1. Sovereign states are acknowledged to have an unquestioned right to exist: whatever disagreements divide them, their existence itself can never be at issue. This principle underpinned the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. It was violated at the end of the eighteenth century with the Third Partition of Poland, which led to that country’s demise, but this was an exceptional case.
2. International relations are confined to contacts between governments: it is a violation of diplomatic norms for one government to go over the head of another with direct appeals to its population. In the practice of the nineteenth century, states normally communicated through the ministries of foreign affairs.
3. Relations among the foreign offices presume a certain level of integrity and goodwill, including respect for formal accords, since without them there can be no mutual trust, and without trust diplomacy becomes an exercise in futility.
These principles and practices, which evolved between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, assumed the existence of a Law of Nature as well as that of a supranational community of Christian states. The Stoic concept of the Law of Nature, which theorists of international law from Hugo Grotius onward applied to relations between states, posited eternal and universal standards of justice. The concept of a Christian community meant that, whatever divided them, the countries of Europe and their overseas offspring belonged to one family. Before the twentieth century, the precepts of international law were not meant to apply to peoples outside the European community—an attitude which justified colonial conquests.
Obviously, this whole complex of “bourgeois” ideas was repugnant to the Bolsheviks. As revolutionaries determined to overthrow the existing order, they could hardly have been expected to acknowledge the sanctity of the international state system. Appealing over the heads of governments to their populations was the very essence of revolutionary strategy. And as concerned honesty and goodwill in international relations, the Bolsheviks, in common with the rest of the Russian radicals, regarded moral standards to be obligatory only within the movement, in relations among comrades: relations with the class enemy were subject to the rules of warfare. In revolution, as in war, the only principle that mattered was kto kogo—who eats whom.
In the weeks that followed the October coup, most Bolsheviks expected their example to set off revolutions throughout Europe. Every report from abroad of an industrial strike or of a mutiny was hailed as the “beginning.” In the winter of 1917–18, the Bolshevik Krasnaia gazeta and similar party organs reported in banner headlines, day after day, revolutionary explosions in Western Europe: one day in Germany, the next in Finland, then again in France. As long as this expectation remained alive, the Bolsheviks had no need to work out a foreign policy: all they had to do was repeat what they had always done—namely, fan the flames of revolution.
But these hopes waned somewhat in the spring of 1918. The Russian Revolution had as yet found no emulators. The mutinies and strikes in Western Europe were everywhere suppressed, and the “masses” continued to slaughter each other instead of attacking their “ruling classes.” As this realization dawned, it became urgent to work out a revolutionary foreign policy. Here, the Bolsheviks lacked guidelines, since neither the writings of Marx nor the experience of the Paris Commune were of much help. The difficulty derived from the contradictory requirement of their interests as rulers of a sovereign state and as self-appointed leaders of world revolution. In the latter capacity they denied the right of other (“non-socialist”) governments to exist and rejected the tradition of confining foreign relations to heads of state and their ministers. They wanted to destroy root and branch the entire structure of national, “bourgeois” states, and to do so they had to exhort the “masses” abroad to rebellion. Yet, inasmuch as they themselves now headed a sovereign state, they could not avoid relations with other governments—at least until these had been swept away by the global revolution—and this they had to do in accordance with traditional standards of “bourgeois” international law. They also needed the protection of these standards to ward off foreign intervention in their own internal affairs.
It is here that the dual nature of the Communist state, the formal separation of party and state, proved so useful. The Bolsheviks solved their problem by constructing a two-level foreign policy, one traditional, the other revolutionary. For purposes of dealing with “bourgeois” governments, they established the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, staffed exclusively with dependable Bolsheviks and subject to instructions from the Central Committee. This institution functioned, at least on the surface, in accord with accepted norms of diplomacy. Wherever permitted to do so by host countries, the heads of Soviet foreign missions, no longer called “ambassadors” or “envoys,” but “political representatives” (polpredy), took over the old Russian Embassy buildings, donned cutaways and top hats, and behaved much like their colleagues from “bourgeois” missions.* “Revolutionary diplomacy”—strictly speaking, a contradiction in terms—became the province of the Bolshevik Party acting either on its own or through the agency of special organs, such as the Communist International. Its agents incited revolution and supported subversive activities against the very foreign governments with which the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs maintained correct relations.
This separation of functions, which reflected a similar duality inside Soviet Russia between party and state, was described by Sverdlov at the Seventh Congress of the Bolshevik Party in the course of discussions of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Referring to the clauses of the treaty which forbade the signatories to engage in hostile agitation and propaganda, he said:
It follows inexorably from the treaty we have signed and which we must soon ratify at the Congress [of Soviets] that in our capacity as a government, as Soviet authority, we will not be able to conduct that broad international agitation which we have conducted until now. But this in no wise means that we have to cut back one iota on such agitation. Only from now on we shall have to conduct it almost always in the name, not of the Council of People’s Commissars, but of the Central Committee of the party …4
This tactic of treating the party as a private organization, for whose actions the “Soviet” Government was not responsible, the Bolsheviks pursued with rather comical determination. For example, when in September 1918 Berlin protested against the anti-German propaganda in the Russian press (which by then was entirely under Bolshevik control), the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs archly replied:
The Russian Government has no complaints that the German censorship and German police do not prosecute [their] press organs for … malicious agitation against the political institutions of Russia—that is, against the Soviet system.… Considering fully admissible the absence of any repressive measures on the part of the German Government against German press organs which freely express their political and social opposition to the Soviet system, it deems equally admissible similar behavior in regard to the German system on the part of private persons and unofficial newspapers in Russia.… It is necessary to protest in the most decisive manner the frequent representations made by the German Consulate General that the Russian Government, by means of police measures, can direct the Russian revolutionary press in this or that direction and by bureaucratic influence instill in it such and such views.5