Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Comintern and Soviet foreign policy,

1919–1941

jonathan haslam

The October Revolution

The October Revolution was intended as a prelude to world revolution. Ini-

tial disappointment at the failure of other countries to follow suit led to an

abrupt change of policy at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, when Lenin settled

for a compromise peace with the Kaiser in order to give time for the creation

of a military base for the revolution until Germany was ripe for revolt. The

invasion of Russia by the armies of Japan and the Entente Powers, in May

and August 1918 respectively, temporarily destroyed the tactic of accommo-

dation with the capitalist world. The option of revolutionary war in the style

of Napoleon was thus forced upon the Bolsheviks as a matter of survival. A

war of offence against the West therefore became inseparable from the needs

for defence. The question hidden behind the ensuing turmoil was the direc-

tion of foreign policy once military hostilities ceased. Would Soviet Russia

revert to the ‘Brest viewpoint’ of accommodation? Or, having tasted the

excitement, would Moscow once again exercise the option of revolutionary

war?

The Bolsheviks had been conducting a ﬁerce campaign to spread the rev-

olution among invading Allied troops since the autumn of 1918 under the

Central Executive Committee’s Department of Propaganda, which was then

moved over into the Communist International (Comintern) on 25 March 1919.

The Comintern was thus always conceived and created for more than just

furthering the worldwide proletarian revolution: protecting and enhancing

the security of Soviet Russia (from 1923 the USSR) was no less a priority.

Not everyone immediately understood this ambiguous role. It was reported

that at the focal point of its intended activities – Germany – the question of

creating the Comintern was viewed ‘with great scepticism’ because it was

636

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Comintern and Soviet foreign policy, 1919–1941

not thought that ‘anything organisationally could be achieved in the near

future’.

In theory no conceptual difference was allowed to exist between these

entirely distinct purposes. But the conﬂict between theory and practice very

soon became too blatant to remain unremarked, and as early as 1924 and as

late as 1935 even ofﬁcial utterance acknowledged that, at any given moment,

these purposes could collide. A further complication also arose from the fact

that the Comintern was born out of the October Revolution of 1917, which was

Russian in inspiration and implementation. It meant that this global apparatus

of power attached to the Soviet Communist Party became embroiled in the

struggle for power that divided the party after the death of Lenin. Thus, even as

it increasingly became an adjunct to Soviet state power abroad, the Comintern

also became an adjunct to one faction within the party that sought to control

all Soviet power. Thus the process of Bolshevising the Comintern that took

place under Lenin – ostensibly to prepare fraternal parties for revolution –

inevitably became a process of Stalinising the Comintern once Stalin crushed

all vestiges of formal opposition in 1929.

Therefore, even if wetreatthe Comintern as the instrument of Sovietforeign

policy that it undoubtedly was, the relationship between Soviet state interests

and the interests of worldwide revolutionwasnot alwaysentirely clear. Second,

even where one can in retrospect see a line dividing the two, the thorny issue

remains of a distinction between the interests of the ruling faction in Russia

and the interests of the Soviet system as a whole. The Comintern was thus not

a marginal and extraneous extension of Soviet power but integral to its very

core and purpose, whether original or bastardised by Stalin’s autocracy. The

legitimacy of the October Revolution in Russia never depended exclusively

on what it could do for Russia. Primarily it lay in what Russia could do for

the world. Once the German revolution triumphed, Lenin intended to move

to Berlin. Thus internal and international purpose could never be separated

by a Chinese Wall of indifference without breaching the Leninist legacy in its

entirety. Even at the height of his powers and at the peak of his contempt for

foreign Communists, Stalin could never fully forswear that legacy, for to do

so would have undermined an essential element in the domestic structure of

power he was so anxious to dominate completely. Trotsky wrote that Stalin

1 Karl Radek, reporting from Berlin, to Lenin, Chicherin and Sverdlov, 24 Jan. 1919:

K. Anderson and A. Chubar’ian (eds.), Komintern i ideia mirovoi revoliutsii: dokumenty

(Moscow: Nauka, 1998), doc. 6.

2 E. H. Carr and R. W. Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926–1929 (London:

Macmillan, 1976), vol. iii, pts. 1–3.

637

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

jonathan haslam

would not dare desert the Comintern except at risk of appearing ‘in the char-

acter of a consistent Bonaparte, i.e. break openly with the tradition of October

and place some kind of crown on his head’.

Standing alone

The failure of the Allied war of intervention, signalled by the British decision

to pull out by the end of 1919, effectively ensured the survival of Bolshevik

rule in Russia and the greater part of its former empire. The Janus faces of

Soviet foreign policy thereby emerged: on the one side the face of appeasement

and statecraft, the policy of accommodation to the capitalist world (the ‘Brest

viewpoint’); on the other the contrasting face of violence and revolution to

uproot and supplant capitalism in its entirety.

Not least because of the Royal Navy offshore, the Baltic states – Latvia,

Lithuania and Estonia – were where Lenin cut his losses. He granted diplo-

matic recognition to these bourgeois nationalist regimes and sought to make

virtue of necessity by dramatically demonstrating Soviet support for the hal-

lowed liberal principle of national self-determination. Similarly in the East,

the Bolsheviks projected their solidarity with ‘national liberation movements’

against Western imperialism even if, in one instance, national liberation was

led by a brutal feudal despot (King Amanullah of Afghanistan). This funda-

mental breach of Marxist principle – to back the bourgeoisie instead of the

toiling masses – was dictated by the demands of the Soviet state in a friendless

world where revolution was slow to emerge. In the eyes of the Bolsheviks

these were merely temporary remedies to a problem for the short term. A

breach of principle in the longer term was not expected and would certainly

not have been accepted if proposed.

At the same time that Lenin reassured the Baltic that they might stand free of

Bolshevik expansionism, other countries were targeted for Sovietisation. The

high point of this misplaced euphoria occurred when Poland was seemingly

within grasp in late July 1920. Lenin declared ‘the situation in the Comintern’

to be ‘superb’. Zinoviev, Bukharin and Lenin thought it the time to encourage

the Italian revolution (this was the time of the factory occupations in Turin).

‘My personal opinion’, Lenin wrote, ‘is that for this we need to Sovietise

Hungary, and perhaps also Czechoslovakia and Romania . . .’

This bafﬂingly

misplaced optimism was connected to the drive on Warsaw in a desperate

3 Published in Biulleten’ Oppozitsii 44 (July 1935): 13; quoted in E. H. Carr, Twilight of Com-

intern, 1930–1935 (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 427,n.75.

4 Lenin to Stalin, 23 July 1920: Anderson and Chubar’ian, Komintern i ideia, doc. 39.

638

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Comintern and Soviet foreign policy, 1919–1941

attempt to create a bridge to the land of revolution, Germany. Even with

the dramatic failure of the Polish offensive, Lenin continued to boast. ‘The

defensive period of the war with global imperialism has ended,’ he told the

Nineteenth Conference of the Russian Communist Party, ‘and we can and

must use the military situation for the start of an offensive war.’

The voice of sanity was that of the brilliant Polish Jew, Karl Radek, who

was consistently better informed about the state of the world because he

moved beyond Soviet borders, and with his eyes wide open. Radek ridiculed

the optimism prevalent in the Kremlin. He had no problem with the notion of

offensive war; only with the assessment of the international situation. ‘Now

comrade Lenin is demonstrating a new method of information gathering: not

knowing what is going on in a given country, he sends an army there,’ he

parried. It was, he agreed, entirely possible that a revolution in Italy would

transform the scene. ‘But in any case we must refrain from the method of

sounding out the international situation with the aid of bayonets. The bayonet

would be good if it were necessary to aid a particular revolution, but for seeing

how the land lies in this or that country we have another weapon – Marxism,

and for this we do not need to call upon Red Army soldiers.’

The complete and humiliating collapse of the last all-out attempt at revo-

lution made by German Communists in March 1921 overturned Comintern

policy. It underlined the sorry fact that – for all the recrimination heaped upon

the KPD leadership for incompetence and lack of conviction – a structural

shift was under way outside Russia, reversing the tide accelerated by war

from revolution to the ‘stabilisation of capitalism’ and, though they had yet

to recognise it, counter-revolution. And if the Soviet regime was to survive, it

had to take careful note and adjust tactics accordingly. Institutionally, the shift

was paralleled by the transfer of talent from the Comintern and other party

bodies to the diplomatic apparatus, in the form of the People’s Commissariat

for Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel), whose hitherto precarious existence now

became solidiﬁed as Soviet Russia established itself as a state in its own right.

It would, however, be wrong to see this shift of emphasis as in any sense

ﬁnal. The two institutions, embodying the Janus faces of the Soviet regime,

fought for dominance as an extension of the fact that Comintern sponsorship

of revolution inevitably created problems for the Narkomindel. Matters came

to a head in mid-August 1921. The issue was to ensure ‘that the international

position of the RSFSR and the Comintern were not in a condition of antago-

nism between one another’. The institutional stance of Soviet diplomats was,

5 Ibid., doc. 47. 6 Radek speaking, 22 Sept. 1920: Ibid., doc. 48.

639

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

jonathan haslam

of course, the ‘Brest viewpoint’: the Peace of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918,

where ﬂedgling Soviet Russia traded its principles, indemnities and territory

for precious time against the invading Germans. Commissar for Foreign Affairs

Georgii Chicherin wrote to party secretary Molotov:

I do not understand why, thanks to the Comintern, we have to fall out with

Afghanistan, Persia and China.

. . .The harm is done in the inadequacy of contacts between the Narkomindel

andtheComintern. The line oftheNarkomindelconsists in enabling theSoviet

Republic, the citadel of world revolution, to overcome millions of difﬁculties.

Only from an anti-Brest viewpoint of indifference to the existence of the

Soviet Republic can this line be rejected. These difﬁculties can be counted

in the millions; our position is extremely complex. Everyone everywhere

mixes up the RSFSR with the Comintern, and an untimely step on its [the

Comintern’s] part could create a catastrophe for us. We have little in the way

of military power. An attack on us from Afghanistan could lead to catastrophe

in Turkestan. This is not a game [etim nel’zia igrat’]. To consider shameful,

vigilance in the face of these dangers – that is truly shameful.

The clash between state interests and revolutionary interests was not so

easily resolved in the East, as the revolutionary movement began to swell. In

Europe, however, where revolution was effectively in retreat and where the

stakes were higher for Soviet security, Comintern tactics had already moved

in the direction of the ‘united front’. Communist parties formed by splitting

Social Democracy were now told to ally with those they believed traitors to

the revolution. The parliamentary road to power, anathema months before,

was now not just acceptable but also the preferred route to government.

The tactical retreat from outright insurrectionism served Soviet state interests

because Lenin had by then reached a point of no return in the decision to align

Moscow with the pariah of Europe, Weimar Germany. And this alignment

rested uneasily upon a common interest between the Right within Germany –

extreme nationalists hostile to the Versailles Treaty system, heavy industry

in need of markets and the military looking for allies against the Franco-

Polish axis – and the Bolsheviks, whose urgent priority was to keep the rest

of Europe at loggerheads to forestall any renewed attempt by a common

coalition to overturn Soviet power. This alignment was preﬁgured by secret

and unwritten understandings on military co-operation secured before the

end of 1921, symbolised in the Treaty of Rapallo in April 1922.

7 Chicherin to Molotov, 14 Aug. 1921: Ibid., doc. 86.

8 E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1921, vol. iii (London: Macmillan, 1953), and

The Interregnum, 1922–1923 (London: Macmillan, 1954).

640

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Comintern and Soviet foreign policy, 1919–1941

Having failed to overthrow the Bolsheviks – though with no idea just how

close they had come – the British, led by Lloyd George, decided to rationalise

retreat by attempting to prove a fundamental tenet of liberal doctrine: that

by trading with Russia, which was now embarking on a market-based New

Economic Policy, Britain could undermine its revolutionary essence as individ-

ual economic self-interest overwhelmed the spirit of collectivism. The market

would thus ultimately triumph. Such a policy might have worked at that time

had Lenin – well versed in liberal fundamentals and a keen reader of Maynard

Keynes – not immediately blocked off that promising but elusive avenue with

institution of a state monopoly of foreign trade. The Anglo-Soviet trade agree-

ment of March 1921 was effectively used by the Bolsheviks to establish Russia

as a presence on the international stage, while failing to secure for Britain a

ready and peaceful means of ridding the world of Bolshevism. It fast became

apparent to all that, with little if any negotiating power at his disposal and

with a readiness to make tactical sacriﬁces as the moment demanded, Lenin

had turned the balance of Europe to Russia’s advantage, and not through

the expected means of revolutionary expansionism but by the time-honoured

practices of realpolitik and in a manner worthy of Talleyrand. In this game

of deadly chess, under Lenin’s skilful direction Moscow always seemed a few

steps ahead, leaving the capitalist world insecure, angry and resentful, but

with no means yet available of turning that into effective policy to neutralise

or destroy the bases of Soviet power.

TherealproblemforSoviet Russia was,however, that this proved Lenin’s last

triumph. The assassin’s bullet increasingly rendered him senseless, and there

existed no one of comparable ability to succeed him. Thus Lenin’s tactical

moves of the moment – such as Rapallo – were, for want of greater foreign

political intuition and ingenuity, ﬁxed in concrete. Where experimentation

beyond Lenin’s strategy did occur, it not infrequently took place long after

it could be truly effective (notably the Popular Front against Fascism) having

been blocked by dogma; or it emerged as a desperate scramble to appease a

foreign threat, during which every trace of principle was ditched in indecent

haste (the Nazi–Soviet pact) and at considerable cost.

The awakening of the East

The one great asset that emerged after Lenin’s demise in January 1924 was

what he had predicted two decades before: namely, the ‘awakening of the

East’ – in this instance the Far East. Strategically the prospect of stripping the

imperialist powers, above all Britain, of the assets that underwrote empire, was

641

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

jonathan haslam

beguiling indeed. India took the greatest share of British export, China stood

a close second. The consequences of losing both or even one of these crucial

markets, that were also the recipients of billions in capital investment, were

both incalculable and uplifting. India, however, trod its own path. The passive

resistance movement established by Gandhi differed from the Bolsheviks (and

Indian Communists) crucially not only as to ends but also as to means. That

left China.

Lenin had been to the fore in establishing Soviet credentials with China’s

bourgeois nationalist movement under Sun Yat-sen. In 1918 a message had

been sent declaring all unequal treaties null and void. Yet nothing was heard in

reply. Finally, at the end of 1920, Russian emissaries reported back favourably

on Sun as ‘violently anglophobe’.

But he led no party as such and Moscow

saw its job as not merely to found a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) but also

build the nationalist movement against the West and Japan. In the summer

of 1922 emissary A. A. Ioffe reported to Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs

(for the East) Lev Karakhan that Beijing was

for us extremely favourable. The struggle with world capitalism has vast res-

onance and massive possibilities for success. The spirit of world politics is

felt here extremely strongly, much greater than, for instance, in Central Asia,

where Lenin attributed it. China is without doubt the focal point of interna-

tional conﬂicts and the most vulnerable place in international imperialism,

and I think that precisely now, when imperialism is undergoing a crisis in

Europe, and when revolution is imminent, it would be very important to

deliver imperialism a blow at its weakest point.

Accusations of ‘revolutionary opportunism’ were met with the rebuttal that

‘revolutionary nationalism’ was a force to be reckoned with in its own right.

‘We have no alternative.’

With Sun’s death early in 1925 the Chinese nationalist movement passed

into the hands of a less principled successor, Chiang Kai-shek, who formed

it into a party: the Guomindang. Even under Sun, however, the interests of

the nationalists intersected with those of Russia only at certain key points,

not all along the line. Rather like Germany under Stresemann from 1926,

the Guomindang saw its close relations with Moscow as a major bargaining

9 Memorandum from A. Potapov to Chicherin, 12 Dec. 1920, M. Titarenko et al. (eds.), VKP

(b), Komintern i natsional’no-revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Kitae: Dokumenty, vol. i (Moscow:

Russian Akademia nauk, 1994), doc. 7.

10 Telegram from Ioffe to Karakhan, 30 Aug. 1922, in Titarenko et al., VKP (b), doc. 28.

11 Speech by Maring, 6 Jan. 1923, at a session of the Comintern executive committee (IKKI)

ibid., doc. 56.

642

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Comintern and Soviet foreign policy, 1919–1941

counter to be cashed in when others offered more; an exercise engaged in with

the British in the late 1920s and the Japanese from the early 1930s.

By 1925 minimal Soviet investment had paid off handsomely. And when

on 30 May the British foolishly ﬁred on unarmed protestors in the Shanghai

International Settlement, the entire nationalist movement rose in protest, the

ﬂedgling and hitherto insigniﬁcant CCP in the vanguard of direct action. The

Soviet, and therefore Comintern, commitment to revolutionary nationalism

in China was only conditional; yet that very condition – drivingthe British out –

was sufﬁcient to send Anglo-Soviet relations into a tailspin from which it never

entirely recovered, and with damaging consequences in the longer term after

Hitler came to power in Germany when Moscow needed London as an ally

against Berlin.

Thus Comintern aspirations were displaced fortuitously from West to East.

Comprehension of the East was, however, not a great deal better than of

the West. And the Russians soon got carried away in expectation of cutting

the British Empire down to size. They were therefore entirely unprepared

when London laid its trap: negotiating a secret compromise with Chiang that

not only encouraged but also facilitated the massacre of Communist cadres

within his ranks and a breach in diplomatic relations with Moscow that ﬁnally

foreclosed on the Leninist investment in revolutionary nationalism. London

also cut relations with Moscow in the spring of 1927. The Russians therefore

had every cause to regret having vested so much in what turned out to be a

futile and costly venture. Only the CCP had more reason for regret. Its last

outpost of strength was washed away in a tide of blood by Chiang at Canton

that December. All that remained were peasants deep in the vast interior,

much vaunted by the unknown Mao Zedung but a cause of deep scepticism in

Moscow, where decisions were in the making to break the back of recalcitrant

peasants resisting the forced collectivisation of agriculture.

Revolutionary phrase versus cautious pragmatism

Had decisions on Comintern strategy hinged entirely on principles of revolu-

tionary solidarity, the Soviet state would have faced the prospect of extinction,

since objective reality did not match up to exaggerated expectations. Rapallo

realpolitik would,for instance, never have come about, thus leaving Russia dan-

gerously isolated in a hostile world. Had decisions hinged entirely on reasons

12 For the larger picture see E. H. Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1924–1926 (London:

Macmillan, 1964), vol. iii, ch. 40.

643

jonathan haslam

of state, however, the Comintern would have lost its membership abroad;

and although Moscow not infrequently undercut fraternal parties, this was

usually only in extremis. In the late 1920s, however, neither factor was criti-

cal to Comintern strategy. What was critical was the advancement of Stalin

within Russia. He had always been deeply sceptical of the Comintern’s value –

lavochka (corner shop) was the dismissive term he used to describe it. None

the less the prevailing view was that the Comintern was the sacred repository

for the ultimate objective – world revolution – and its membership was inex-

tricably tied into the Soviet party; indeed the Polish party was so difﬁcult to

differentiate – it also sprang from the RussianSocial Democratic Labour Party –

that later Stalin wiped it out.

What made necessary the complete subordination of the Comintern to

Stalin was that it was effectively a continuum with the Soviet party – so dom-

ination of the latter also necessitated domination of the former. What made

possible that subordination were practices begun by Lenin for completely

different purposes. Strict discipline was governed by the notorious twenty-

ﬁrst condition of Comintern membership, which originated not from Russian

hands but at the enthusiastic suggestion of the founder of the Italian Commu-

nist Party, Amadeo Bordiga. This greatly facilitated the process begun by Lenin

known as Bolshevisation,which was to ensure that the sections wereﬁne-tuned

to (successful) Russian revolutionary standards. The core assumption behind

the purge was the ﬁxed and unalterable belief that failure to accomplish revo-

lutionary goals was not the result of the absence of revolutionary conditions

but the absence of revolutionary aptitude.

If this werenot distortion enough, it rapidly became an instrumentto bolster

the power and inﬂuence of those Russians at the head of the Comintern –

initiallyZinoviev – to advance their ownprot

es at the expense of meritocracy.

Thus it was that initially the Left (including Bordiga) captured the Comintern,

was soon forced to give way to the Right, and both were then obliged to cede

to Stalin; precisely parallel to the shift of power within the Soviet Communist

Party. Bolshevisation therefore reached its apogee as Stalinisation. And by then

whatever virtue there had originally been had long surrenderedtobureaucracy.

It is no accident that later the indigenous revolutions were accomplished only

by those who, one way or another, evaded Moscow discipline (Tito, Hoxha,

Mao and Castro).

Stalin notoriously stole the policies of his enemies once he had done with

them. Thus it was that, having rid Russia of Trotsky (though not his followers,

who were still sulking in their tents), Stalin immediately embarked on policies

hitherto heralded by the Left as the domestic solution to Moscow’s dilemma:

644

Comintern and Soviet foreign policy, 1919–1941

rapid state industrialisation and the forcible collectivisation of agriculture.

This was prefaced by turning the Comintern sharp left against all contacts

with Social Democracy and bourgeois nationalism worldwide, proclaimed at

the sixth Congress in 1928, ironically under the now helpless leader of the

Right, Bukharin. The entire reorientation, domestic and foreign, was effec-

tively harnessed to winning over the Left, even if one allows that events were

anyway pressing in this direction. Whether Stalin would have forced the pace

without such incentives is open to doubt, for he had hitherto been identiﬁed

as a Rightist both internationally (by the British Foreign Ofﬁce no less) and

at home (not least by Trotsky). The acute tension within him between innate

caution and burgeoning intemperance during moments of gloomy introspec-

tion was apt to break dramatically when events allowed, and drive him to lash

out in unexpected directions and at unsuspecting victims.

Although the Comintern no longer remained the centre of Soviet foreign

policy-making, neither did it become completely irrelevant – not least because

the rest of the world saw international revolution as Russia’s objective. Thus

the shift to the left did have undesirable consequences for the effectiveness of

Soviet diplomacy. A near rupture with France at the end of 1927 was followed

by a near rupture with Germany early in 1928 and a crisis in China in 1929.

That same year ill-considered and overt attempts to recruit the rank and ﬁle

of the French Communist Party (PCF), the second largest in Europe, for the

purpose of spying on military and logistical capabilities resulted in the prompt

arrest and imprisonment of the PCF leadership, followed by further tension

with Moscow. The atmosphere of fear was such as one might have expected

on the eve of war and matched the bellicose rhetoric on the domestic front.

The one inevitably spilled easily over into the other.

There was one notable success, however. Patching up relations with the

minority Labour administration in Britain provided some compensation,

but increasingly France took the lead against international Communism. An

unusually enfeebled British Empire – already undermined by the Treasury’s

short-sighted ﬁnancial policies – fell easy victim to the Wall Street Crash in

October 1929; and by the end of September 1931 Britain was not only forced

into devaluation but even the navy had mutinied.

To a Marxist all this should have come as no surprise. The Russians, of

course, had long predicted a crash followed by acute social unrest, if not rev-

olution. But as far as Stalin was concerned rhetoric was just rhetoric. Policy

was a different matter. With the countryside in revolt, the industrial economy

13 Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926–1929, vol. iii, pt. 1.

645