With several ensuing decrees and pronouncements during the weeks following the Communist seizure of power, Lenin and his associates let it be known that, like it or not, Soviet relations with foreign states would be cast in totally new, “militant” ways. Treaties would be torn up, and the tsarist diplomatic tradition would be repudiated. Out of the destruction of the Old Order worldwide would come socialist construction. “Much remains in the world that must be destroyed by fire and steel,” said Lenin during World War I, “in order that emancipation of the working class may be achieved.... Do not listen to sentimental whiners who are afraid of war”—or of world revolution. By war Lenin meant not only clashes between nation-states or, as he put it, between proletarian and bourgeois states, which he considered the wave of the future. Diplomacy, too, was regarded as a “weapon” for advancing The Cause worldwide.
EARLY DIPLOMACY
Lenin’s tactics called for advance and retreat or what he called taking “one step backward in order to make two steps forward.” By 1918 Lenin was prepared in certain circumstances to look at interstate relations in quite conventional ways as viewed from the parapets of the Kremlin, the Soviet government’s new home (as of March 11, 1918, when the regime was officially moved there from Petrograd). Despite their revolutionary rhetoric and the adoption of radical-sounding governmental titles like “commissar” (an invention of Trotsky’s), the leaders of the Soviet Republic began to confront traditional problems of Realpolitik along with their preoccupation with their much touted revolutionary messianism. As this mix was being recipied, the Third Communist International, significantly, was founded in the next year, 1919.
Of utmost immediate importance, however, was the defense of the Bolshevik revolution in the grimmest, most realistic terms. The regime was acquiring increasing numbers of domestic armed and unarmed enemies— especially within the restive working class. Lenin had prorogued the democratically elected Constituent Assembly that was allowed to meet for only one day on January 18. The Bolsheviks had won only about one-quarter of the seats. The oppressive Cheka police (from the Russian acronym for Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution) and its drumhead, firing-squad tribunals had already been set up in December. Civil war began to rage as domestic and foreign enemies harangued and fought against the “Revolution” and the Lenin dictatorship. By 1921, on Kronstadt Island in Petrograd, Lenin’s Red Army was mowing down workers and sailors, his staunchest, former Bolshevik supporters. Throughout the rest of the country the Red Army and the Cheka tribunals, liquidating “counterrevolution,” were brutally suppressing peasant revolts.
The later, halfhearted, short-term Allied intervention in the Civil War (1918) further complicated the Soviet Republic’s external security. The aim of the Allied intervention, to be carried out only while World War I was still raging, had been intended mainly to defend against Bolshevik seizures of the large Allied stores of weapons and ammunition bunkered at such Russian wharves and depots as those at Murmansk, Archangel, and Odessa as well as in the Far East. Bolshevik propaganda, often later echoed in the West, depicted this limited enterprise solely as a concerted effort by the Western powers to snuff out Communist rule. George V. Kennan, a witness to these events, has described such propaganda about the “counterrevolutionary intervention” as just that—propaganda.
In early January 1918 Russia was still formally engaged in hostilities against the Central Powers in World War I. Soldiers on both sides died in this interval following the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917. In this continued fighting on the Eastern Front, Germany was about to fully occupy Ukraine and with it to gain control over 40 percent of Russia’s total industry and 70 percent of her iron- and steel-producing capacity. The bulk of Russian-exported grain was produced in this “breadbasket.”
How to extract the Soviet state with its emerging Red Army from World War I with minimal damage to the integrity of the New Order became central to Soviet diplomacy. Ukraine was not yet totally in German hands. It was Berlin’s price for German withdrawal from Russia in exchange for Russian closure of the Eastern Front against the Germans. By a narrow margin of voting in the party’s Central Committee, in which Trotsky opposed Lenin, the latter’s plan to sacrifice the entire Ukraine to Germany was adopted. Trotsky and other officials of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs thereupon traveled in Western-style civilian clothes (but without top hats or striped pants) to Brest-Litovsk in German-occupied Poland to work out the deal with the German emissaries for closing down the Eastern Front. This agreement became the famous Brest-Litovsk Treaty of March 1918, abbreviated simply as “Brest-Litovsk,” an early example of Soviet willingness to compromise on the diplomatic front (though Lenin seemingly had no other choice) and in particular to strike a deal with the Germans.
It also signified winning what became known in Soviet tactics as a “breathing space,” that is, time to recoup in order to later resume the revolutionary offensive following the Brest-Litovsk “retreat.” Zigzagging was a well-known Bolshevik device, part of the “code of the Politburo.” Lenin said at the time: “If you are not able to adapt yourself, if you are not prepared to crawl in the mud on your belly, you are not a revolutionary but a chatterbox.” Such retreating, as with Brest-Litovsk or the New Economic Policy launched in 1921, did not mark the end of the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary socialist mission; it only represented a pause—and a useful one in several respects.
Lenin had just barely sold his comrades on the usefulness of the treaty. Yet he had convinced a majority by arguing that German troops fighting on the Eastern Front would be transported westward to fight the “capitalist-imperialist” states of France, Britain, and the United States.1 (The latter had been dispatching units of the American Expeditionary Force into France since early 1917.) The Germans soon carried out this deployment to the disadvantage of the Allied war effort against the Central Powers.
Brest-Litovsk provides a good example of dovetailing what looks superficially like mere reason-of-state diplomacy—namely, ending war on Russia’s western frontier—with the timeless dictates of Leninist ideology—namely, encouraging interimperialist “contradictions” and interimperialist fratricidal war. Here was set a lasting precedent, a harbinger of what was to become a perennial Soviet tactic in foreign relations—namely, helping the Western capitalist states self-destruct. As Lenin advised: In diplomacy, “we must exploit the contradictions and divergences in view between any two imperialisms, between two groups of capitalist states, pushing one against the other.”2 The “pushing” included instigation of war between them.
Pondering Lenin’s words with the realist-versus-traditionalist points of view in mind (see chapter 1), was this instigation policy motivated by nonideological “geopolitical interests” alone? Or was it based on Bolshevist revolutionism? It would seem that both factors were operating. Yet without ideological underpinning about the “laws” of capitalist imperialism, the policy of fomenting intra-imperialist tensions would have lacked a perspective, if not a motivation.
Because of the transfer of German troops to the Western Front, Germany in spring 1918 seemed to have come near to winning the war against the Allies, with its 200 divisions poised to drive on to Paris—at one point the French capital lying only some 35 miles distant from the invaders. However, French and U.S. reinforcements succeeded in stopping the last of Ludendorff’s several offensives by summer 1918. By November the war was over.