By the 1970s upward, several dozen countries worldwide could be considered active members of the Soviet bloc or of the extended “socialist camp” of cooperative “client-states.” All were committed to enforcing the principles of Soviet foreign policy and expansionistic “internationalism.”
Citing such postwar facts as the above, the so-called traditionalist school rebuts the realists. These scholars take seriously ideological pronouncements like Mein Kampf, the Japanese Tanaka Memorial, and, correspondingly, Marxist-Leninist ideology as formulated in the writings of Lenin and Stalin and their aides and successors. Traditionalists produce numerous quotations from the speeches and writings of Soviet leaders as they set out to prove their point about Soviet ideology as a practical, guiding set of principles, if not an actual blueprint of expansionism.9 Such writers dovetail Moscow’s ideological formulations with actual Soviet policies. They demonstrate how the official ideology actually formed the basis for Soviet foreign policy. For example, Richard W. Harrison, author of the new study The Russian Way of War: Operational Art, 1904–1940, has written that “ideological absolutes and political controls imposed on [the Red Army] created an ethos not disposed to recognize limits, and which could hardly have failed to have an impact on the nature of its military operations. Consequently, the political-military belief that the Communist ideology represented the most dynamic historical forces naturally inclined the army toward offensive operations.”10
In assessing the intent of Soviet behavior on the foreign front, this school also emphasizes the practical importance of the global institution of the Third Communist International (Comintern). It also cites its postwar successor, the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform). Far from regarding Marxist-Leninist ideology and the Comintern/Cominform as mere window dressing, this school claims that ideology and policy making work hand-in-glove in a practical way. Traditionalists might note that the Western realists habitually project onto the Soviet camp their own views. They write under the spell of the “end of ideology” in their part of the world.
An exploration of the validity of this point of view can start with an examination of the Mr. X (Kennan) analysis. if Mr. X’s presentation is convincing beyond reasonable doubt and Soviet ideology indeed functioned like the North Star to Kremlin policy making, then the argument that Stalin et al.’s militant, “offensist” ideological pronouncements on the eve of World War II would seem to have more than dubious validity. Ideological pronouncements thus become determinants of actual Soviet behavior toward Germany and its goals in World War II. They may even be seen to underlie the Nazi–Soviet agreements along with Stalin’s scuttling of effort to conclude collective-security arrangements with the Western capitalist democracies (chapter 2).
Do, in fact, Soviet ideological, expansionist statements prior to the German invasion on June 22, 1941, provide any clues of actual Soviet intentions and actions? Several post-Soviet Russian writers refer to various militant ideological statements made by high Soviet officials in the months just before June 1941. They claim that such statements could not have been made unless approved by Stalin. Furthermore, the declarations themselves, they insist, reflect above all “offensist” military planning that must have been endorsed by the dictator. For instance, in his chapter in the Afanas’iev volume, The Other War, V. L. Doroshenko, noting the discovery by another writer, T. S. Bushuyev, of a new, revealing document, a speech by Stalin to a secret meeting of the Politburo, August 19, 1939 (see appendix 3 for the text), writes:
Stalin needed the Second World War no less than Hitler. Stalin not only helped Hitler initiate it [in Poland], he entertained the same goal as did Hitler: seizure of power in Europe as well as the immediate aim of destroying Poland. Stalin calculated that the war, started by Germany, would lead to the downfall of the European order. Meantime, he would remain out of the [war] for a time entering the war at the most opportune moment. [Stalin’s plans] were not only to conquer eastern Europe but to help bring about a communist revolution in France by going at very least as far as the English Channel.
War, as viewed by Stalin and, before him, Lenin, suggests the writer, is the “midwife of the sovietization of the whole European Continent.” The Politburo speech by Stalin makes all this explicit. It states that “Communist revolutions inevitably will break out” there as the Soviet Army “liberates” Europe as a stage in the “development of world revolution.”11
The classical expression of this goes back to Lenin. When in exile in Switzerland as World War I began in 1914, Lenin viewed the war as a great opportunity for overturning the capitalist order. The war, whose destruction he relished for its usefulness to The Cause, would unleash massive chaos. It would create the impetus for antiwar sentiment that in turn would become fuel for socialist revolution that would put an end to all war by liquidating capitalism and, with it, imperialism. This perspective remained fundamental to Marxism-Leninism right up to the fall of the Soviet order in December 1991.
In M. I. Mel’tyukhov’s contribution to the Afanas’iev volume, titled “Ideological Documents of May–June 1941,” first published in the Russian military journal Otechestvennaya Istoriya (no. 2 [1995]), the author reproduces a number of militant statements made by high Soviet officials. They strictly conform to Marxist-Leninist “revolutionist principles.” He claims that they amount to blueprints for waging offensive war in the near future. The Russian historian quotes such officials as the No. 2 man to Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov; Party Secretary Andrei Zhdanov; Aleksandr Shcherbakov, party secretary for ideology and a close aide of Stalin’s; Soviet president Mikhail Kalinin; and others.12
Several statements by the above illustrate Mel’tyukhov’s emphasis on ideology:
If you are Marxists, if you study the history of the party, then you understand that the basic concept of Marxist teaching is that under conditions of major conflicts within mankind, such conflicts provide maximum advantages to communism. (Kalinin, speech, May 20, 1941 )
War will come at the same moment when communism is to be expanded.... Leninism teaches that the country of socialism [USSR] must exploit any favorably-developing situation. In which it becomes incumbent on the USSR to resort on its own initiative to offensive military actions against the capitalist encirclement with the aim of extending the front of socialism. (Shcherbakov, speech, June 5, 1941)
When conditions are favorable, we will extend the front of socialism further to the west.... For this purpose we possess the necessary instrument: The Red Army, which as early as January 1941 was given the title, “army-liberator.” (Zhdanov, speech to a conference of film workers, May 15, 1941)
The overseer of political indoctrination of the Red Army, Lev Mekhlis, stated frankly at the Eighteenth Communist Party Congress (March 1939), referring to the views of Stalin in a manner similar to Molotov and Zhdanov (as quoted in the introduction): “If a second imperialist war turns its cutting edge against the world’s first socialist state, then it will be necessary for the Soviet Union to extend hostilities to the adversary’s territory and fulfill [the USSR’s] international responsibilities and increase the number of Soviet republics.”13
For Mr. X (Kennan), however, ideology is not everything; it does not cancel out other determiners of Soviet behavior. As he notes, “Soviet policy is highly flexible” and answers to real conditions beyond its borders, not exclusively to ideological dogmas. Moreover, he continues: