the Kremlin is under no ideological compulsion to accomplish its purposes in a hurry. Like the Church, it is dealing in ideological concepts which are of long-term validity, and it can afford to be patient. It has no right to risk the existing achievements of the revolution for the sake of vain baubles of the future. The very teachings of Lenin himself require great caution and flexibility in the pursuit of communist purposes.... Thus, the Kremlin has no compunction about retreating in the face of superior force. And being under the compulsion of no timetable, it does not get panicky under the necessity for such retreat. Its political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal.
Translating the above and adding elements from the rest of his Foreign Affairs essay, we might conclude that for Mr. X—who in his monumental essay is surely reflecting on past Soviet behavior as well as what he anticipated for the coming years of the post–World War II Cold War—the Soviets may be guided or inspired by their ideology. Yet they will act cautiously, not “fanatically.” They will not engage in reckless, offensive behavior. They will assert themselves aggressively only where a political vacuum appears. In all, their patience is “Oriental” (Kennan’s word). They do not work according to a rigid, world-revolutionary timetable or blueprint.
Applying realist-Kennan’s views retrospectively, it would seem that Stalin would never risk war, in the offensist sense of initiating hostilities out of the blue. He did not actively prepare for waging an offensist war against Germany or all of Europe in the 1940s, it is alleged. Rather, as Soviet propaganda also stipulated, if war were forced on him, he would have more than taken up the cudgels and “extended socialism” abroad on the tips of bayonets—but only if attacked and “given the chance.” This might be called a “piggyback” strategy by which an opportunity (war launched by “imperialists”) is exploited but not necessarily instigated by the side seeking to profit from it, that is, the Soviet Union.
It follows that Stalin, assuming he was a pupil of the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, might agree that the best victory is one that is obtained by a minimum of armed fighting or, in fact, by none at all. “Weapons are ominous tools,” Sun Tzu writes, “to be used only when there is no other alternative.” Stalin, after all, had won half of Poland, the Baltic states, part of Finland, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and other territory by virtue of his deal with Hitler and with a minimum of warfare, in some cases none at all.
However, this expansion was taking place when the Red Army was prepared to act merely as an intimidator or enforcer of sovietization. When it tried to be more than that—a latter-day Grand Armee in the expansionistic, Napoleonic tradition—it failed miserably (as in the aggressive war against Finland, begun in December 1939, or the attempted seizure of Poland in 1920).
Could it also be said that the Soviets’ massive, ongoing military buildup in 1939–41, accompanied as it was by threatening tones of militancy in its propaganda, was aimed mainly at scaring off any likely aggressor? Did the military buildup serve more as a deterrent than as real preparation for unilaterally initiating a “preventive” war?
Was Stalin so cautious that he was not about to risk what Kennan calls destruction of all the achievements of the Soviet Union—its factories and cities and the communist one-party rule and superstructure—in risky, untimely war making? As Stalin proclaimed in 1925: “If war is to break out, we won’t be able to stand by idly. We will have to enter the fray but we will be the last ones to do it in order to be the decisive weight on the scales, a weight that must tip the balance.”14
As we will see in the next chapter, nor was Stalin, as he put it in early 1939, about to “pull chestnuts out of the fire” for any other nation-states that got into trouble, such as in war or the threat of it—in Czechoslovakia’s case, invasion by the German Army in 1938. The Soviet Union would remain on the sidelines as destruction of other European countries was unleashed. It would be neither purely neutral nor directly involved. Until later....
Moreover, Stalin was coy in his negotiations (via Molotov) with Hitler and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop in 1940 about just what kind of active cooperation he would be willing to give the tripartite coalition of states (the Axis)—assuming the Soviets joined it—which the USSR was invited to join and toward which a memorandum was prepared in Moscow, notably on the Soviets’ own initiative. Yet any concrete plans for forming such a broadened alliance or an expanded Axis that would include the Soviet Union as a full-fledged member were at best put on the back burner by Stalin and Molotov in that period. This is shown by close examination of the relevant texts of the negotiations during 1939–40.
Why such an expanded alliance was put on the back burner stems from the fact that Stalin evidently had another tactic in mind—an ideological subplot, as it were. It was a gambit that both he and Lenin had often mentioned in the context of war as the midwife of revolution: that is, encouragement of intra-imperialist discord. This tactical standby of the Kremlin will be explored later. Further, the former deputy chief of Soviet foreign intelligence of the NKVD at that time recalls the ideological-expansionist edge of Soviet foreign policy and of Soviet collaboration with Hitler, observing:
Once again for the Kremlin, the mission of Communism was primarily to consolidate the might of the Soviet state. Only military strength and domination of countries on our border could ensure us a superpower role. The idea of propagating world Communist revolution was an ideological screen to hide our desire for world domination. Although originally this concept was ideological in nature, it acquired the dimensions of realpolitik. This possibility arose for the Soviet Union only after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed. In secret protocols the Soviet Union’s geopolitical interests and natural desires for the enlargement of its frontiers were for the first time formally accepted by one of the leading powers of the world [Germany].15
Whatever position one may take on the influence of ideology on any regime’s policy making while assigning the priorities to ideology over or in conjunction with nonideological Realpolitik, the following must be kept in mind. The Soviet regime in particular put a very high premium on ideology, and not merely qua rationalization or propaganda. No doubt ideology, in terms of some of its particulars, would have to yield or be changed to suit new circumstances. But to conclude that ideology was readily disposable, meaningless, or otherwise irrelevant to Soviet policy making, especially as concerned the global arena and long-standing Leninist revolutionary goals, is unrealistic, unhistorical, and inapplicable. For the Soviet regime, its ideological underpinnings were fundamental. It is no exaggeration to say, one must think, that, to use the Soviet expression, ideology served as the Soviet regime’s “lodestar.”
NOTES
The first epigraph is from James E. Dougherty and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff Jr., Contending Theories of International Relations, 2d ed. (New York: Harper and Row), p. 114.
The second is from V. I. Lenin, Selected Works, vol. 7 (New York: International Publishers, 1943), p. 357. For many other similar statements by Lenin, Stalin, and other high Soviet officials, see Albert L. Weeks, Soviet and Communist Quotations (New York: Pergamon-Brassey’s Publishers, 1987), chapter 16. Lenin welcomed World War I, remarking that a “nice, little war” would provoke world revolution.