Kennan’s above observation—that there can be “ambiguities in practice” —ironically opens another realist front against the traditionalist view: Namely, if ideology is so binding—for example, as with the Soviet antifascist line in the Comintern from 1935 to late 1939—how was it that Stalin could conveniently discard this basic party line when he concluded his agreements with the Nazis in 1939 and 1940? So doing, he thereby suspended the antifascist line in Soviet media and official pronouncements. In this process, Stalin’s zigzag alienated many Communists and fellow travelers worldwide. Ideology was put through the wringer.
Put another way, fundamental Soviet national interests seemingly can cause contradictions between raison d’état and Moscow’s official ideology. This in turn suggests that ideology can be relegated to secondary importance in favor of other, larger national considerations in policy making, such as contingencies that arise that do not neatly fit ideological dogmas. This was the case—presumably—in August 1939 when the Soviet–Nazi alliance was taking shape. Yet even this maneuver, as we will see, had an ideological motivation.
Some authoritative Soviet military spokespeople, moreover, have insisted that diplomacy, not necessarily ideology alone, can provide the best “preparatory,” favorable conditions for later waging of war. To wit, General Makhmut Gareyev, in his volume M. V. Frunze—Military Theoretician, writes: “Skillful diplomacy [umelaya diplomatiya] not only creates favorable conditions for waging war, but can lead to the creation of a totally new politico-military situation in which armed struggle can be conducted.” 6 He thus suggests that through “forceful” diplomacy (e.g., in acquiring [annexing] Baltic and other territory in the 1940), Stalin had prepared the USSR for waging war—whether defensive or offensive (see chapter 5).
Nevertheless, ideology, though playing a subsidiary role at times, was exploited at least as rationalization for the sovietization of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in that year, just as the previous sovietizations of foreign lands had been. The old “bourgeois order” had to be overthrown (as in Poland in 1920 and September 1939). This was deemed “historically inevitable.”
In noting Stalin’s relegation of Communist International (Comintern) interests to a lower priority with the shift in the party line on Nazi Germany, the realists only seemingly make a good point. By making his pact with the class devil (fascism being the most “mature” form of capitalism) in August 1939, it is claimed, Stalin surely was prioritizing what he considered at least to be Soviet short-term, putatively nonideological “national” interests. He seemed to be placing the latter ahead of ideological principles. This, in turn, apparently makes the case that ideology can look irrelevant or expendable in certain crucial situations. As Soviet Charge d’Affaires Georgi Astakhov reassured German Foreign Office State Secretary Ernst Weizsaecker on May 30, 1939:
[Astakhov] explained how Russian relations with Italy . . . as well as other countries could be normal and even very good, although in those countries Communism was not favored at all. He strongly emphasized the possibility of a very clear distinction between maxims of domestic policy on the one hand and orientation of foreign policy on the other hand.... The ideological barrier between Moscow and Berlin [Astakhov said] was in reality erected by us.
Likewise, after the German attack on the USSR in June 1941, Stalin again executed a zigzag. It was a maneuver that seemed again to compromise the official ideology. For the Soviet leader lost no time closing ranks with those same “capitalist-imperialist” states of Britain and America, which the Soviets, particularly during the twenty-one-month Nazi–Soviet honeymoon from August 1939 to 1941, had singled out as “warmongers,” the “main instigators of war” (e.g., against the Soviet ally, Nazi Germany). Yet, by the next month of July, Stalin was addressing these same capitalist democracies in the friendliest of terms. He dubbed them fellow “democratic,” antifascist, war “coalition” members. They were no longer characterized as “plutocratic,” the Nazi-like epithet used in both Nazi and Soviet propaganda. Nor were they even described as “imperialist” states, the term used for them before July 1941 and restored again after the “two-camps” line of capitalist-imperialist versus socialist states developed in the Kremlin by 1946.
Forgotten, too, were those parallel “socialist” ideologies, Nazi and Soviet. Their compatibility had once prompted friendly statements in the German and Soviet press, 1939–41, that the two systems had much in common. Yet, the term allies—soyuzniki—was very seldom used to describe during the Soviet phase of World War II Stalin’s newfound, “friendly,” capitalist Western states that were later to compose the United Nations alliance along with the USSR. (Nor, for that matter, was soyuzniki used for Soviet–German ties during the Nazi–Soviet honeymoon.) Suspension of anti-Western, “anti-imperialist” ideology “for the duration” clearly had to be and was achieved for the sake of the common war effort. Disbandment of the Comintern in 1943 likewise fits in with this opportunistic tactic.
However, such ideological compromises and backtracking lasted only as long as the war did. And this is grist for the opposing, traditionalist mill. As referenced by Kennan in his 1949 Foreign Affairs essay, momentary twists and turns aside, Stalin and Co. never really renounced basic Marxist-Leninist ideology. The ideology, he suggests, still imparted thrust and guidance to Soviet behavior in the international arena during and after the war.
A case in point is the earlier promise in 1933 to suspend Soviet-sponsored Communist propaganda and subversion in the United States. This was the price for U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union. However, Soviet subversive activity, based on Marxist-Leninist principles and applied against the United States and other capitalist democracies, continued unabated in the postwar era as it had in a concealed way after recognition twelve years before. (Even in the heyday of Nazi–Soviet friendship the Germans complained of the same Soviet perfidy.)
In contrast to Kennan and other “cold warriors” of the postwar period, author Gabriel Gorodetsky, a writer of the realist persuasion especially when it comes to Soviet foreign policy, describes Stalin’s basic attitude toward Marxism-Leninism as follows: “Stalin was little affected by sentiment or ideology in the pursuit of foreign policy. His statesmanship was rooted in Russia’s tsarist legacy, and responded to imperatives deep within its history.... It is not surprising that in the execution of his foreign policy Machiavelli rather than Lenin was Stalin’s idol; here was a man who had The Prince especially translated for him.”7 Professor Andreas Hillgruber adds: “Stalin never made decisions of ‘grand policy’ on the basis of Bolshevist revolutionary ideology. He practiced above all a rationally calculated power politics with the aim of expanding the Soviet empire by exploiting the war that began in 1939 among the ‘imperialist’ powers. Social revolutionary transformation in newly-won territories was subordinated to strategic security.”8
THE TRADITIONALIST VIEW
Among the postwar milestones of unabated, ideological, “internationalist” activity subsidized by Moscow are the famous Duclos Letter (The Daily Worker [the United States], May 24, 1945) and Stalin’s February 1946 electoral speech. These along with other Soviet tracts at the time sounded traditional communist ideological notes as to the “inevitability” of the demise of capitalism, the reemergence of capitalist imperialism and war in the immediate future, and the inevitability of world revolution. With this in mind, Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech in June 1946 can be viewed as a reaction to Stalin’s postwar reassertion of the traditional tenets of Marxism-Leninism and Soviet expansionism from the Stettin to the Balkans and beyond that the ideology evidently inspired and endorsed.