Instinctively he adopted an attitude towards which the Russian revolution was in any case drifting, an attitude of national self-centredness and self-sufficiency. To many rank and file Bolsheviks world revolution had become a lamentable myth by 1924, while the building of socialism in Russia was the exacting and exhilarating experience of their generation. Despite all his verbal tributes to Leninist internationalism, Stalin became the chief mouthpiece of this sentiment. He elevated the sacred egoism of the Russian revolution to a supreme principle — this was the real meaning of his idea of ‘socialism in one country’. He was determined to make the sacred egoism of the ‘only proletarian State in the world’ the guiding idea of international communism as well. Whenever the interests of foreign communism clashed or appeared to clash with those of the Soviet Union, he sacrificed foreign communism.
By the middle of the 1920's Bolshevism had virtually solved its dilemma of ‘liberation’ versus ‘containment’ in favour of containment. World capitalism was not to be allowed to overlap the frontiers of the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was not to forgo even the slightest chance of an understanding with any bourgeois government, even if such an understanding could be bought only at the price of ‘betraying’ foreign communism. Fascist regimes, bourgeois democracies, and Oriental reactionary dictatorships — all were equally good, or equally bad, as partners in trade and diplomatic bargaining.
The Communist International still proudly claiming to be the vanguard of world revolution became the rear-guard of Stalin's diplomacy. It was used as an instrument of Soviet pressure upon capitalist governments rather than as a militant movement fighting for their overthrow.
‘Socialism in one country’ was in effect the formula in which Bolshevism, under Stalin's leadership, intimated its readiness for self-containment to a world which was anyhow bent on containing it. Thus the statesmen of the Western world understood the formula; and most of them applauded Stalin's victory over Trotsky, in whom they saw the hateful incarnation of all the world-revolutionary aspirations of early Bolshevism. (Little did those statesmen expect that one day they would feel threatened by a revolution carried on the point of the bayonets of Stalin's armies!)
As long as Bolshevism hoped and believed that its ultimate salvation would come from abroad, it remained in a sense elevated above its Russian environment. It did not feel dependent on that environment only. It could afford to express its disdain for native ‘backwardness’, for Russia's semi-Asiatic outlook, and for her Tsarist past; and nobody vented that disdain more often and with less inhibition than Lenin did. During the early years of the Soviet regime, the Bolshevik leaders had the feeling that they were Marxists in partibus infidelium, West European revolutionaries acting against a non-congenial Oriental background, which temporarily restricted their freedom of movement and tried to impose its tyranny upon them. Only revolution in the West could relieve them from that tyranny; and that it was about to do so was beyond doubt.
No sooner had Bolshevism mentally withdrawn into its national shell than this attitude became untenable. The party of the revolution had to stoop to its semi-Asiatic environment. It had to cut itself loose from the specifically Western tradition of Marxism. It had to lay itself open to the slow, persistent infiltration of native backwardness and barbarism, even while it struggled to defeat that backwardness and barbarism.
The adjustment began in the early part of the Stalinist era, and it did so in every field of activity: in the method of government, in the approach to problems of culture and education, in the relations with the outside world, in the style of diplomatic dealings, and so on. The process of infiltration was gaining momentum throughout the Stalinist era; and it reached a grotesque climax just at its end.
This does not mean that Bolshevism surrendered to its native environment. On the contrary, during the greater part of the Stalin era Bolshevism was as if at war with it — industrializing, collectivizing, and modernizing it. In a sense, Bolshevism has ‘Westernized’ the essential framework of Russian society. But it could do so only by itself becoming ‘Orientalized’. This mutual interpenetration of modern technology and Marxist socialism with Russian barbarism formed the content of the Stalin era.
Shortly before his death Lenin had a premonition of the shape of things to come. He recalled the familiar historical phenomenon when a nation which has conquered another nation culturally superior to it succumbs to the political and cultural standards of the conquered. Something similar, so Lenin argued, may happen in class struggle: an oppressed and uneducated class may overthrow a ruling class culturally superior to it; and then the defeated class may impose its own standards upon the victorious revolutionary forces. In a flash of extraordinary foresight, Lenin had the vision of his disciples, the former professional revolutionaries, adopting the methods of government and the standards of behaviour of the Tsars, the feudal boyars, and the old bureaucracy. Lenin warned his followers against this danger; but up to a point he himself furthered it. He argued, for instance, that in order to prepare Russia for socialism industrially, technologically, and educationally, Bolshevism must drive barbarism out of Russia by barbarous methods, as Peter the Great had done in his time.
This obiter dictum, one of Lenin's many and sometimes contradictory sayings, became Stalin's guiding principle. He had none of the qualms about barbarous methods which beset Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders; and he had no hesitation in proclaiming that the driving out of barbarism in a barbarous manner was no mere preliminary to socialism — it was socialism itself.
To sum up: the transition from Leninism to Stalinism consisted in the abandonment of a revolutionary internationalist tradition in favour of the sacred egoism of Soviet Russia; and in the suppression of Bolshevism's pristine attachment to proletarian democracy in favour of an autocratic System of government. The isolation of the Russian revolution resulted in its mental self-isolation and in its spiritual and political adaptation to primordial Russian tradition. Stalinism represented the amalgamation of Western European Marxism with Russian barbarism.
A brief historical digression may perhaps be permitted here.
We have seen that Marxist communism had had its cradle in the industrial West. A Western philosophy (Hegel), a Western political economy (Ricardo), and the ideas of Western Utopian socialism (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen) had nursed it. Marxism claimed to make articulate theoretically and to express politically the revolutionary aspirations of Western industrial workers. During many decades it then strove to convert and conquer the West through the exertions of the Western working classes. By the turn of the century great labour movements had sprung up all over Western Europe, which marched under Marxist banners and solemnly vowed to use their first opportunity to carry out proletarian revolutions.
Yet this apparent success of Marxism was spurious. More than a hundred years after the message of the Communist Manifesto had first resounded throughout the world not a single proletarian revolution has triumphed in the West. Not even a single full-scale attempt at such a revolution, an attempt genuinely backed by a majority of the working class, has taken place in the West, apart from the Commune of Paris, defeated in 1871.