Stalin notoriously stole the policies of his enemies once he had done with them. Thus it was that, having rid Russia of Trotsky (though not his followers, who were still sulking in their tents), Stalin immediately embarked on policies hitherto heralded by the Left as the domestic solution to Moscow's dilemma: rapid state industrialisation and the forcible collectivisation of agriculture. This was prefaced by turning the Comintern sharp left against all contacts with Social Democracy and bourgeois nationalism worldwide, proclaimed at the sixth Congress in 1928, ironically under the now helpless leader of the Right, Bukharin. The entire reorientation, domestic and foreign, was effectively harnessed to winning over the Left, even if one allows that events were anyway pressing in this direction. Whether Stalin would have forced the pace without such incentives is open to doubt, for he had hitherto been identified as a Rightist both internationally (by the British Foreign Office no less) and at home (not least by Trotsky). The acute tension within him between innate caution and burgeoning intemperance during moments of gloomy introspection was apt to break dramatically when events allowed, and drive him to lash out in unexpected directions and at unsuspecting victims.
Although the Comintern no longer remained the centre of Soviet foreign policy-making, neither did it become completely irrelevant - not least because the rest of the world saw international revolution as Russia's objective. Thus the shift to the left did have undesirable consequences for the effectiveness of Soviet diplomacy. A near rupture with France at the end of 1927 was followed by a near rupture with Germany early in 1928 and a crisis in China in 1929.[137]That same year ill-considered and overt attempts to recruit the rank and file of the French Communist Party (PCF), the second largest in Europe, for the purpose ofspying on military and logistical capabilities resulted in the prompt arrest and imprisonment of the PCF leadership, followed by further tension with Moscow. The atmosphere of fear was such as one might have expected on the eve of war and matched the bellicose rhetoric on the domestic front. The one inevitably spilled easily over into the other.
There was one notable success, however. Patching up relations with the minority Labour administration in Britain provided some compensation, but increasingly France took the lead against international Communism. An unusually enfeebled British Empire - already undermined by the Treasury's short-sighted financial policies - fell easy victim to the Wall Street Crash in October 1929; and by the end of September 1931 Britain was not only forced into devaluation but even the navy had mutinied.
To a Marxist all this should have come as no surprise. The Russians, of course, had long predicted a crash followed by acute social unrest, if not revolution. But as far as Stalin was concerned rhetoric was just rhetoric. Policy was a different matter. With the countryside in revolt, the industrial economy overheated and unrest manifest within the ranks ofthe Red Army, itselfback- ward technologically compared to the Great Powers, the last thing Stalin wanted was a Communist attempt to seize power and, in so doing, unite the wrath of the capitalist world in a furious, further and possibly final assault on the debilitated Soviet Union.[138]
Thus an extraordinary credibility gap emerged by the spring of 1930 between bellicose Comintern propaganda about the imminence of war and revolution and the flagrant timidity and conservatism of Stalin's instructions to foreign Communist parties. In both Germany and China word went out to desist from grandiose and risky revolutionary adventures.[139] On the diplomatic front this cautious approach was matched by Commissar Maksim Litvinov, who had de facto control over the Narkomindel since 1928 before supplanting his ailing and querulous boss, Georgii Chicherin, in the summer of 1930. The Litvinov line met Stalin's needs to a tee. It meant following the line Lenin had chosen in the spring of 1922 for the Soviet delegation to the Genoa conference, designed to win over the pacifist bourgeoisie of the West with high-flown talk of increased trade, world peace and general and complete disarmament; a charade, perhaps, but a proven and effective smokescreen which required a continued Soviet presence at international conferences - mostly boring Geneva, where Litvinov indulged himself spinning out the empty hours in the evenings watching Westerns at the cinema.[140]
Fear of France eclipses the real danger
France was, of course, the power most set against disarmament, haunted by fear of a German revival. But it was also an imperial power overseas of some magnitude, and lines of communication were stretched to the limit. Since the 1920s, when it led in the losses from nationalisation by the Bolsheviks of all private property in Russia, France had chafed at irksome but containable Comintern support for troublesome tribes in North Africa. It had been obliged to follow Britain and Germany in recognising the Soviet regime. Sentiment hardened, however, when, in the spring of 1930, a nationalist revolt of major proportions took hold in Indochina, in which the young Ho Chi Minh's Communist group came to play a role disproportionate to its minuscule size. Paris, on very little evidence but the principle of cui bono, immediately blamed
Moscow and launched a European-wide campaign to renew the economic blockade of Russia ended by the British in March 1921.[141]
In the bleak circumstances of the Great Depression, with industrialised powers now looking anxiously to capture the few lucrative markets that remained and with the Russians favouring Germany, Sweden, Italy, Britain and the United States with sizeable orders for capital goods, the French stood alone (except for its powerless little allies along the Danube who competed with Moscow on the falling world grain market). Yet, because the Russians still lacked an efficient foreign intelligence service, French hostility came to be magnified out of all proportion to its true effectiveness. And a further factor intervened to compound Soviet anxieties when, on 18 September 1931, Imperial Japan launched its occupation of Manchuria, overran Soviet-owned railroads and raced to the Soviet border with a view to another excursion at Russian expense. Word soon leaked to the press that the French expressed the wish to the Japanese that they now go north (to Russia) rather than south (to Indochina). The Japanese also reinforced existing military and intelligence links with Finland, Poland and Afghanistan, in an attempt at encirclement of the USSR. Soviet efforts to counteract this met stiff resistance in Washington, where the Republican administration under Hoover stubbornly sought recompense for property appropriated by Lenin in 1918 and had no incentive to appease the Russians while they bought US manufactures anyway. And the British, economically holed beneath the waterline and with a navy of doubtful morale, shied away from confrontation with warlike Japan. Worse still, the Red Army in the Far East deterred no one, a fleet had yet to be put together and the single-tracked Trans-Siberian Railway gave little promise of rapid reinforcement in time of war. The need to rearm speedily in the East placed a new burden on a strained economy and the need to stockpile food for war in Siberia further exacerbated the acute shortage of grain that had opened up with famine in the summer of 1932.18
Rather than risk allowing the KPD to launch an abortive revolution in Germany, which was sure to fail if merely for the fact that the stooges Stalin had emplaced were better known for unthinking obedience than strategic initiative, Stalin instead chose to encourage German nationalism as the best means of distracting the French. Hitler was seen here, as elsewhere in Europe, to be just another German nationalist. No attempt was therefore made to curb the natural antipathy of the KPD towards long resented 'social Fascists' (the socialists of the SPD), whereas any attempt to open a channel towards them in the name of a still greater threat (the Nazis) was sat upon firmly.[142] The Comintern thus resumed its role as a passive conveyor belt for the furthering of Soviet state interests - as interpreted by Stalin and, in this instance and every other with respect to German matters, by his closest colleague, chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and overseer of the Comintern, the dour and taciturn Viacheslav Molotov.
139
16 See Jonathan Haslam,