Harnessing such idealism was important. While it is true that party members now held key positions in most institutions and enterprises, this alone did not ensure total control or total obedience. Throughout the decade local officials continued to ignore central directives, formulate policy on their own, behave dishonestly and immorally, and in general to comport themselves in ways that reflected badly on Soviet power. And as late as 1929, the Soviet administrative apparatus barely existed in the countryside. In sum, by 1929 the politics of consolidating Red October and Stalin’s emergence as leader had led to a redefinition of leadership and, by extension, of the party itself. All this provided the immediate background for the different kind of revolution that would commence with the ‘Great Turn’ of 1929–30.
Foreign Policy of an Internationalist State
International politics presented a special challenge for the Soviet state. In the Marxist schema, the Russian Revolution was but the first of a forthcoming wave of proletarian uprisings that the communists would lead and support. In the conditions of 1921– 9, however, the Bolsheviks could furnish little more than encouragement and example; Soviet Russia during NEP needed not the rapid exportation of revolution, but above all time to heal its wounds and strengthen itself militarily. Thus, while by no means abandoning the Marxist vision of the future, the immediate focus of Soviet foreign policy was survival and state interest. Not surprisingly, Bolshevik international behaviour was also entwined with Soviet domestic politics.
The Comintern (Communist International) was founded in 1919 and served as the co-ordinating centre of the world workers’ movement. Although it was based in Moscow, the Soviet state maintained the fiction that the Comintern was an independent body without government ties. The fact that no less a figure than Zinoviev served as its head—from its founding until his disgrace in 1926—belied such claims, however. The Bolsheviks attempted to co-ordinate Comintern activities with the national priorities of the Soviet state, and by the early 1920s it was clear that Moscow was dictating Comintern policy. When, for example, the country needed a breathing spell in 1921, fiery rhetoric from the Comintern gave way to a more diplomatic posture towards Europe. The open promotion of revolution was redirected almost exclusively towards Asia. In 1924 the emergence of Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’ further curbed the language of international proletarian revolution. In addition, Zinoviev’s replacement by Bukharin as Comintern head in 1926 was clearly a by-product of Soviet internal politics, as was Bukharin’s replacement with Stalin’s protégé Viacheslav Molotov in July 1929.
The Comintern also tried to define the correct relationship towards right-wing groups and non-communist socialists. In 1928 the Sixth Comintern Congress aroused considerable dismay in foreign ranks by forbidding alliances between revolutionary Marxists and moderate socialists. It asserted that the greatest danger came not from the many emerging fascist groups in Europe, but from the moderate parties on the left. This led to key defections, notably but not exclusively among French communists, who felt that Realpolitik dictated a common cause with other leftist elements in their own countries against the increasingly menacing right. This policy also hampered the German Communist Party by channelling its energy against socialists rather than the Nazis. Thus, by the end of the decade, Bolsheviks had made the Comintern centralized and subservient, but at the cost of reducing its effectiveness abroad.
In its foreign policy, a pragmatic internal logic governed Soviet behaviour. Revolutionary Russia faced a hostile international community in 1921: the overthrow of tsarism by a mass movement had alarmed the ruling élites in the West, giving rise to the Red Scare. The Bolshevik state compounded such fears when it nationalized industry, including foreign-owned enterprises, and repudiated the pre-1917 national debt (much of which was held by foreign creditors).
As Russia entered NEP, Lenin adumbrated the concept of peaceful coexistence. He argued that the capitalist and socialist camps could both compete and co-operate, and that military conflict between them was not necessarily inevitable. Socialist states could interact, especially economically, with the capitalist world because in any long-term competition socialism would ultimately prevail. Such thinking fitted the circumstances of the early 1920s. In the absence of the Western assistance that was to have come from the international proletarian revolution, it was vital that the Soviet republic end its diplomatic isolation and, if possible, attract financial help. This would not be easy. As the decade opened, no major industrial nation had yet given the revolutionaries diplomatic recognition, nor was there any sign of support for providing significant investment.
Pragmatism, within limits dictated by the internationalist element of Marxism, therefore shaped Bolshevik foreign relations. Soviet Russia’s unalloyed hostility to the League of Nations before 1927 contained elements of both. But it was surely economics, not ideology, that led to the Anglo-Russian Trade Agreement (March 1921), and to Bolshevik participation in the Genoa Conference (April 1922). The latter, organized by the major industrial powers to discuss the reconstruction of the European economy, produced a rude shock: Germany and Russia, the two pariah states of Europe, independently unveiled their own Treaty of Rapallo, which officially renounced mutual claims and foresaw closer economic ties between the two. The treaty also gave Germany and Russia diplomatic leverage to play England and France off against one another. Perhaps most important of all, it laid the grounds for secret German-Soviet military cooperation: Germany could conduct training and weapons testing (forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles) on Soviet soil, and in return the Russians benefited significantly from the exposure to German military expertise. Rapallo was partially undone in 1925 when the Western powers included Germany in the Locarno Pact, which sought to stabilize European politics by achieving an agreement on permanent borders. The blow of being excluded from Locarno was softened only partially for the Soviets when Germany and the USSR reaffirmed Rapallo in 1926 with the Treaty of Berlin.
Russian relations with the West were mercurial. Britain’s first Labour government granted diplomatic recognition to the USSR in early 1924, and Italy and France—although not the United States—soon followed. By October, however, relations already became strained when the ‘Zinoviev letter’ caused a scandal during British elections. Allegedly a directive on tactics from the Comintern to the British Communist Party, the publication of this forgery played a role in the Conservative victory. By May 1927 matters deteriorated to the point that Britain severed diplomatic ties, and France demanded in October that the Soviet Union recall its ambassador. Stalin capitalized on the furore: although legitimately concerned, he publicly exaggerated the imminent danger of military conflict and deftly exploited the ‘war scare’ against the Trotsky–Zinoviev–Kamenev bloc in the politics of succession.
In the end, the Soviet state achieved little in foreign relations during NEP: nor was it able to ignite international revolution to improve appreciably its standing in Europe. When Stalin ascended to top leadership, he replaced Lenin’s policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with a philosophy that emphasized the link between internal mobilization and foreign threats: the concept of hostile capitalist encirclement. But behaving as if surrounded by enemies bent on the destruction of the country only served further to estrange the USSR. Hence Soviet Russia ended the 1920s much as it had begun the decade—without reliable allies and widely distrusted.