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Soviet Diplomatic Policy in the 1920s

Дата публикации: 20 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) - Foreign relations →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1190294341


Soviet Diplomatic Policy in the 1920s

Did the Soviet regime pursue an aggressive foreign policy in the 1920s?

Viewpoint: Yes. The Soviets actively promoted revolution abroad and used aggressive diplomacy to ensure the continued existence of their communist state.

Viewpoint: No. The Soviets drew back from confrontation in an attempt to build alliances that would ensure their survival and help them develop their economy.


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With the end of the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks found themselves masters of their land. How the first communist government would relate to the rest of the world remained a mystery, however. Prerevolutionary theorists and ideologues--including the new state's leader Vladimir Lenin--believed that a successful revolution in Russia would galvanize the proletarians of the world to emulate the Bolsheviks and spread communism worldwide. Western leaders feared a Red victory in the Civil War for precisely that reason. As internal stability returned to Russia, its intentions remained a mystery to the rest of the world, and they are still a subject of debate among historians.
Views articulated at the time--and reinforced during the Cold War that followed World War II--carried Bolshevik ideology to its logical conclusion. Through subterfuge, espionage, terrorism, agitation, early attempts at direct conquest, and general duplicity, the Kremlin seemed to be encouraging socialist rebellion in Europe, nationalist independence movements in the colonial world, and another major war among the capitalist great powers that would further international communist revolution. A rival interpretation holds, however, that the Soviet Union quickly encountered all the challenges and dilemmas that defined a normal state in the conventional arena of international politics. In this view, goals such as stimulating Western investment in the flagging Soviet economy, promoting trade agreements to facilitate development, seeking a firm alliance with isolated post-World War I Germany, participating in the international community, and maintaining the standard diplomatic contacts and institutions to make such goals possible far exceeded even the most committed ideologue's interest in overturning the world order.



Viewpoint: Yes. The Soviets actively promoted revolution abroad and used aggressive diplomacy to ensure the continued existence of their communist state.

In order to understand Soviet diplomacy in the 1920s, it is essential to remember that the communist regime in Moscow was committed not just to maintaining its power in Russia but also to spreading revolution throughout Europe and eventually the world. Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership aimed not only to alter the political structure of nations but also to restructure them socially and economically as well. In order to pursue such lofty ambitions, however, it was necessary first and foremost to ensure the survival of the communist experiment in Russia. After initial efforts to help revolution sweep across Europe in 1919 and the early 1920s came to naught, Russian revolutionaries began to seek normal diplomatic relations with established nations in order to gain the legitimacy and economic benefits they needed to survive. Many commentators have described these actions as cautious. At the same time, however, the Soviets continued to take advantage of the opportunities they saw to try to promote revolution. They began setting in place international structures, such as the Communist International (Comintern), that they expected to facilitate revolution in the future. What is most noteworthy about Soviet foreign policy in the 1920s is how boldly the Bolsheviks sought to promote revolution despite their relative weakness and the difficulties they were facing at home.

Soviet diplomacy during the 1920s looks cautious to many scholars because the Bolsheviks' reactions to several setbacks look like the policies of a nation fighting for survival. This apparent cautiousness began with Soviet Russia's withdrawal from World War I in March 1918. Lenin realized that the Provisional Government fell because it could not deliver the peace desired by the Russian people and that peace was necessary before any government could begin restructuring the country. After various diplomatic stall tactics failed to dampen German enthusiasm for its plans to destroy Russia, the Bolsheviks took their country out of World War I by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, accepting the terms of a defeated nation. The Bolshevik regime made major economic concessions to Germany, and it parted with Ukraine, Poland, Finland, and the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). With this territory went one-third of the Russian population, a substantial loss but one Lenin deemed necessary to retain power.

As it turned out, however, Germany's acceptance of an armistice to end World War I on 11 November 1918 effectively negated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which the Soviets had renounced two days earlier. In the winter of 1918-1919 the Bolsheviks attempted unsuccessfully to reassert Russian control over Finland and the Baltic States. A coup attempt in Finland failed, as did the Baltic invasions. Still, it was noteworthy that the Communists were taking risks, trying to reassert control over these newly independent nations even as a civil war raged on Russian soil.

The Russian Civil War was another factor restraining Bolshevik activities. Anticommunist Whites battled the Bolshevik Reds for control of Russia, forcing the Bolsheviks to focus on ensuring victory at home. The outcome of the war was complicated by the intervention in Russia of troops from fifteen nations. They were deployed in numbers too small and geographically too distant from important fields of battle to make much of an impact on the outcome of the war, but their presence threatened greater and more effective intervention by Britain, France, the United States, and Japan, among others. This intervention contributed to later Soviet concerns about "capitalist encirclement," the idea that the capitalist nations surrounded the Soviet Union and would try to choke off and destroy it from the outside.

While the Bolsheviks were focused on keeping control of Russia in the face of civil war and Allied intervention, initially promising developments in other European countries led nowhere. Communist regimes took power but fell quickly in Bavaria and Hungary in 1919. Early victories in the Russo-Polish War of 1920 fueled hopes that Warsaw would soon be the capital of a Polish Soviet Socialist Republic, but the resurgence of Polish fortunes on the battlefield ended that hope. In Germany various uprisings and coup plots accomplished nothing. Diplomatically, the Soviets felt they had suffered setbacks with the Dawes Plan of 1924 and the Locarno Pact in 1925. The former provided Western assistance to Germany, and rescheduled the World War I reparations debt that previously had been a source of conflict between the Germans and the victorious allies. The latter committed the Germans to preserving the boundaries of Western Europe and gave the Germans a stake in maintaining the status quo there. Together, the Dawes Plan and the Locarno Pact sharply reduced the possibilities for Soviet-German cooperation.

Despite these events, however, the Soviets under both Lenin and his successor, Josef Stalin, pursued the most aggressive foreign policies possible. Regardless of their outcomes, the Bolsheviks did seek to expand their revolution to Poland and Germany. They tried simultaneously to encourage the overthrow of the German government and to work with the Germans to overthrow the European order established by the Treaty of Versailles (1919). They also established the Comintern in 1919 for the purposes of establishing firm Soviet control over communist parties in foreign countries and ensuring that any successful communist revolutions would place pro-Moscow parties in power.

The audacity of the Soviets was readily apparent in their conduct during the Russo-Polish War of 1920. Although the war began with a Polish attack on Russia in April 1920, the Russians had begun planning operations against Poland in January 1920. Richard Pipes and other historians have argued that had the Poles not attacked first, the Soviets might have initiated hostilities themselves. By July the Red Army had blunted the initial Polish advance and turned the tide on the battlefield. At this point the British foreign secretary, George, Lord Curzon, offered a plan for an armistice with a border drawn in accordance with the "ethnographic frontier" between Russia and Poland. Lenin rejected this offer, opting instead to prosecute a war that he hoped would lead to the establishment of a Soviet Poland and put the Red Army on the frontier of Germany. Poland was crucial not only because conquering it would move the revolution farther west, but also because it was a symbol of the Versailles system; that is, an independent Poland was not just a reminder of Wilsonian devotion to national self-determination, it was a crucial piece of the international system that the British and French had designed to contain both Germany and Russia.

Placing the Red Army in Poland, on the frontier of Germany, Lenin hoped, would help to facilitate revolution in that crucial industrial nation. This goal was part of Lenin's expansive image of revolutionary possibilities in Europe in 1920. He expected that the Poles would greet the Red Army as liberators and that the revolution would expand from there. In his correspondence, Lenin described plans for the spread of the revolution not only to Poland but also to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Italy. Lenin, however, had misjudged the situation in Poland. The Poles did not rise up against the ruling class and greet the Red Army as liberators. Instead, they rallied in defense of their homeland as overextended Russian forces drew near. When peace came with the Treaty of Riga in March 1921, Poland emerged with portions of Byelorussia and Ukraine. The Soviets had failed to spread revolution throughout central and eastern Europe as they had expected, but not from the lack of aggressive policy decisions.

Soviet efforts to bring the revolution to Germany also failed. Germany was crucial in Bolshevik diplomacy for several reasons. It was the largest and most populous European nation west of Russia. German industrial capacity was prodigious. The record of German armies in wars against Denmark, Austria, and France between 1864 and 1871 had been overwhelming. Even while saddled with relatively ineffective allies in World War I, the Germans had enough military might to come close to victory over the combined power of Britain, France, and Russia. Perhaps most noteworthy for the Bolsheviks was Germany's status as an outlaw power. After Germany was defeated by the Allies in World War I, the peace treaty declared the Germans responsible for the war. They were required to pay reparations and accept limitations on their military. Germany, like the Bolsheviks, had been ostracized by the Great Powers.

Because they were both outsiders in the new international system, Bolshevik Russia and Weimar Germany had grounds for working together. Yet, at the same time that Moscow wanted to work with Berlin to undermine the Versailles system, the Bolsheviks were also attempting to undermine the Weimar government of Germany, as part of their plan for communist world domination. On several occasions Bolshevik agents tried to encourage uprisings in Germany that ultimately failed or were aborted. In 1919, 1921, and 1923 leftists or Communists attempted to take power in Germany and failed.

Despite these activities, it was logical that the Germans and the Soviets would work together. The Treaty of Rapallo (1922) united the governments of two historically powerful European nations in adamant opposition to the Treaty of Versailles. In their dealings, the Germans and Russians worked to subvert the limitations imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty and at the same to permit the Soviets to acquire military hardware to which they otherwise would not have had access. The Soviets permitted on Soviet soil the training of German forces and the establishment of German-run manufacturing plants prohibited by the Versailles Treaty. The Soviets took some of the production from these plants, significantly improving the military hardware at their disposal, while at the same time the German armaments industry remained intact despite Versailles prohibitions.

Soviet diplomacy during the Ruhr crisis of 1923 also showed the Communist commitment to aggressive foreign policies. The Germans had refused to make reparations payments required by the Treaty of Versailles. In accordance with its provisions, the French and Belgians occupied German territory to extract the reparations directly, triggering a European crisis. The Soviet approach was to threaten war against Poland if the Poles joined a European coalition and attacked Germany. The British were cool to the idea of fighting Germany again, and their diplomacy undermined the French. Meanwhile, the Soviets were playing the role of provocateur, attempting to weaken the Allies and undermine their commitment to the Versailles system.

More important to their efforts to spread revolution, the Bolsheviks established the Comintern. This organization of communist-party representatives from around the world was ostensibly an independent organization that had chosen to establish its headquarters in Moscow. In reality it was subservient to the Soviet government. Member parties were required to agree to Lenin's Twenty-One Conditions, which were adopted at the Second Comintern Congress in 1920. These conditions required subservience to Moscow, including the maintenance of "parallel illegal organizations" to be used when the time came for a decisive challenge to the social order in their respective countries. Moscow tightened its controls on the foreign parties, demanding even greater subservience, at the Fifth Comintern Congress in 1924.

Another component of Soviet diplomacy during the 1920s was the courtship of national-liberation movements in emerging nations. Especially in China and India, but also in Iran and Turkey, the Soviets moved to weaken historic Western prominence by encouraging anti-imperialist forces--even when they were not communist. The Soviets were determined to weaken the hold of Britain, France, and other imperial nations on their colonies, and were quite content to abandon communists in those colonies when anticommunist forces were the strongest possible anti-imperialists. The Soviets thus sought to promote their long-term aim of expanding Communism with the short-term device of weakening the advanced industrial nations by undermining their colonies.

Many obstacles had confronted the Bolsheviks after 1918: the small numbers in their own ranks, the vast size of the nation they governed, the hostility they engendered both inside and outside Russia, the civil war they endured, and the territory they were forced to sacrifice under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. They had to bypass all these roadblocks to solidify their control of the nation they expected to be the starting point of world revolution. Overcoming such obstacles entailed some minimization of risks diplomatically. Yet, despite some apparent caution, they pursued an aggressive, if not always successful foreign policy, attempting to sovietize Poland, spread the revolution farther into western and southern Europe, reclaim control of Finland and the Baltic States, encourage uprisings in Germany, undermine the Versailles system, control international Communism through the Comintern, and destabilize foreign interests in the colonial world. Taken together, these actions show that the Soviets, though sometimes cautious for tactical reasons, were nonetheless aggressive in pursuing their aim of communist expansion.

-- John Soares, Cincinnati, Ohio


Viewpoint: No. The Soviets drew back from confrontation in an attempt to build alliances that would ensure their survival and help them develop their economy.

After winning the Russian Civil War, the Soviets needed time to work on building their socialist utopia. The Civil War and the Bolshevik policy of War Communism had left the country and its economy in ruins. One of the necessary conditions for rebuilding the country was minimizing the risk of foreign intervention--as fifteen nations had done during the Civil War--as well as foreign diplomatic and economic pressure. The Soviets also hoped that the Soviet Union could get some help from abroad in the form of investment, development, and trade agreements. In the early 1920s the Soviet Union adopted the policy that Josef Stalin later described with the slogan "socialism in one country." In other words, the Soviet Union was choosing to postpone an international communist revolution in favor of peaceful coexistence with the admittedly suspicious West. In 1917-1920, immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, this policy would have seemed unlikely. In these years Russia seemed determined to spread the revolution abroad. The Communist International (Comintern) was established in March 1919, with the expressed purpose of pursuing this goal.

Once the Civil War was won in 1920, however, the Soviets turned to the question of how to reconcile the demands of being a revolutionary regime and securing that revolution. At the Ninth Party Congress meeting in September 1920, the Politburo voted against using the Red Army to support foreign revolutions. The unsuccessful attempt to export revolution to Poland earlier that year almost certainly played a role in this decision as did the combined devastation of World War I and the Civil War, and it was clear to Vladimir Lenin that Soviet Russia could not thrive in a state of economic independence from the rest of the world. By the end of 1920, Lenin was no longer speaking publicly of an impending world revolution. Rather, he was saying that he expected it to happen eventually. In March 1921, at the Tenth Party Congress, Lenin announced the New Economic Policy (NEP), a series of measures intended to stimulate development by restoring a limited market economy in Russia. At the same time, Russia began seeking out treaties to normalize relations with its neighbors and the rest of the world, as well as trade agreements with the leading industrial powers, including the archimperialist, archcapitalist power Great Britain. By 1924 normal diplomatic relations had been established with a host of previously hostile nations. Although the United States did not establish formal relations until 1933, American private investment was warmly welcomed by Lenin's regime. The Soviet Union, in short, was actively seeking membership in the international state system.

European diplomacy in the 1920s has been derisively called the "diplomacy of casinos," as the secret diplomacy of the prewar era was replaced with a series of ad hoc multilateral conferences held at resort locations across the Continent. One of the greatest of these was the Genoa Economic Conference of April-May 1922, attended by thirty-four national delegations and forty-two heads of government. The main purpose of this conference was engineering the economic reconstruction of Europe after the catastrophe of World War I. Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain invited the Soviets, assuming that extending a cooperative hand for rebuilding Russia would have a salutary effect on Anglo-Soviet relations. This invitation was perhaps based on a rather superficial and inaccurate view that the Bolsheviks were moving away from their ideological roots and would become better international citizens because of the move.

There was no such change in Soviet Russia, but the Soviets, desperate for help, still accepted the invitation. In preparation for the conference, the Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs expended a tremendous amount of effort to produce information to prove the need for foreign aid. Commissar of Foreign Affairs Georgii Chicherin let the West know that he intended to attend the conference with abundant goodwill, and from the outset he expressed the desire to work with the West in building a peaceful and cooperative world order. As perhaps a further sign of the Soviets' willingness to adopt Western rules of international behavior, Chicherin addressed the Genoa Conference in (apparently only marginally comprehensible) French, still the international language of diplomacy.

It has repeatedly been claimed that the Soviets sought to spread the Bolshevik Revolution to Germany, Britain, and China in the 1920s, but it must be understood that in that decade, Soviet policy making was not as monolithic as it became by 1929, when Stalin consolidated his power. The 1920s were in fact a period when, at least by later standards, Soviet policy making was open to input from various sources. Accordingly, even though Chicherin was delivering one message as commissar of foreign affairs, the Comintern was acting independently, meddling in the Chinese Civil War and the domestic politics of Germany and Britain. Chicherin strenuously opposed such actions of the Comintern as diversions from the primary Soviet foreign-policy objective: the defense, consolidation, and preservation of the revolution in the Soviet Union. The Comintern's failed attempt to spark a revolution in Germany in 1923 convinced the Politburo that the policy of cooperation--which had been agreed on in government circles in 1920-1921--was the correct policy. No further attempts at triggering revolution in the West were made.

During this period the Soviet Union saw Germany as its key partner in foreign affairs. In the Rapallo Agreement of 1922, the two countries agreed to cooperate in various areas, including trade and military exchanges. The backbone of Soviet policy toward Germany, this treaty was more a Soviet accommodation to the international state system of the West than it was an attempt to subvert it. The Germans, in particular, were especially sensitive to the question of the Bolsheviks' role in promoting revolution, having had several communist uprisings in 1918-1919. This issue became a sore point for Germany again in 1923, when France occupied the Ruhr, triggering more unrest in Germany. With Lenin incapacitated by strokes suffered in 1922-1923, the Politburo--under the influence of Lev Trotsky, showing his firebrand tendencies--voted to support the impending German revolution. Ignorant of the actual conditions in Germany, the Soviets shipped money and weapons to Germany to arm a communist army. The uprising was quickly suppressed by German local police. Despite such actions on the part of the Soviets, Germany's status as a pariah in the post-World War I world led it to cooperate with the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, distrust of the Soviet Union in the West was reinforced by the notorious "Zinoviev Letter." Cited in the Daily Mail, this letter helped swing the 1924 British elections in favor of the anticommunist Conservatives, who defeated the first British Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald. One of many purportedly written by Comintern leader Grigorii Zinoviev to British Communists, this letter was used as proof that the Labour government was soft on communism. Among other things, the letter encouraged members of the British Communist Party to form revolutionary cells in the police and army, in anticipation of the pending revolution. While it is true that Zinoviev was in contact with British Communists, most scholars have concluded that the "Zinoviev Letter" was a forgery and did not reflect true Soviet policies or intentions.

Soviet policy in regard to China was more focused on gaining support in an area that was trying to establish order than it was on attempting to subvert a stable regime. After the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911-1912, a protracted state of warlordism settled into an uneasy peace under the nominal government of the nationalist, anticommunist Kuomintang. The Soviets supported the Kuomintang--not the Chinese communists--militarily and financially. In 1926 the Politburo voted not to promote a revolution in China, continuing to support the Kuomintang even as it planned to destroy the Chinese communist movement. China, however, played a far smaller part in Moscow's foreign-policy goals than that played by Europe.

In Europe, the second half of the 1920s was colored by the Locarno Pact and the ascendancy of the League of Nations. In 1925 the Western European powers and Germany met at the Swiss resort town of Locarno, where they agreed to recognize existing frontiers in the region and negotiated the entry of Germany into the League of Nations the following year. The pact did not include a guarantee of Germany's existing eastern boundaries as a tacit nod toward Germany's desire to correct its frontiers in Eastern Europe. In Moscow, Stalin saw this omission as particularly sinister. Chicherin's official statement concluding that the West had no interest in toppling communism, however, is far more indicative of Soviet policy at that time.

From 1920 to 1929, Soviet diplomacy was neither as monolithic nor as subversive as later Cold War interpretations described it. In Moscow, various schools of thought competed for control. The one individual who had the most strongly developed interest in foreign affairs was Commissar for Foreign Affairs Chicherin, who consistently propounded a policy of peaceful co-existence with the West. While there were occasional lapses when Moscow saw apparent opportunities to promote revolution abroad, the aggregate path of Russian foreign policy during the decade followed the conclusion reached by Lenin's government in 1920-1921, when they decided that the Soviet Union could not afford to destabilize the international state system or individual states. Even in China, the one place where the Soviets had an extended presence, they pursued a policy aimed at promoting stability in a region of chaos. The claim that the Soviets attempted to spread world revolution bears only a fleeting relationship to the facts.

-- Phil Giltner, Albany Academy


LENIN'S TWENTY-ONE CONDITIONS

In 1920, the year after Soviet Russia established the Communist International (Comintern) to bring together communist parties from around the world, Vladimir Lenin issued twenty-one rules requiring the subservience of other parties to Russian control. These conditions for membership included:

1. The general propaganda and agitation should bear a really Communist character, and should correspond to the programme and decisions of the Third International. The entire party press should be edited by reliable Communists who have proved their loyalty to the cause of the Proletarian revolution. . . .

2. Every organization desiring to join the Communist International shall be required to remove from all the responsible posts in the labor movement . . . all reformists and followers of the "centre," and to have them replaced by Communists, even at the cost of replacing at the beginning "experienced" men by rank-and-file working men.

3. The class struggle in almost every country of Europe and America is entering the phase of civil war. Under such conditions the Communists can have no confidence in bourgeois laws. They should create everywhere a parallel illegal apparatus, which at the decisive moment should do its duty to the party. . . . In every country where in consequence of martial law or of other exceptional laws, the Communists are unable to carry on their work lawfully, a combination of lawful and unlawful work is absolutely necessary. . . .

6. Every party desirous of affiliating with the Third International should renounce not only avowed social patriotism, but also the falsehood and hypocrisy of social pacifism; it should systematically demonstrate to the workers that without a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism no international arbitration, no talk of disarmament, no democratic reorganization of the League of Nations will be capable of saving mankind from new Imperialist wars. . . .

12. All parties belonging to the Communist International should be formed on the basis of the principle of democratic centralism. At the present time of acute civil war the Communist Party will be able fully to do its duty only when it is organized in a sufficiently thorough way, when it posses an iron discipline, and when the party centre enjoys the confidence of the members of the party, who are to endow this centre with complete power, authority and ample rights. . . .

14. Each party desirous of affiliating with the Communist International should be obliged to render every possible assistance to the Soviet Republics in their struggles against all counter-revolutionary forces. . . .

Source: "Leninism Discipline in the Comintern," in A Documentary History of Communism and the World: From Revolution to Collapse, edited by Robert V. Daniels (Hanover & London: University Press of New England, 1994), pp. 32-34.

FURTHER READINGS


References


Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, translated by Phyllis B. Carlos (New York: Summit, 1986).

Jon Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

R. Craig Nation, Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy 1917-1991 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992).

Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923, revised edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Knopf, 1993).

Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-1973, second edition (New York: Praeger, 1974).

Stephen White, The Origins of Detente: The Genoa Conference and Soviet-Western Relations, 1921-1922 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Опубликовано на Порталусе 20 сентября 2007 года

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