.^[11] Still other scholars recalculated production figures for the years of NEP and demonstrated the sharp decrease in industrial productivity achieved by the end of the 1920s when compared to 1913 and concluded that the late NEP situation was one of economic stagnation, unemployment, and low living standards.^[12]

Viewed from a post-Soviet historical perspective, there are good reasons

to doubt whether NEP in actuality ever constituted a viable option for agriculture and economic foreign relations. Close examination of these two sectors of the economy indicates that the NEP crisis did not begin in November 1927. Rather "a cumulative series of converging crises" plagued NEP from the time it was instituted.^[13] The foreign sector of the economy never recovered from the dislocations of the years 1914-1920; and only in 1923/24 and 1926/27 could grain be exported at a level sufficient to fulfill the trade plan for the year.^[14] Responsibility for this has been laid at the door of those who planned and managed the economy in that they failed to develop an efficient system for marketing grain and goods and made repeated and disastrous errors in the pricing of both. Even more fundamental, however, were the refusal to recognize foreign debts, the persistence of the foreign trade monopoly, the fixed prices, the unrealistic exchange rate, and the unconvertible currency—all inimical to participation in a world market and to the development of an internal market economy as well.^[15]

Historically, the foreign relations and economic crisis of 1927-29 exposed the two irreconcilable notions of NEP that prevailed within the party. The backers of one of them were willing to subordinate plans to acquire advanced foreign technology to the market of peasant proprietorship, to social and economic equilibrium, and to the evolutionary construction of socialism. The supporters of the other viewed agriculture as the sector of the economy from which the capital for the technology of a rapid-tempo industrialization was to be derived. This conflict over strategies of economic development was not resolved, as it might have been under different political conditions, by the dictates of cost-effectiveness and rational resource allocation. Instead, factional conflict within the CPSU made reasoned argument and rational problem solving impossible. Consideration of economic policy was transformed into a war of competing doctrines, the outcome of which was determined in the realm of intraparty political infighting.^[16]

A second explanation for the direction taken at "the great turn" posits that the decisive factors in the outcome of the leadership struggle, and therefore of the economic crisis, were Stalin's assets and advantages. He seemed to be pragmatic, sober-minded, and responsible. His politics combined resolution, reassurance, and optimism; socialism could be constructed in the USSR, and in a comparatively short period of time. By contrast, the Trotsky-Zinoviev Opposition seemed rash and extremist, while the moderates, with their conciliation of kulaks, Nepmen, and foreign capitalists, stood discredited by what appeared to be their timidity. The development path of "revolution from above," on which Stalin embarked beginning with his tour of Siberia in January 1928, had a particular appeal to that genera-

tion of party officials which had come of political age during War Communism. To them, Communism meant "martial zeal, revolutionary voluntarism and élan , readiness to resort to coercion, rule by administrative fiat ..., centralized administration, summary justice, and no small dose of ... Communist arrogance."^[17] Determined to "catch up and surpass" Europe and America as quickly as possible, they found the crisis of 1927-28 frustrating, and a return to a smoothly functioning NEP unappealing. NEP signified to them inequality of opportunity and living standards, profiteering Nepmen, a disunited leadership, and a suspicion that the movement had lost its purpose and direction and become mired in stagnation. With their belief in the continuing revolutionary transformation of Soviet society, they could not accept the New Economic Policy as the outcome and the end of the October Revolution.

What has been largely missing from the scholarly discussion of the alternatives available at the time of "the great turn" is an extended investigation of all the elements present within the programs discussed among the Soviet leadership during the years 1925-1929. Not only were contrasting strategies of industrialization debated during those years, but opposing conceptions of Russia's relations with the world economy and of Soviet foreign relations were also under consideration.^[18] One strategy of economic foreign relations aimed at liberation from the influences of the world market. Another involved encouraging foreign states to participate in the Soviet economy and sought to integrate Russia into the world market. The latter was the strategy of technology transfer, capital imports, and trade treaties—the policy of Sokolnikov and Krasin, of Trotsky in 1925 to 1926, of Stalin from late 1926 to early 1928, and the one of which Rykov spoke unremittingly. One set of international relations would revive revolutionary internationalism, increase the level of militancy among the parties of the Comintern, and appeal to German nationalism as a weapon against international capitalist stability. The other aimed at détente with England, America, and France, and at cultivating their moral support for the Soviet regime.

Admittedly relations with Europe and America were no panacea for Soviet economic development.^[19] Capitalist penetration posed a significant threat to the construction of socialism in the USSR, with or without the foreign trade monopoly. The integrative foreign trade model that NEP borrowed from the tsarist regime, based as it was on grain exports, had worked before 1914 only by means of an exploited peasantry. A regime that had repudiated the debts of the Russian past could not expect much in the way of long-term loans from Europe and America. The rhetoric of "world revolution" and the subversive activities of the Comintern, ineffective and

unsuccessful as they were, perpetuated ideological opposition and provided nourishment for anti-Communism both in capitalist Europe and nationalist Asia. The doctrine of "peaceful coexistence," with its notion of a world divided into two irreconcilable camps, and "the struggle for peace," which aimed at the unilateral political/ideological disarmament of the other side, placed strict limitations on any possible socialist accommodation with the imperialist powers. The dual policy caused problems for Russia's relations with the world economy that could not be overcome by Soviet diplomacy.

What was the alternative to the foreign relations of "world revolution" and "peaceful coexistence" that Lenin and his successors adopted in the USSR during the years 1920-1929? Soviet policymakers might have developed an appreciation of the inevitably destructive costs of a second round of twentieth-century total warfare to all participants, capitalist and socialist alike. They might have recognized in defeated Germany the largest potential contributor to the aggravation of those conflicts among nations that could lead to such a war. The ECCI might have ceased proclaiming that the German problem was insoluble, and the NKID and the RMC might have weaned themselves from dependency on the Rapallo relationship, together with the surreptitious military collaboration and occasional hints at cooperation against Poland that sustained it. The attention of Soviet foreign policy could have been moved westward from Berlin and oriented toward security guarantees for continental Europe.

In actuality, such a policy course could have been implemented only if significant ideological alterations had been made in both the capitalist and socialist worlds. Ideological alteration in Moscow would have entailed renunciation of the "catastrophic premise," with its set of optimistic expectations for a second round of imperialist wars, as the basis of Comintern and CPSU pronouncements on foreign relations. The "struggle for peace" might then have been reformulated accordingly.

For Lenin the "struggle for peace" was subject to the class struggle: War was inherent in the highest stage of capitalism; only with the global triumph of socialism would peace be assured. Stalin departed from this conception. In a statement to the Eighth ECCI Plenum in May 1927, he subordinated the "struggle for peace" to the inevitability of imperialist wars and defined it in terms of the threat to the security of the USSR. By the time of the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928, the "struggle for peace" referred to a campaign conducted by foreign proletarian forces to protect the USSR against the dangers inherent in the conflict among nations.^[20] The alternative, which was denounced in the CI during the years 1929-1933 as "petit bourgeois pacifism," was one that turned the "struggle for peace" into an effort to establish conditions of genuine peace on a global scale for

the sake of humanity. This kind of a peace program would have encompassed more than "peaceful coexistence" between socialism and capitalism. Being based on acknowledgment that war between any two European states could engulf many, as it had in the World War, it would have aimed at creating conditions of peace among the capitalist states.

A program such as this would have departed from the foreign relations concept derived from Lenin's Imperialism . And it sounds utopian. However, it also resembles at some points the policies proposed by Litvinov in December 1933, a policy course approved by the Politburo and conducted by the NKID in the period that followed—although it ran directly counter to Stalin's own personal foreign policy conception.^[21] Known as "collective security" in the 1930s, some elements of it had been advanced by Litvinov as early as 1922 in his objections to the pro-German Rapallo line adopted by the NKID at that time, and other elements appeared in his public statements five years later as Russia joined the League's Preparatory Commission on Disarmament.^[22]

Bukharin too voiced an alternative to mainline Leninist-Stalinist foreign relations. In late 1926 and early 1927, he called for what would have amounted to a reconsideration of the "catastrophic premise." Doctrinally he moved Germany from the group of powers that were the oppressed victims of the imperialist victors of the World War into the camp of the imperialists themselves, and he also indicated the potential danger Germany posed to the peace of Europe. He suggested a new international politics in which the efforts of the Soviet government and the Communist International would be coordinated and directed toward preventing what he predicted would be a new and greater world war and toward establishing a generalized peace.^[23] Neither Bukharin nor Litvinov looked sanguinely upon a second round of general warfare, and their collaboration in favor of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact in 1928 may well be explained by their shared aversion to a security policy premised on perpetual interimperialist conflict.

However, Bukharin failed to oppose with any consistency the two closely related concepts of international relations with which his opponents in the Comintern were associating themselves in 1928—that the world verged on "a second round of wars," and that therefore international capitalism was too hostile and too moribund to be a suitable partner to socialist development through peaceful international economic interdependence. Although he was the leading exponent of evolutionary socialization and balanced economic development among them, he remained the most autarkic of the Bolsheviks.^[24] The theoretical legitimization Bukharin provided for "socialism in one country" made it difficult for him to develop a coherent alterna-

tive to the Stalinist course.^[25] Although he became openly critical of forced-pace industrialization and coerced collectivization beginning in September 1928, he seems never to have rejected the assumption that self-sufficient economic development was both necessary and desirable.^[26] His vision of Russia's economic future was thereby limited; possible cooperation on his part with integrationist economists was restricted; and he was left partially disarmed in his criticism of those who would abandon both the rationality of the market and the rationality of the plan and leap forward into forced collectivization and furious industrialization. Nor did Bukharin overtly oppose what became the central principle of Stalinist foreign policy, the idea that an ominous "foreign threat" confronted the USSR. Indeed, simultaneously with the warnings regarding the dangers of a new world war that he issued at the end of 1926, he became the earliest and most prominent spokesman within the party leadership for the alarmist statements which provoked the full-scale war scare crisis that climaxed six months later.^[27] The significance of the "foreign threat" at the time of "the great turn" is considered next.

The "Foreign Threat" and Rearmament

One feature of the doctrine of war devised by Lenin before the October Revolution was the notion that armed struggle between the forces of the victorious proletarian revolution and the imperialist states was unavoidable. Although the Civil War seemed to validate this notion, Lenin's pronouncements on the international situation in the years immediately following the Civil War emphasized respite from imperialist onslaught, capitalist-socialist equilibrium, and the possibilities for "peaceful coexistence" between the two systems. This post—Civil War doctrine was undermined beginning in 1926. In the cooperation among the Locarno powers, in the statements of the diehards in London, and in Pilsudski's seizure of power in Warsaw, the Soviet leadership found substantiation for the belief that a capitalist coalition was organizing for an attack on the USSR. The foreign relations crisis the next year convinced the entire party leadership that the threat was actual. Representatives of both the Stalin-Bukharin-Rykov majority and the Trotsky-Zinoviev Opposition spoke of war breaking out within months.

Voroshilov, the commissar for military and naval affairs and head of the Revolutionary Military Council, was slightly more prudent. He informed the Soviet people at the height of the war scare crisis that "after the break in diplomatic relations, the next logical step would be an open military assault on us." The country should be ready, he warned, for an attack that might be launched "in two years, one year, or possibly, though very unlikely, in a few

months." A special message of the Central Committee to the Soviet population on 1 July was even less definite regarding the time frame for capitalist aggression: "We do not know and we can not know when the enemy will attack the USSR openly with the bayonet. Yet there may be no shadow of a doubt that English imperialism is working ever harder to bring such a deadline closer."^[28] Then in December, the resolutions of the Fifteenth Party Congress spoke of "the immediate threat of an imperialist attack from the outside."^[29] Statements such as these suggested that the "foreign threat" was close at hand even if an actual attack was not imminent. They also extended the threat years into the future.

However, from the time of the war scare crisis, no one among the party leadership maintained with confidence that a restabilized system of capitalist states could continue to coexist peacefully with the Soviet Union for an indefinite period of time. At the height of the crisis, Tomskii proclaimed what he termed "the beginning of the end of the breathing space." As the crisis subsided, the Political Report of the Central Committee to the Fifteenth Party Congress announced that the period of" 'peaceful coexistence' [was] receding into the past, giving way to a period of imperialist assaults and preparation for intervention against the USSR." Events since the previous party congress two years earlier were ushering in a changed mode of relations between the USSR and the capitalist world, and at the same time a new era in the development of capitalism was beginning. "The stabilization of capitalism," the report stated, "is becoming more and more rotten and unstable."^[30] With these notions, the Bolshevik concept of international relations was transformed. During "the great turn," the menace of war and the condemnation of "imperialist pacifism" became the guiding principles of Soviet foreign relations doctrine. As such, they strongly influenced economic policy, defense policy, and domestic politics.^[31]

In the spring of 1926, when the Revolutionary Military Council first approached the German government regarding collaboration on the construction of a modern weapons industry in Russia, defense spending in the USSR was one-half of what it had been in peacetime, prerevolutionary Russia. This changed over the next three years as plans for industrial development evolved. Defense requirements—justified by the "foreign threat"—played an important role in these plans, and the war scare in particular was used to dramatize the urgency of military preparedness. Two days after Britain broke off relations with the USSR, the commissar for finance called on the population to make special efforts to strengthen the country both militarily and economically. Within three weeks, a "national defense week" was declared to proclaim the need for massive economic mobilization.^[32] The isolation of the USSR, as demonstrated by the events

of the summer of 1927, was the most significant immediate factor influencing the leadership when it implemented the industrialization drive in October. The rapid development of heavy industry was imperative, Kalinin stated at this time, even though there was little probability of a British "declaration of war tomorrow." Britain's "incessant and systematic preparation of such a war" made it necessary.^[33] Thus, the war scare turned the dognat i peregnat slogan into a national security imperative. Either the USSR acquired the technology and industrial base for defense or, as Stalin subsequently stated, "we will be wiped out."^[34]

Even as the "war menace" subsided, the "foreign threat" remained an incentive to rearmament and a means of mass mobilization. The Fifteenth Party Congress resolved: "Bearing in mind the possibility of a military attack it is essential in elaborating the Five-Year Plan to devote maximum attention to a most rapid development of those branches of the economy in general and industry in particular on which the main role will fall in securing the defense and economic stability of the country in wartime."^[35] As the First Five-Year Plan was prepared, there was no wavering in the drive to construct a defense industry capable of providing the arms to defend the USSR, and successive drafts of the plan stressed the need for an arms industry that could produce technically advanced weapons. This development culminated in the summer of 1929 when the Politburo and Sovnarkom resolved to revise the Five-Year Plan in the direction of producing modern artillery, tanks, armored cars, and airplanes and approved an extensive program intended to develop a modern war industry that could support the conduct of war under conditions of economic blockade.^[36]

The Shakhty trial in the spring of 1928 joined the "foreign threat" to the "internal class enemy." The OGPU and Andrei Vishinskii, the presiding judge at the trial, linked the indicted engineers conspiratorially to hostile foreign capitalists and their agents who allegedly sought to weaken the USSR in preparation for a future war of intervention. Stalin expressed the tie between the two doctrines most fully in a classic statement made at the time of the trial:

It would be foolish to believe that international capital will leave us in peace. No, comrades, that is not true. Classes exist, international capital exists, and it cannot look on calmly at the development of the country that is building socialism. Formerly, international capital thought it could overthrow the Soviet regime by means of outright armed intervention. The attempt failed. Now it is trying, and will go on trying, to undermine our economic strength by means of inconspicuous, not always noticeable but quite considerable, economic intervention, organizing sabotage, engineering all sorts of "crises" in

this or that branch or industry, and thereby facilitating the possibility of armed intervention in the future. All this is woven into the web of the class struggle of international capital against the Soviet regime, and there can be no question of anything accidental here.^[37]

Fused together in what Stalin called "the class struggle of international capital against Soviet power," the "foreign threat" and the "internal class enemy" were powerful ideological weapons. They justified the wider use of coercive measures against the residual Opposition, and they facilitated the defeat of the moderates and their nonparty supporters in government agencies who regarded the abilities of the old technical intelligentsia as necessary to the industrialization drive.

The "foreign threat" and the "internal class enemy" became two halves of the policy basis for Stalinist economic and political development. From the "foreign threat" was constructed what Sheila Fitzpatrick has called the "perpetual wartime-like crisis atmosphere" that prevailed during the years of the First Five-Year Plan. "Class enemies" were the substance of what Hiroaki Kuromiya has termed "the class warfare ideology of Stalin's industrialization."^[38] The war menace allowed the emerging Stalinist leadership to push through an agenda of hurried industrialization and forced collectivization at any cost. Class warfare ideology inspired the sacrificial and superhuman efforts of "Stalin's industrial revolution." The presence of internal "class enemies" distracted attention from the blunders of the leadership during the years of the First Five-Year Plan and provided scapegoats for their mistakes. Not coincidentally, the "foreign threat" emerged at a time when economic development had reached the point where mar-ketization under NEP had to be either extended or abolished. The extension of the market and the development of conditions of peaceful trade would eventually have made obsolete and irrelevant the combative party elite that had risen to prominence during the Civil War. Abolishing NEP and unleashing a new civil war, on the other hand, allowed that elite to survive and to continue asserting its control over Soviet society. The vast majority of those who had become party functionaries during the decade following the revolution had no choice but to support the Stalinist course with its doctrine of "foreign threats" and "class enemies."

Was the invocation of a "foreign threat" simply cynicism? Had it no basis in reality? On the one hand, the Red Army was poorly equipped and badly prepared. On the other, relations with the capitalist powers were improving in early 1929, and America and Europe were more forthcoming with loans and technology during the period of the First Five-Year Plan than they had been at the time of NEP. The proponents of the "foreign

threat" did not analyze these phenomena according to the categories of political realism, however Rather, their conviction that politics were to be understood in the terms of class analysis led them to look for the fundamental social forces that made up international relations. In doing so, they linked up the opposition that came from foreign governments and banks with the opposition that came from within the country and from inside the party itself. The result was a particularly virulent fear that the class base of Soviet power was weakening, that elements of the leadership were wavering, that the achievement of socialism was at risk, and that enemies abroad were ready to strike.

Diplomacy and "The Great Turn"

In his report on the international situation to the assembled delegates of the Sixth Comintern Congress held between July and September 1928, Bukharin discussed the changes that had taken place since the last congress in 1924. The era of "temporary capitalist stabilization" was coming to an end, he announced, and a "third period" in the history of the world since the October Revolution was beginning.^[39] As the congress took place at the height of the struggle between Bukharin and Stalin, there was considerable conflict between the supporters of each leader as the two sides of the divided CPSU struggled for control of the international Communist movement. Much of that battle was fought over the final form of the "Program of the Communist International," in which social democracy was denounced and bracketed with Fascism as a tool of the bourgeoisie.^[40] By contrast, the documents on international relations and the world political economy adopted by the congress reaffirmed the general line that Bukharin, with Stalin's support, had propounded regularly since late 1926. This line expressed their belief that the contradictions to which imperialism was subject, both among nation states and within particular national economies, were sharpening at an accelerated rate^[41] and that, as this happened, the masses of Europe and Asia were becoming increasingly radicalized, and the USSR was becoming more and more threatened. The "third period" was, and would be, a time of crisis. This crisis was both systemic and international, one of both intensified class struggle and renewed imperialist war. As outlined in the "Resolution on the Measures of Struggle against the Dangers of Imperialist War" adopted by the congress, the future was defined in catastrophic terminology as a time of increasingly open imperialist hostility toward the Soviet Union and China, a time when "two imperialist groups of states" would clash "in a struggle for world hegemony," and a time when "a mighty revolutionary movement" would rise up.^[42]

Adoption of this general line was one of several interrelated developments that took place in 1928-29. A "socialist offensive" was undertaken in the USSR against both independent peasant agriculture and private-enterprise small business. Stalin became a spokesman for the view that the Soviet Union was surrounded by foreign enemies, linked to enemies at home, who were plotting the ruination of the industrialization drive and the downfall of the Soviet regime. Within the leadership of the CPSU, the moderate group was defeated, and Stalin—and those who agreed with him or did not oppose him—gained control of the Central Committee. They put the First Five-Year Plan into effect and launched "Stalin's industrial revolution" with its "class war ideology." The official foreign policy conception of the Central Committee majority was transformed from one centered on an indeterminate period of "peaceful coexistence" to one premised on the approach of a new imperialist war and a mounting "foreign threat" to the USSR. One would normally expect to see such momentous changes—in party leadership, in strategies of economic development, in social policy, in the tactics of the international Communist movement, and in foreign policy conception—accompanied by diplomatic innovation, that is, by a change in the conduct of foreign relations and in particular in a shift in policy toward the major capitalist powers. There was none.

"People often forget," Izvestiia stated in May 1929, "that the Five Year Plan defines our foreign policy" and that this plan makes it necessary "to delay the war threat and make use of ... world markets."^[43] Rykov, the perpetual integrationist and the last remaining member of Lenin's Politburo (other than Stalin), stated the case for peaceful relations in his report to the Fifth Soviet Congress that same month:

Comrades, the fulfillment of the Five Year Plan is bound up with an enormous development in our exports and imports, the import of a vast mass of equipment for our industry, agriculture, and transport. Therefore we are not less, but more interested than before in the development of peaceful relations and trade agreements. The fulfillment of the Five Year Plan demands consistent and systematic work over a number of years. Therefore in international relations we are trying for such solidarity and firmness in relations with individual states that no setback or loss will occur from that quarter in carrying out the colossal schemes of works laid down in the plan.^[44]

Official government pronouncements such as these stressed the continuity of foreign policy through the radical transformations of 1928-29. The search for agreements with the capitalist powers went on, and the "struggle for peace and disarmament" was doctrinalized as the general line

of Soviet diplomacy. Both government and party assemblies continued to affirm this slogan as the basic principle of Soviet foreign policy despite the "foreign threat." The explanation given was that the more provocative the capitalist powers became, the more necessary it was for the USSR to continue the "struggle for peace." Thus, although the new course of diplomatic initiatives first undertaken in 1926 had not achieved the positive results expected of them, there was no shift in the intentions and conduct of foreign relations with Europe and America at a time when nearly everything else in the USSR was becoming more militant and confrontational.

One solution to this puzzle states that the Sixth Comintern Congress adopted the "third period" doctrine, with its "new era of revolutions and wars," solely to explain class relations within capitalism. The doctrine was of importance largely for tactical purposes in the struggle between the emerging Stalinists and the supporters of Bukharin, and it was of consequence mainly for the tactics of the German Communist Party in its relations with the German Social Democratic Party. Stalin and the Stalinists did not really believe that war was imminent in 1928-29, this argument continues; in actuality, they expected a long period of peace while they loudly proclaimed the contrary.^[45] Nevertheless it was contradictory to have counted on implementing the First Five-Year Plan with expanded foreign trade at a time when the entire capitalist system was proclaimed to be on the verge of collapse. A second solution to the puzzle suggests that Stalin himself took little interest in foreign relations in general and that he shunned diplomacy in particular.^[46] He simply stuck with the foreign policies already in place in 1928 until forced into a policy shift in late 1933 by the threat a National Socialist Germany posed to Soviet security. For this reason, he induced no radical transformation of foreign relations at the time of "the great turn" comparable to what took place in other policy areas.

The scholarship of Robert Tucker contradicts both these theories. Stalin, he insists, was vitally interested in international relations largely because he was convinced that the USSR would be involved in another war within the space of a few years. The whole of the "policy program" that he implemented in his "revolution from above" was shaped by his concept of Russia's situation in world politics. Well before 1928, Stalin had decided that Russia's "backwardness" and isolation necessitated the construction of "socialism in one country." "To transform NEP Russia into a socialist Russia," Tucker argues, "was to construct an industrially and militarily powerful Soviet Russian state owning the instruments of production and capable of fending for itself in a hostile world." The requirements of national defense were primary for Stalin. "All else," according to Tucker, "had

to be subordinated to the one great task of amassing military-industrial power in a hurry."^[47]

Stalin made war preparedness the national priority because, in his mind, war was both inevitable and imminent. In the doctrine of war and peace that he developed during the period of "temporary capitalist stabilization" and "socialism in one country," he distinguished between imperialist and interventionist wars, just as Lenin had done in 1916. He viewed both as inevitable, and he saw either as a threat to the USSR. Indeed, the central concern that he voiced in the years 1925-1929 was that conflict between rivals within the capitalist camp would develop into an anti-Soviet war as the imperialist powers, either as a consequence of war with each other or as prelude to it, attempted to thwart the threat posed to international capitalism by a USSR-based international socialist revolution. At the same time, he decided that the international situation of the Locarno era strongly resembled the one in which the World War had begun—with developing anticolonial movements and great power rivalries in East Asia, North Africa, and the Balkans. It portended, he thought, a second imperialist war, "not tomorrow or the day after," in his own words, "but in a few years time."^[48] And because Stalin believed that war among the imperialists would be accompanied by a war of intervention against the USSR, the threat to Russia was close at hand.

The international situation confronting the USSR, Stalin thought, made the development of a modern arms industry imperative. He first put forth his doctrine of impending war in a Central Committee discussion of appropriations for the Red Army in 1925, and he was the leading proponent on the Politburo of secret military collaboration with Germany. In turn, the construction of a socialist military-industrial complex carried foreign relations imperatives of its own, that is, a period of international peace. At the time of the 1927 war scare crisis, he stated: "We can and must build socialism in the USSR. But in order to build socialism we first of all have to exist. It is essential that there be a respite from war, that there be no attempts at intervention, that we achieve some minimum of international conditions indispensable for us so we can exist and build socialism."^[49] The crucial task of extending the respite from war was assigned by Stalin to Soviet diplomacy.

Soviet diplomacy could operate effectively within the capitalist world system, Lenin had "taught," because of the contradictions inherent in the relations among the imperialists. To exploit those contradictions was the central precept of Leninist diplomacy as practiced at Brest-Litvosk and Genoa/Rapallo (in both cases by aligning Russia with Germany), and as adopted by Stalin. Like Lenin, Stalin regarded the first task of Soviet

diplomacy to be that of preventing the formation of anti-Soviet coalitions and forestalling any coordinated intervention by the imperialist states and their clients while socialism—and the heavy industry and modern military capacity that accompanied it—was constructed in the USSR. Extending the interwar truce by diplomatic means, called "stretching out the breathing space," became the central tenet of Soviet foreign relations as "the great turn" was taken into "the new era of war and revolution."^[50] Consequently, diplomatic relations with Europe and America did not take on the aggressive and confrontational tone otherwise characteristic of the policies and relations of "the great turn."

Nevertheless, the increasingly confrontational statements made by the leadership to CPSU and Comintern cannot be dismissed as merely tactical, ideologically delusionary, or meaninglessly rhetorical. A more reasonable understanding of the shift from "capitalist stabilization," "international equilibrium," and "peaceful coexistence" to "a new era of wars and revolutions" requires seeing it as a means to both national integration and national security. At a time when the membership of the Soviet and foreign Communist parties included those who sympathized with the Opposition or with the moderate group, an internal and an international Communist consensus, or "solidarity," might be formed in opposition to a "foreign threat" to the socialist homeland. That same "foreign threat," along with domestic "class enemies," could be used within the USSR as a new basis for social cohesion at a time when the tempo of collectivization and industrialization divided Soviet society. At a time when the USSR was without stable diplomatic alliances, the support of an international working class alerted to the threat of an imperialist attack on the USSR provided one of the few measures of preparedness available. And at a time when the Soviet defense establishment was unprepared for all-out warfare, the slogan "a new era of wars and revolutions" stood as a warning to the capitalist powers and as a deterrent against attack: "War against us will bring revolution to you."^[51]