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The Emergence of Stalin’s Foreign Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Robert C. Tucker
Robert C. Tucker*
Affiliation:
Council on International and Regional Studies at Princeton University
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Extract

To understand Stalin as a political thinker, we must see him as a man whose thinking was strongly influenced by perceived parallels between present and past. Unlike other Bolsheviks, he found a parallel between Russia’s internal situation in relatively tranquil 1925 and on the eve of the October upheaval of 1917. He thrice stated in party forums during 1925 that the present international situation resembled the prelude of the World War’s outbreak in 1914. And having come to think in Russian historical terms, he discerned a parallel between Muscovite Russia’s situation in earlier centuries and Soviet Russia’s now. In a party speech of 1928, for example, he found a cue for present policy in Peter the Great’s attempted revolutionary leap out of Russian backwardness; and in the often quoted speech to managers in 1931 he spoke of the beatings that Russia had suffered in history as punishment for her backwardness and declared that Soviet survival now depended on conquering that backwardness in ten years.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , December 1977 , pp. 563 - 589
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1977

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References

1. Stalin, I. V., Sochineniia, 13 vols. (Moscow, 1946-52), 7: 12-13, 28, 280 Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Stalin’).

2. Ibid., 11: 248-49; 13: 38-39.

3. Stalin, I. V., Sochineniia, ed. McNeal, Robert H., 3 vols. (Stanford, 1967), 1(14): 2–10 Google Scholar. The letter was first published in Bol'shevik, no. 9 (May 1941). For the text of Engels's article, see Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Russian Menace to Europe, ed. Blackstock, P. W. and Hoselitz, B. F. (Glencoe, 1952), pp. 22–55 Google Scholar.

4. Stalin, 7: 11-14. This speech was first published after the Second World War.

5. Dyck, Harvey Leonard, Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, 1926-1933: A Study in Diplomatic Instability (New York, 1966), pp. 13, 68-72.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., pp. 89, 96-98. In “The Soviet War Scare of 1926-27,” Russian Review, 34, no. 1 (January 1975), John P. Sontag argues that the war scare was genuine, yet also “grossly and crudely manipulated by Soviet politicians in 1927. “

7. In 1929 the Soviet foreign commissar, Georgii Chicherin, told Louis Fischer, who spent several days with him in Wiesbaden where he was taking a cure: “I returned home in June 1927 from western Europe. Everybody in Moscow was talking war. I tried to dissuade them. ‘Nobody is planning to attack us, ’ I insisted. Then a colleague enlightened me. He said, ‘Shh. We know that. But we need this against Trotsky'” ( Fischer, Louis, Russia's Road From Peace to War: Soviet Foreign Relations 1917-1941 [New York, 1969], p. 172 Google Scholar; on the war scare episode as a whole, see pp. 165-79).

8. Stalin, 9: 322.

9. Stalin, 10: 281, 285, 288. Emphases added.

10. Stalin, 12: 20-21; Cohen, Stephen F., Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography 1888-1938 (New York, 1973), pp. 391–92 Google Scholar; and Borkenau, Franz, World Communism: A History of the Communist International (Ann Arbor, 1962), p. 336–37.Google Scholar

11. The Communist International 1919-1943, ed. Jane Degras, vol. 3 (London, 1971), p. 42.

12. Stalin, 6: 282. In “The Strange Case of the Comintern,” Survey, 18 (Summer 1972): 91-137, Theodore Draper has traced Soviet use of the phrase “social-fascism” to 1922 and original authorship of the concept to Zinoviev.

13. Stalin, 12: 246, 254-56, 260-61.

14. For examples see Timasheff, Nicholas S., The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York, 1946)Google Scholar, chapter 6; S. Harper, , The Russia I Believe In (Chicago, 1945), p. 144 Google Scholar; and Pares, Bernard, A History of Russia (New York, 1944), p. 1944 Google Scholar. Among foreign observers who did not fall victim to the unreal antithesis were Kennan, George F., Nicolaevsky, Boris I., and Wolfe, Henry C.. See Kennan's Memoirs 1925-1950 (Boston, 1967), pp. 70–73 Google Scholar; Nicolaevsky, , “Vneshniaia politika Moskvy,” Novyi zhurnal, 1942, no. 3, pp. 199–200 Google Scholar; and Wolfe, , The Imperial Soviets (New York, 1940)Google Scholar, especially chapter 12.

15. For the President, Personal and Secret: Correspondence Between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt, ed. Orville H. Bullitt (Boston, 1972), pp. 68-69; U.S., State, Department of, Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers: The Soviet Union 1933-1939 (Washington, D.C., 1952), pp. 60–61 Google Scholar. On the defensive character of Soviet foreign policy in this period, see Kennan, George F., Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (New York, 1960), pp. 265–66 Google Scholar; and Beloff, Max, The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia 1929-1941, vol. 1 (London and New York, 1947)Google Scholar, especially chapter 3.

16. Stalin, 7: 93-94.

17. Pravda, February 14, 1938.

18. “The Party Before and After Taking Power,” in Stalin, S: 109. Emphasis added.

19. Stalin, 7: 273.

20. “The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists,” in Stalin, 6: 396-97, 398-99.

21. “On the Social Democratic Deviation in Our Party,” in Stalin, 8: 263.

22. Stalin, 7: 281-82.

23. Pravfa September 15, 1927.

24. Speech of December 6, 1920 to Moscow party activists, in Lenin, V. I., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., 55 vols. (Moscow, 1958-65), 42: 56 Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Lenin).

25. Ibid., pp. 56, 60-69.

26. Stalin, 7: 357-58, 363.

27. See, for example, Brandt, Conrad, Stalin's Failure in China 1924-1927 (Cambridge, Mass., 1958)Google Scholar; and Trotsky, Leon, The Third International After Lenin (New York, 1970), pp. 167–230 Google Scholar.

28. “Excerpts from Confidential Speeches, Directives and Letters of Mao Tse-tung,” New York Times, March 1, 1970, p. 26. See also Dedijer, Vladimir, Tito (New York, 1953), p. 322.Google Scholar

29. Stalin, 7: 27.

30. Izvestiia, January 22, 1929. For an English translation, see Eudin, Xenia J. and Slusser, Robert M., Soviet Foreign Policy 1928-1934: Documents and Materials, vol. 1 (University Park and London, 1966), pp. 158–66.Google Scholar

31. On Lenin as Stalin's identity-figure, whom he aspired to match or outdo in historymaking exploits, see Tucker, Robert C., Stalin As Revolutionary 1879-1929: A Study in History and Personality (New York, 1973), chapters 4, 12, and 13.Google Scholar

32. Lenin, 42: 56. Although not in the text, the word “only” belongs to the sentence's sense in the context of what follows.

33. I am not suggesting that this was what Lenin had in mind. In general, Stalin's imperial-Communist orientation on contiguous territories as fields for revolutionary advance was a departure from Leninist thinking about the future course of Communist revolution. Stalin's bolshevism was fused with Russian nationalism; Lenin's was not. I am indebted to Professor Moshe Lewin for suggesting that this point be stressed.

34. Stalin, 7: 12-14.

35. Ibid., p. 38. Stalin had listed the Western proletariat and the oppressed colonial peoples as the first and second allies. But elsewhere in the speech he implicitly put the interimperialist contradictions in or near first place by calling them “our greatest (velichaishii) ally. “

36. Stalin, 13: 114-15.

37. Ibid., pp. 115-17.

38. For the Bauer visit, see Lerner, Warren, Karl Radek: The Last Internationalist (Stanford, 1970), p. 86 Google Scholar; for Reibnitz's visit, see Carr, E. H., The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, vol. 3 (New York, 1953), p. 1953 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which quotes a memoir later published by Radek in the Soviet journal Krasnaia noi/.

39. Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1975), p. 594.

40. Carr, E. H., The Interregnum 1923-1924 (New York, 1954), pp. 159-60, 177.Google Scholar

41. World News and Views ﹛International Press Correspondence), June 28, 1923, pp. 460-61.

42. Abraham Ascher and Guenter Lewy, “National Bolshevism in Weimar Germany: Alliance of Political Extremes Against Democracy,” Social Research, Winter 1956, pp. 464-66. For a time during the tense summer of 1923 Communists and Nazis shared platforms at protest mass meetings, although one Nazi speaker remarked that the Communists could never be national so long as they were led by “Radek-Sobelsohn and whatever the other Jews are called” (Carr, The Interregnum, pp. 182-83). In mid-August the Nazis banned such common meetings. Nazi anti-Semitism was an embarrassment for the Communists at that time, Carr observes here, although a Communist proclamation was reported by the Berlin based Menshevik Sotsialisticheskii vestnik to have said: “Jewish capitalists grow fat on the exploitation of the German people. “

43. Dyck, Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, pp. 103 and 141. The instability of the partnership is the key theme of this illuminating study. It is also shown in Hilger, G. and Meyer, A. G., The Incompatible Allies: A Memoir-History of German-Soviet Relations 1918-1941 (New York, 1953)Google Scholar. On the Rapallo accord as a result mainly of Soviet initiative, aimed at “the splitting off of the Germans from the others,” see Kennan, Russia and the West, pp. 204 and 207. For a full historical account of Rapallo's diplomatic background, see Bournazel, Renata, Rapallo: Naissance d'un Mythe (Paris, 1974).Google Scholar

44. Stalin, 7: 36.

45. Fischer, Ruth, Stalin and German Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), pp. 287 and 313 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Brandler, notes the author, wrote in the German party organ Rote Fahne: “Beat the Fascists wherever you meet them. “

46. “Letter to Comrade Me—rt” (actually, to the German left Communist Arkadi Maslow), in Stalin, 5: 43 and 45.

47. Dyck, Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, pp. 229 and 235. In this and the following two paragraphs I rely heavily on the detailed documented record presented by Dyck.

48. Apropos of Stalin's “rightism” in foreign policy, Bukharin told Kamenev in July 1928 that Stalin was taking the line in the Politburo that there should be no death sentences in the Shakhty case. Indeed, two of the three Germans placed on trial were acquitted and the third was given a suspended sentence.

49. Dyck, Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, pp. 236, 242-44. The author plausibly surmises here that the agreement with Poland was entailed by the prior Soviet-French agreement; and that in 1931 the Manchurian crisis along with Soviet internal preoccupations made nonaggression treaties with Poland and the Baltic states appear desirable to Moscow as added assurance of calm on its western borders.

50. Bracher, Karl Dietrich, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Effects of National Socialism, trans. Steinberg, Jean (New York, 1970), chapter 4.Google Scholar

51. Trotsky, Leon, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York, 1971), pp. 125—29, 139Google Scholar. In “The German Communists’ United-Front and Popular-Front Ventures,” The Comintern: Historical Highlights, ed. Milorad M. Drachkovitch and Branko Lazitch (New York, 1966), p. 115, Babette L. Gross writes from experience that for members of the German Communist Party at that time, “the Nazi bully squads were the main adversary; they had to be counterattacked, their blows warded off. “

52. Ascher and Lewy, “National Bolshevism in Weimar Germany,” pp. 472, 478-79. For the February 1930 Comintern directive, see Kommunisticheskii Internatsional’ v dokumentakh 1919-1932, part 2 (Moscow, 1933), p. 946.

53. Gross, “The German Communists’ United-Front and Popular-Front Ventures, “ p. 117. The author, herself the sister of Margarete Buber-Neumann (Heinz Neumann's wife), also reports here (p. 116) that on a visit to Moscow in April 1931 Neumann heard Stalin criticize the KPD for having cooperated with the SPD in Thuringia in bringing about a vote of no-confidence in the Nazi minister of the interior, Wilhelm Frick.

54. Ex-Insider, “Moscow—Berlin 1933,” Survey, no. 44-45 (October 1962), p. 162.Google Scholar

55. Stampfer subsequently settled in the United States where he revealed this information in an interview. See Dallin, David J., Russia and Postwar Europe, trans. Lawrence, F. K. (New Haven, 1943), pp. 61–62 n.Google Scholar

56. Quoted by Carr, The Interregnum, p. 187. See also Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, pp. 111-12. Although Stalin did not later include the letter in his collected works, he acknowledged its authenticity in a Central Committee plenum of 1927 (see Stalin, 10: 61-62).

57. Buber-Neumann, Margarete, Von Potsdam nach Moskau: Stationen eines Irrweges (Stuttgart, 1957), p. 284 Google Scholar. The author adds here: “I haven't forgotten Stalin's question to Neumann because it was the first thing Heinz shared with me when he arrived at the Friedrichstrasse Station in Berlin. “

58. Hilger and Meyer, The Incompatible Allies, p. 253.

59. Wollenberg, Erich, The Red Army: A Study of the Growth of Soviet Imperialism (London, 1940), p. 278 Google Scholar. Wollenberg was one of the editors of Rote Fahne in 1932.

60. Hitler's Speeches, ed. N. H. Baynes, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1942), 2: 1019, quoted by Beloff, The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, p. 25.

61. Report of April 28, 1933 from Khinchuk, in Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR, chief ed. A. A. Gromyko, vol. 16 (Moscow, 1970), p. 271.

62. Radek, Karl, Podgotovka bor'by sa novyi peredel mira (Moscow, 1934), pp. 92–94 Google Scholar. This book is a collection of Radek's articles published in 1933.

63. My account of National Bolshevism among the Nazis is based on Laqueur, Walter, Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (London, 1965), pp. 154–58 Google Scholar; and Ascher and Lewy, “National Bolshevism in Weimar Germany,” pp. 469, 474-78.

64. Litvinov, M. M., Vneshniaia politika SSSR (Moscow, 1935), p. 70.Google Scholar

65. Hilger and Meyer, The Incompatible Allies, pp. 256-57. Hilger says here that the Russians motivated this action by saying they had a reliable report that Vice-Chancellor von Papen had given the French ambassador in Berlin detailed information on Soviet-German military relations. According to Wollenberg (The Red Army, p. 237), two top Soviet generals, Tukhachevskii and Gamarnik, proposed right after Hitler's accession that Red Army-Reichswehr relations be broken off but were turned down because “Stalin did not agree with them. “

66. Hilger and Meyer, The Incompatible Allies, pp. 270-71. On the Tukhachevskii statement see also Laqueur, Russia and Germany, p. 164, where a documentary source is given (Documents on German Foreign Policy, series C, vol. 2, November 1, 1933, p. 81).

67. Hilger and Meyer, The Incompatible Allies, pp. 267-68. This conversation took place at Baum's dacha outside Moscow

68. Stalin, 13: 294, 297, 302-3.