Some observers wonder whether Lenin, Stalin, and their cohorts and propagandists really believed or meant what they so often said about spreading Communism and the Soviet system worldwide. Were they serious when they declared that the “revolutionary base” of the USSR, the “first socialist country,” would be used in order to subvert “capitalist imperialism” and “colonialism”? Said Lenin: “We Marxists have always stood, and still stand, for a revolutionary war against counterrevolutionary nations. [We would be] in favor of an offensive revolutionary war against them.”2 Stalin noted: “The victory of socialism in one country is not a self-sufficient task. [It is] the groundwork for world revolution.” The Soviet Union is prepared, Stalin declared, quoting Lenin, “to come out even with armed force against the exploiting classes and their states.” The program of the Communist International (Sixth Congress, 1928) puts it: “The USSR . . . raises revolts and inevitably becomes the base of the world movement of all oppressed classes.”3
As mentioned in the introduction, did the Soviet founding father, Lenin and his successors, Stalin, et al., seriously regard war as the “midwife” of revolution? Did they ever wage war with that in mind? In other words, was the ideological goal of fomenting world revolution according to the axioms of Marxism-Leninism mere vranyo (Russian equivalent of “verbal bravado”), so much mumbo jumbo?
Finally, this question arises: Was the forcible expansion of the borders of the young Soviet Republic immediately after 1918 and in the 1920s—into the borderlands of Ukraine, Byelorussia, Georgia, Armenia, Turkestan, and so on—basically nonideological? Was it merely the reflexive, nationalist assertion of long-standing Russian territorial expansionism into neighboring lands going back to the tsars?
On the other hand, if this Soviet borderland expansion—coupled to attempts to sovietize the independent Baltic states (after 1917) as well as the more distant countries of Hungary and Germany beginning in 1918 and then Poland in 1920—was inspired by the Soviet ideology of exporting the Soviet new “socialist order” and fomenting global revolution, then Marxist-Leninist doctrine, it would seem, becomes crucially determinant. It impinges significantly on the casting of both domestic and foreign policy. It therefore becomes necessary to view Soviet behavior to an important degree through the prism of the stated beliefs of the regime, its ideology, and its revolutionary program. And that includes, of course, the thrust of Soviet behavior in the immediate pre-World War II period, which is the central topic of this book.
Roughly two schools of thought have coalesced around the pair of opposing questions about the role of ideology in Soviet behavior. One school frames the question this way: Is ideology in general mere window dressing, an updated form of the ritualistic Indian rain dance as some political analysts such as Lewis Feuer have put it? Or, on the other hand, does ideology provide a realistic, practical “blueprint” for concrete policy making and action, a “lodestar” (the Soviet metaphor for Marxist-Leninist ideology) in order to guide the Russian ship of state in practical ways?
THE REALIST VIEW
The first side in this dispute—the so-called realist school—argues that ideology is mostly extravagant propaganda. At best, its function is to supply ballast and legitimation to a top-heavy, autocratic regime whose legitimacy otherwise is questionable. Ideology is crucial in order to justify or legitimize a regime’s authoritarian or dictatorial rule. The absolutist regime’s set of doctrines must be believed by the people and followed to the letter. How else can the autocratic state bind together the comrades in realizing the common cause, the practical goals of the regime? (Plato apparently had something like this in mind with his “useful lie” (ϰρήζιμοζ ψεύ∂οζ) taught to the citizens of his ideal republic—a mythic ideology implanted in the youth to guarantee obedience to the philosopher-kings.)
Yet these dogmas, or “myths,” it is alleged by the realist school, are at heart impractical and visionary—in either the short or long term. To the realists, this makes the dogmas all but irrelevant. Marxist-Leninist principles and goals are like hymns sung to the choir.
For instance, consider the catchphrase for the much touted millennial paradise of “full communism”—“from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”—together with the anarchist-like dream in Communist ideology that prophesies the ultimate, total withering away of the state, the end of the division of labor and of differences between town and country, and so forth. These farfetched axioms of Marxism-Leninism are viewed by many Western observers as so much sugarcoating. They are at best rationalizations, they insist, in support of one-party rule. That anyone would believe such shibboleths, least of all take them literally as “blueprints” for the future, is almost like saying that American Indians performing a rain dance for tourists in New Mexico are to be taken seriously, as though truly endeavoring to produce rainfall.
In short, to the realist school, Marxism-Leninism is little more than advertising, boastful pontification. Realists might point out that in America clubs like Kiwanis, Rotarians, Masons, and so on likewise make vast boasts and millennial prognostications. But does such posturing and mumbo jumbo really mean anything? Does it affect their behavior in any concrete way? Or does it simply boost zealots’ spirits while rationalizing their very enterprise?
In its ideological formulations respecting foreign states and their societies, Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism’s dogmas, realists claim, likewise should not have been taken seriously at any given time or place. Surely, they claim, Lenin, Stalin, and their cohorts could not have seriously entertained the idea of a future “Soviet of the Whole World” (Lenin’s phrase, which he often repeated). The Soviet epigones may have talked that way to cajole or bemuse the workers, peasants, and intellectuals or themselves or to boost party morale and strut “militancy.” But that the leaders were actually planning and working to attain such farfetched goals, especially “world revolution,” was and is regarded by realists as largely fatuous. One can safely say that most authors, latter-day Western Soviet specialists, and Moscow correspondents writing on the Soviet affairs have hewn to this approach, at the very least since the 1960s.4
If the realists are right, then the many Soviet ideological pronouncements of an expansionist nature in the pre–World War II period can be taken with a grain of salt or, in fact, ignored altogether. Such a view, of course, prompts a negative interpretation of, for example, the “Mr. X” essay by George F. Kennan, published in Foreign Affairs in 1949. The views stated in that article—in describing and analyzing Soviet ideology as a driving force of policy—were to underlie U.S. and Western “Cold War strategy” for the coming four decades. Mr. X’s views became cant as the verbal springboard for formulating and maintaining the long-term American view of vigilant “containment” toward Marxism-Leninism and Soviet expansionism. It was the subtext of the Cold War.
Even in Kennan’s earlier writings, for example, his “personal paper” drafted in Moscow in spring 1935, had a similar thrust. As he then wrote:
It is important to recall the fundamental peculiarity of Russian foreign relations.... The masters in the Kremlin are revolutionary communists . . . they themselves are leaders of the world proletariat. [The Russians can] tolerate ambiguities enough in practice but not in theory. [Their] conception of foreign relations has had a profound effect, not only on the character of diplomatic life in Moscow, but also on the entire development of Russia’s foreign relations.5