It will be remembered that by the middle of the 1920's the Bolshevik mind had become profoundly disturbed by the isolation of the Russian revolution. It then began to reconcile and to adapt itself to isolation, and even to glory in it. This mood found its apotheosis in the slogan ‘socialism in one country’, the dogma with which Stalin proclaimed the self-sufficiency and self-containment of the Russian revolution. Henceforth, adherence to this dogma became the test of loyalty to Bolshevism. Any deviation from it was branded as treason; and those who represented the revolutionary internationalism of earlier days were marked as apostates.
The halcyon days of ‘socialism in one country’ lasted until the Second World War.
Throughout the late 1920's and 1930's Stalin's diplomacy sought, implicitly or explicitly, to preserve the international status quo and to enhance Russia's position within it. ‘We do not want a single square yard of foreign land’ was the maxim of Chicherin and Litvinov, the two Foreign Ministers of the time.
‘Not a square yard of foreign land’ might also be said to have been the watchword inspiring the Communist International, which continued to claim, however, that no land on the globe was foreign to it.
The main purpose of the Stalinized Comintern was to do political guard duty for the ‘only proletarian State’ so that the building of socialism in ‘one-sixth of the earth's territory’ should not be disturbed by capitalist pressure or — by revolutionary developments in the remaining five-sixths, which might interrupt the Soviet Union's ‘peaceful coexistence’ with capitalism.
The Communist Parties refrained from moves which might have embarrassed Soviet diplomacy in its dealings with foreign governments. They backed all and every one of Stalin's diplomatic manoeuvres either indirectly by exercising pressure upon the bourgeois governments, or directly by lending open support to the successive manoeuvres on the ground that no matter how contradictory these might be, they also expressed the quintessence of international proletarian interest. It was no longer Bolshevik Russia which waited for world revolution — world revolution now had to wait until Russia had built up her socialism.
The records of the Stalinized Comintern are, of course, full of fantastic battle-cries, wild forecasts of imminent world revolution, and the most rabid upbraiding of all bourgeois and Social Democratic Parties. The records also speak of some ‘putschist’ incidents, stray forays in insurrectionist tactics, and displays of pseudo-revolutionary trigger-happiness. It is enough to recall here the Canton rising of 1927, or the bombastic resolutions of the Sixth Congress of the Comintern (1928), which instructed all member parties to direct their fire primarily against the social democrats in preparation for an imminent assault on the bastions of world capitalism.
However, these diversions did not affect the main trend of Soviet and Comintern policy. The communist following could not be kept inactive for an indefinite time without a consequent breakdown in its morale. When the General Staff would not allow it to engage in genuine fighting, it had to permit at least some mock battles. The need for these was the more pressing the more the communist ranks became aware that they were ordered either to render yeoman service to ‘class enemies’ or merely to mark time. The ‘ultra-left’ turns of the Comintern came, as a rule, after spells of ‘rightism’, which had usually left the aftertaste of self-abasement in the mouths of the rank and file.
But whenever Soviet diplomacy was engaged in serious dealings with foreign powers, the Comintern always sounded the cease-fire to its mock battles and switched back to rightist, ‘opportunist’ policies in which it sometimes persisted with suicidal consequences. This was true of the Communist Party of China in 1925-7; on Stalin's orders, it remained subservient to the Kuomintang up to the moment when Chiang Kai-shek ordered a massacre of the communists, and even during the massacre itself. This was also true of the French and Spanish Communist Parties during the Popular Fronts of 1936-8, when the policy of ‘collective security’ and of the anti-Hitler alliance with the West demanded that the radicalism of the rank and file in the Popular Fronts be kept in check. Then, in the period of the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement (1939-41), the Comintern sought to gain acceptance of that agreement by the world's working classes by telling them that not the Third Reich but France and Britain were their chief enemies. At the next turn the Comintern became the mouthpiece of the anti-Fascist Grand Alliance, until Stalin, anxious to prove his reliability to Churchill and Roosevelt, rose up early one morning, in April 1943, and ‘clave the wood for a burnt offering’. Unlike the Biblical Isaac on the way to Moriah, the Comintern did not even ask ‘Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’
Was Stalin then the great Saboteur and betrayer of world revolution, as Trotsky saw him?
Yes and no. He certainly did his best to destroy the potentialities for revolution abroad — in the name of the sacred egoism of the Russian revolution. But how real and important were those potentialities between the two world wars? Trotsky saw that period as one sequence of great but missed revolutionary opportunities. The historian of the period cannot be so sure about its latent possibilities. He can gauge only its actuality, not its potentiality.
Stalin worked on the assumption that there was no chance of a communist victory in the West or in the East. If that was so, then he was sacrificing to the selfishness of Bolshevik Russia the shadow, not the substance, of world revolution. He believed that by building up the Soviet ‘citadel of socialism’ he was making the only contribution towards world revolution which could be made at the time. This conviction allowed him to treat the labour movements of the world with boundless cynicism and contempt.
He hoped that ‘socialism in one country’ would be his life's work and his party's philosophy for a whole historical epoch.
That epoch came to an end much earlier than he expected. It was brought to a close by the Second World War and its aftermath, in which the dynamics of the Soviet State and the genuine social ferment in the world combined to open a new and momentous chapter of revolution.
Conservative minds in the West have seen in Stalin the evil plotter responsible for all the revolutions of our day, because to the conservative mind revolution is always the result of plotting and conspiracy. The impartial historian will take a somewhat more complex view of this chapter in Stalin's career. He will record that in the last decade of his life Stalin struggled desperately and unavailingly to save his policy of self-containment, or what remained of it, from the tempest of the time.
He was guided by motives of orthodox strategy, not of international revolution, when, in 1939-40, he sent his armies to the Baltic lands and to the Ukrainian and Byelorussian marches of Poland. He sought to deny to Hitler these jumping-off grounds for an attack on Russia.
He could not and would not risk leaving the tiny Baltic States as independent buffers between his and Hitler's war machines. He had to incorporate them in the Soviet Union — or eise, he was convinced, they would be absorbed by Greater Germany. But the Soviet Union could not effectively absorb those countries without bringing their regimes into line with its own. So Stalin's armoured brigades rolled to the Baltic coast and to the River Bug to occupy strategic outposts; but they carried revolution in the turrets of their tanks.
Even then Stalin produced the Tsars' title deeds to the annexed lands and claimed to have collected for Russia merely her old patrimony. He was still anxious to intimate that this departure from self-containment was only incidental and local in character; and that it had been dietated by national-Russian, not by international-revolutionary motives.