Conclusion

By the time of the 1928-29 "great turn" from the New Economic Policy to Stalinist economic and political development, many of the fundamental institutions, methods, and doctrines of Soviet national security were fixed in a form they would retain for decades. First, the drive for industrialization was launched, aimed at the creation of a self-sufficient military-industrial complex that would provide Soviet armed forces with weapons of current design and would be given first claim on national income and natural resources. Beginning in 1927, the project was justified by a high-range estimate of the magnitude of the "foreign threat" to the security of the USSR, and in 1928 it was joined to the use of preemptive state terror in defiance of internationally accepted humanitarian and democratic norms. Soon it came to have priority above all other economic, social, human, and environmental needs.

Second, in 1922 Soviet diplomacy had become discouraged about the prospects of a comprehensive post-revolutionary settlement between the socialist and capitalist camps. The diplomatic aspect of the special relationship with Germany had eroded seriously after 1925. Beginning in 1926, the efforts of the NKID were no longer aimed at obtaining dramatic breakthroughs to favorable relations with any of the capitalist powers but were concentrated on making gradual improvements in the tenor of relations and on concluding agreements piecemeal.

Third, the doctrine that informed foreign relations in 1928-29 reasserted that the capitalist world order was incapable of any prolonged stabilization and affirmed the concept that the greater the coherence demonstrated by the capitalist order, the greater the dangers that confronted the USSR. The Soviet Union would, nevertheless, be made more secure, the doctrine continued, by participating in world politics than it would be

by remaining apart from them. However, any rapprochement between the USSR and the capitalist world could go no further than a "peaceful coexistence" standoff.

Institutions, methods, and doctrines such as these were not inherent in the revolutionary origins of the regime, nor were they taken directly from pre-World War I Marxism-Leninism. They were formed out of the international experience of the Soviet Union as it entered world politics during the years between the Bolshevik and Stalinist revolutions. Explaining the development of the foreign relations of the USSR during this period of formation is the project undertaken in this book, the argument of which can be stated in the form of the following propositions.

1. Soviet foreign relations were founded on twin principles. One was that the revolution begun in Russia could be continued by building an international Communist movement and aligning it with mass-based non-insurrectionary proletarian organizations in Europe and nationalist movements in Asia. The other was that the survival of the socialist republics in the lands of the former Russian Empire depended on protecting them against foreign intervention and on reconstructing and restructuring the Russian economy. To these ends, the Soviet leadership sought to obtain the technology of the advanced industrial countries, to construct protective zones on the frontiers of the USSR made up of stable states independent of the great powers, and to find a secure position for Soviet Russia within the capitalist world order. As the means to that stability, security, and technology, those who made the October Revolution established conventional commercial and diplomatic relations with the governments of the capitalist states of Europe and with the authoritarian modernizers of Asia, none of which were particularly sympathetic to the international Communist movement.

2. Internationalizing the October Revolution while normalizing relations with European capitalists and Asian nationalists was no simple task. The two efforts complicated each other in many ways. The series of trade and recognition agreements negotiated by the NKID beginning in 1921 restricted the dissemination of revolutionary propaganda. The ideological isolation into which their commitment to global revolution put the Bolsheviks posed a formidable obstacle to Soviet diplomacy in its efforts to establish normal relations with Europe and America. The search for trade and loan agreements presupposed a stable and prosperous system of capitalist states ready to transfer technology and to make loans; but internationalizing the October Revolution in Europe, Islamic Asia, or China threatened international capitalist stabilization. The financial aid given to

the General Strike in England and the political and military assistance sent to the Nationalist Revolution in China provoked Soviet Russia's most severe foreign relations crisis during the period between the end of the Civil War and the German invasion twenty years later. The Comintern's ideological attack on the Treaty of Versailles—an effort to promote solidarity with the German proletariat in opposition to the reparations-collecting European bourgeoisie—indirectly encouraged revanchist forces in Germany, diminished the prospects for international stability in Europe, and eventually ruined the system of security begun by Soviet diplomacy in the 1920s. In circumstances such as these, efforts to sharpen social conflict in Europe and nationalist conflict in Asia, and thereby to promote the global revolution on which the security of socialist revolution was presumed ultimately to depend, increased directly the isolation and insecurity of the Soviet state.

Neither half of "the dual policy" could be renounced, however. "The world revolutionary process" was the means by which the first and only socialist regime would reproduce itself; "peaceful coexistence" allowed the regime to survive until it did. Accordingly, while the Foreign Commissariat announced that socialism and capitalism could exist side by side to their mutual benefit, Comintern manifestos proclaimed the violent demise of capitalism and the inevitability of proletarian revolution in Europe. The two modes of early Soviet foreign relations could not be integrated into a coherent grand strategy, and in actuality no reliable method was found both to participate in and to overthrow capitalist international relations. Nor, despite Chicherin's repeated efforts to do so, were the two projects effectively separated from each other within Soviet policy making, either institutionally or rhetorically.

3. When Bolshevik assistance to revolutionary movements in Asia is regarded from a global perspective, it does not seem to have been a substitute for proletarian insurrection in Europe. On both continents similar strategies for internationalizing the October Revolution developed simultaneously—from revolution by local initiative in 1918-19, to revolution on the frontiers of the Civil War under the protection of the Red Army, to revolution by cadres coordinated from within the Comintern Executive Committee, to subversion through Soviet embassies abroad, to the elaborate missions of political guidance and military assistance dispatched to both Germany and China in 1923. Researchers in the archives of the Central Committee may or may not find a comprehensive plan for global revolution conceived in the Kremlin. However, the patterns of insurrectionary advance, retreat, and advance again were sufficiently simultaneous in both regions to undermine decisively the credibility of the notion that

national liberation in Asia was a form of strategic compensation for the recession of proletarian insurrection in Europe.

4. How the first socialist society acquired the means of production was a matter of foreign relations. Any of the various strategies posited in the industrialization debate that was conducted among the party/state leadership during the 1920s were to be achieved most fully by importing advanced technology from America and Europe. This was obscured by the rhetoric of autarky deployed in the debate itself, and it has been largely overlooked in the discussion of the problem by scholars. To fund technology import, two fundamentally different methods were potentially possible during the era of the New Economic Policy. One of them envisaged significant advances of capital from Europe and America. The feasibility of this method depended, however, on political prerequisites set forth in London, Paris, Brussels, and Washington: The leadership of the USSR must recognize the debts of previous Russian regimes and behave both internationally and at home as would pragmatic politicians at the head of a normal state. However, their involvement in nationalist struggles in Asia, the encouragement they gave to civil disobedience within the armed forces of Europe, and their repression of dissent and opposition within the USSR precluded the Bolsheviks from doing so. The other way to pay for imported technology looked to compulsory loans from the populace and to party/ state control over the production and sale of grain as a way of acquiring revenue and foreign exchange for foreign purchases. Significantly, opting for one method or the other had consequences for the constitutional development of the USSR. Whereas international loans depended on favorable world opinion, internal borrowing and state grain controls not only freed the construction of socialism from foreign capital, it also allowed the regime to defy international public opinion and perpetuate and extend the use of preemptive state terror as the way to resolve internal political conflict.

5. Neither Genoa nor Rapallo provided a base for Soviet relations with the capitalist powers. The potential for a general peace treaty between socialist Russia and the capitalist powers that was projected at the Genoa Conference foundered on the complexity of the issues involved in a comprehensive multilateral East-West settlement, on disagreement on all sides over what debts of the Russian past were to be paid, and on reciprocal ideological antagonism. The Rapallo-based relations that Russia developed with Germany from 1922 to 1926 were based on full diplomatic recognition followed by a treaty of neutrality, on mutual cancellation of debts and reparations, on trade agreements and medium-term credits, and on the willingness of Weimar governments to forgo "punishing" the Soviet gov-

ernment for Communist insurrections in Germany. They remained "special" to these two countries, however. Although London and Paris recognized the Soviet regime in 1924, subsequent bilateral negotiations never got beyond the no-debt-payment/no-loan impasse, and die-hard anti-Communism brought Soviet relations with both Britain and France to a crisis within three years. When Germany and the Allied powers assembled at The Hague in 1929-30 to arrange what was called at the time "the final liquidation of the war," the USSR was not present. Not until 1943, after the Red Army had stopped the Wehrmacht, was the Soviet Union admitted to the councils of the world powers, and the USSR did not attend an international megaconference similar in size and scope to Genoa until the Helsinki Conference convened fifty years afterwards.

6. The world order that emerged with the liquidation of the Ruhr invasion in 1924 was defined in reports to congresses of the Comintern and the RCP(B)/CPSU as "the international stabilization of capitalism." The term signified the restoration of stability and productivity to bourgeois Europe by means of American capital achieved at the cost of the economic and political subordination of Britain and the Continent to the United States. In this world order the USSR was recognized diplomatically as the successor to the regime of the tsars by most of the nations of Europe, Asia, and Latin America. However, it remained in virtual diplomatic isolation. The governments of Britain, France, and Germany resolved their outstanding postwar conflicts and regularized their relations with the United States by means of a series of agreements on reparations, war debts, trade, and security. At the same time they suspended negotiations with the Soviet Union or kept them on a strictly tentative basis. It was in the context of these international developments that the crucial debates among the Soviet leadership on the construction of industrial socialism in Russia took place. And these developments constituted the international environment in which a Central Committee majority formed around Stalin and Bukharin and asserted at least officially that the achievement of socialist industrialization in Russia did not depend on either the proletarians or the capitalists of Europe.

7. During the era of "socialism in one country," Soviet foreign relations doctrine separated into two opposing conceptions, each with its own analysis of the international situation, its own predictions for the future, and its own prescriptions for policy. One conception posited that Euro-American capitalism and the proletarian regime in Russia were stabilizing simultaneously, that this dual stabilization would govern world politics for some time to come, and that it would offer to the USSR a "prolonged period of respite" from involvement in imperialist warfare. This respite, which would last for

years, even decades, would permit the USSR to consolidate its alliances with the proletariat of Europe and the peoples of Asia, to industrialize, and to construct socialism. The other conception denied that a protracted respite was in the offing and asserted categorically the "precarious" and "temporary" character of capitalist stabilization. Within this conception, the May 30th movement in China became the beginning of "a new era of wars and revolutions," and from the international conferences and treaties of 1925, and from the campaigns conducted by die-hard anti-Communists in Europe, it was concluded that the imperialist powers were arming themselves, encircling the USSR, and preparing for military conflict. A war could begin in a few years time and be accompanied by, or preceded by, a preemptive military strike against the Soviet Union. In 1925-26 these two contradictory prognostications coexisted within the Soviet discourse on the international situation. At times both were asserted in the same doctrinal pronouncements without the contradiction between the two of them being explicitly resolved.

8. In public statements and private conversations alike, both Chicherin and Litvinov carefully separated the NKID from the "foreign threat" prognostication, and during the second half of 1926, the Foreign Commissariat reformulated actual Soviet foreign policy according to the "whole period of respite" scenario. As was the industrialization strategy adopted at the same time, foreign policy was premised on the assumption that proletarian rule in the USSR had achieved stability both domestically and internationally and that socialism would be constructed gradually out of the conditions of NEP. In one of the heretofore least understood developments in the history of early Soviet foreign relations, the expectation of rapid breakthroughs to comprehensive settlements, either on the multilateral Genoa model or on the bilateral Rapallo model, was abandoned in favor of a search for piecemeal arrangements that included foreign trade agreements designed to improve, restore, or establish political relations with the major capitalist powers, bilateral neutrality treaties with states bordering the USSR, and participation in the instruments of multilateral international cooperation.

9. Lenin brought Soviet Russia into world politics in 1921 with a foreign policy conception composed largely of those of his pre-1917 ideas about the development of the early twentieth-century global political economy that seemed to have been confirmed by the course of international politics during the three years following the revolution. To wit, conflicts among the imperialist powers and between the capitalist and socialist "camps" were inevitable until the world order was transformed by proletarian revolution in Europe. Until then, coalitions of capitalist states

represented a particular threat to "proletarian power" in Russia. The blockade and intervention of the period 1918-1920 were possible because the capitalist powers had been able to act together. On the other hand, "breathing space" was created when they were divided among themselves and at war with one another. Insofar as the capitalist world system offered any security to the Russian and other Soviet republics, it was because the postwar antagonisms inherent in the relations among the imperialist powers could be counted on to prevent them from acting on their basic antagonism toward "proletarian power" and taking united action against the Russian and other Soviet republics. Soviet security was best ensured, therefore, by participating in capitalist international relations and using the conflicts present in the postwar situation to prevent the formation of anti-Soviet coalitions—military, commercial, financial, or diplomatic.

The failure of the Genoa Conference and the conclusion of the Rapallo Treaty in 1922 seemed to validate Lenin's belief that antagonisms among the capitalist powers favored the survival of the Soviet republics. However, the Dawes Plan and the Locarno Treaties undermined the supposition that the capitalist powers could not overcome their postwar differences and that the divisions and antagonisms among them could be counted on to protect socialist Russia from their combined opposition. In this manner, the agreements of international stabilization concluded among Britain, France, Germany, and the United States between 1924 and 1926 represented a fundamental challenge to the most basic precepts of Leninist foreign relations.

One possible response to that challenge was to abandon the premise that not only international proletarian revolution, but Soviet security as well, always benefited from conflict among the capitalist powers—and to adopt instead the alternative doctrine of foreign relations proposed on occasion during the post-Locarno era in both Comintern circles and the Foreign Affairs Commissariat. This doctrine held that "peace is indivisible," that another conflict anywhere in Europe could escalate into a second total war, a war that would devastate both capitalist and proletarian nations. The task of both the NKID and the Comintern was, therefore, not to add to the tensions that contributed to interimperialist conflict or to the antagonisms between the capitalist and socialist camps, but, rather, to work to reduce them.

10. Both the doctrine of "indivisible peace" and the prognostication of "prolonged respite" were casualties of the 1927 war scare and the extended crisis it touched off. The notion that capitalist coalescence threatened the USSR was reasserted amid cries of alarm over the foreign threat. No longer did any member of the party leadership, whether from the Opposition, the moderate group, or the future Stalinists, contend that the post-1923 world

order was one in which a restabilized system of capitalist states could continue to coexist for an indefinite period of time with stabilized proletarian power in the USSR. Instead, the foreign relations doctrine of both the CPSU and the Comintern stated dogmatically that the capitalist world order was incapable of any prolonged stabilization, that it was becoming increasingly "rotten and unstable," and that a new era in the history of international capitalist development was beginning that would bring cataclysmic war and revolution. To be sure, the idea that another total war in Europe would devastate both capitalist and socialist civilization would be revived to underpin Litvinov's security policy from 1934 to 1939, and the belief that capitalism and socialism could coexist at peace indefinitely would serve as the basis of post-World War II détentes between East and West. However, many of the more antagonistic conclusions drawn from the first era of Soviet foreign relations would exert a powerful hold on the national political imagination for almost as long as there was a Soviet Union.