In lieu of a conclusion
This chapter tells a convoluted story, or rather stories, spanning five decades and a spectrum of leadership ranging from Stalin's absolute dictatorship to Putin's technocracy. It depicts a society where politics and culture have until quite recently been intimately, indeed inextricably, intertwined, and where the imperatives of one frequently conflicted with the essence of the other. Even in today's post-Soviet Russia, where artists grope to find a secure footing in the rubble of the old cultural landscape, the nexus of politics and culture has not entirely disappeared. For better and for worse, each illuminates the other, deepening our understanding of both. The story, then, is as complex as the society - and like the society, with all its metamorphoses and transformations, the story continues, its future unknown.
Comintern and Soviet foreign policy, 1919-1941
JONATHAN HASLAM
The October Revolution
The October Revolution was intended as a prelude to world revolution. Initial disappointment at the failure of other countries to follow suit led to an abrupt change of policy at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, when Lenin settled for a compromise peace with the Kaiser in order to give time for the creation of a military base for the revolution until Germany was ripe for revolt. The invasion of Russia by the armies of Japan and the Entente Powers, in May and August 1918 respectively, temporarily destroyed the tactic of accommodation with the capitalist world. The option of revolutionary war in the style of Napoleon was thus forced upon the Bolsheviks as a matter of survival. A war of offence against the West therefore became inseparable from the needs for defence. The question hidden behind the ensuing turmoil was the direction of foreign policy once military hostilities ceased. Would Soviet Russia revert to the 'Brest viewpoint' of accommodation? Or, having tasted the excitement, would Moscow once again exercise the option of revolutionary war?
The Bolsheviks had been conducting a fierce campaign to spread the revolution among invading Allied troops since the autumn of 1918 under the Central Executive Committee's Department of Propaganda, which was then moved over into the Communist International (Comintern) on 25 March 1919. The Comintern was thus always conceived and created for more than just furthering the worldwide proletarian revolution: protecting and enhancing the security of Soviet Russia (from 1923 the USSR) was no less a priority. Not everyone immediately understood this ambiguous role. It was reported that at the focal point of its intended activities - Germany - the question of creating the Comintern was viewed 'with great scepticism' because it was not thought that 'anything organisationally could be achieved in the near future'.[126]
In theory no conceptual difference was allowed to exist between these entirely distinct purposes. But the conflict between theory and practice very soon became too blatant to remain unremarked, and as early as 1924 and as late as 1935 even official utterance acknowledged that, at any given moment, these purposes could collide. A further complication also arose from the fact that the Comintern was born out of the October Revolution of 1917, which was Russian in inspiration and implementation. It meant that this global apparatus of power attached to the Soviet Communist Party became embroiled in the struggle for power that divided the party after the death of Lenin. Thus, even as it increasingly became an adjunct to Soviet state power abroad, the Comintern also became an adjunct to one faction within the party that sought to control all Soviet power. Thus the process of Bolshevising the Comintern that took place under Lenin - ostensibly to prepare fraternal parties for revolution - inevitably became a process of Stalinising the Comintern once Stalin crushed all vestiges of formal opposition in 1929.[127]
Therefore, even ifwe treat the Comintern as the instrument of Soviet foreign policy that it undoubtedly was, the relationship between Soviet state interests and the interests of worldwide revolution was not always entirely clear. Second, even where one can in retrospect see a line dividing the two, the thorny issue remains of a distinction between the interests of the ruling faction in Russia and the interests of the Soviet system as a whole. The Comintern was thus not a marginal and extraneous extension of Soviet power but integral to its very core and purpose, whether original or bastardised by Stalin's autocracy. The legitimacy of the October Revolution in Russia never depended exclusively on what it could do for Russia. Primarily it lay in what Russia could do for the world. Once the German revolution triumphed, Lenin intended to move to Berlin. Thus internal and international purpose could never be separated by a Chinese Wall of indifference without breaching the Leninist legacy in its entirety. Even at the height of his powers and at the peak of his contempt for foreign Communists, Stalin could never fully forswear that legacy, for to do so would have undermined an essential element in the domestic structure of power he was so anxious to dominate completely. Trotsky wrote that Stalin would not dare desert the Comintern except at risk of appearing 'in the character of a consistent Bonaparte, i.e. break openly with the tradition of October and place some kind of crown on his head'.[128]
Standing alone
The failure of the Allied war of intervention, signalled by the British decision to pull out by the end of 1919, effectively ensured the survival of Bolshevik rule in Russia and the greater part of its former empire. The Janus faces of Soviet foreign policy thereby emerged: on the one side the face of appeasement and statecraft, the policy of accommodation to the capitalist world (the 'Brest viewpoint'); on the other the contrasting face of violence and revolution to uproot and supplant capitalism in its entirety.
Not least because of the Royal Navy offshore, the Baltic states - Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia - were where Lenin cut his losses. He granted diplomatic recognition to these bourgeois nationalist regimes and sought to make virtue of necessity by dramatically demonstrating Soviet support for the hallowed liberal principle of national self-determination. Similarly in the East, the Bolsheviks projected their solidarity with 'national liberation movements' against Western imperialism even if, in one instance, national liberation was led by a brutal feudal despot (King Amanullah of Afghanistan). This fundamental breach of Marxist principle - to back the bourgeoisie instead of the toiling masses - was dictated by the demands of the Soviet state in a friendless world where revolution was slow to emerge. In the eyes of the Bolsheviks these were merely temporary remedies to a problem for the short term. A breach of principle in the longer term was not expected and would certainly not have been accepted if proposed.
126
Karl Radek, reporting from Berlin, to Lenin, Chicherin and Sverdlov, 24 Jan. 1919: K. Anderson and A. Chubar'ian (eds.),
127
E. H. Carr and R. W Davies,
128
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