Zdzisław Stahl

Soviet policy after the defeat of the “Axis”

To understand clearly and relevantly today’s international position, created after the military defeat of the Axis states, requires an awareness in the first instance of the aspirations, possibilities, and necessities of Soviet policy. To understand Soviet policy, in turn, it is necessary to refer to its basic assumptions, from which – in this superpower of classical totalism – everything consistently and necessarily flows. For between the dogmas of party ideology, the fanaticism of which permeates the Soviet ruling stratum, and the guidelines of Kremlin policy, there is a close interplay, the violation of which would inevitably threaten the collapse of the entire system and, subsequently, of the Soviet empire. This interplay also has its consequences abroad, for party ideology also guides and holds in check that vitally important factor of Soviet power and the vanguard of Bolshevik international expansion which the communist party creates in every country.

Among the basic tenets of the ideology of Bolshevism, created and handed down in Lenin’s will, is the thesis that two regimes cannot coexist side by side on the globe: the so-called capitalist and communist. There is an abyss between them, and a struggle must take place which will lead to the decisive victory of one of them. Either the Soviet Union will bring about, through revolutions or by any other means, the overthrow in the other countries of the world of the system in Russia called “capitalist”, or – the system created by the Communist Party on Russian territory must collapse. This principle had to imbue Bolshevism and Soviet policy with a spirit of necessary imperialism, a dynamic of uninterrupted push outwards, all over the world.

The Soviet system, i.e., a huge state, supplemented by offshoots of communist parties operating in all countries, thus became an organism calculated to grow and expand territorially, incapable of living in a limited area without this developmental process. The Bolshevik ideology, in turn, came forward first in the current period of history with the thesis that a single regime – that is, in Moscow’s terms, communist – must prevail on the globe.

It must be said that Lenin, with this thesis of his, summarised above, has become much more relevant today than he was twenty-plus years ago when he formulated it. Wendell Willkie1, a recently deceased American politician, was the author of a book entitled One World, and the literature proclaiming this ideal is constantly growing. President Truman2 of the United States declared repeatedly that one and the same “way of life” should prevail throughout the world, and the development of technology crowned by the atomic bomb gives this ideal an increasingly concrete, military, and political character. For truly “one” is a world in which, from any point of it, any other point of it can be attacked every day and hour with the terrible blow of the atomic bomb. And since a sixth of the globe is in possession of the Leninist doctrine of the necessity of the revolutionary and ruthless destruction of the regimes of the rest of the world, then – when the achievements of technology make it possible to undertake a gigantic conquest – it is no wonder that the idea of “one world” has also acquired the right of citizenship among the peoples of democratic and Christian civilisation, called capitalist by Moscow. This is what their simple defensive instinct demands.

The Leninist goal of world revolution and the overthrow of the anti-communist system could not, of course, according to Soviet notions, be fulfilled at once. Bolshevism had its theory of the realisation of this goal from the beginning. According to Lenin – who was an excellent expert on the Russian soul and on the other Eurasian peoples, while he was fundamentally mistaken in his predictions concerning the peoples of Christian civilisation – a universal revolution and the reign of the dictatorship of the proletariat should already have taken place because of the previous world war. In fact, this did not happen either before Lenin’s death, which occurred in 1924, nor did it happen afterwards.

The Soviet Union, having failed to achieve this goal directly, closed itself within its borders and isolated itself from the rest of the world, operating outside the Chinese wall of those borders only through communist parties centrally directed from Moscow. The rationale of Soviet policy at this stage became that of “capitalist encirclement”. In order to preserve its internal system during this period, while the “capitalist” system still prevailed all around, the Soviet Union adopted the principle of absolute seclusion from the rest of the world politically, economically, culturally and ideologically, that is, in all areas of human life. Thus isolated, the USSR resolved to create by its own efforts a self-sufficient social system, independent of foreign countries and in possession of as much military power as possible. The expression of this aspiration became the “quinquennia”, i.e., the stages of building up an enormous war machine, at the expense of the freedom and well-being of the peoples of the Soviet Union. These great sacrifices were enforced by terror on the one hand, while on the other, the broad masses of Soviet citizens were assured that this was a transitional period, dictated by the “capitalist encirclement”, after the breaking of which would come a time of prosperity and universal happiness. Complementing these assumptions was the parallel conviction – also based on Lenin’s theory – that the existence of “capitalist” states must lead to war and that inevitable war – if not the previous, then the next – would pave the way for world revolution.

Moscow’s political tactics throughout the period between the two world wars flowed strictly from the theoretical assumptions summarised above and manifested themselves most clearly on the eve of the 1939 war. War between the Western powers, divided at that time into two opposing camps, democracy v. the Axis states, was the phenomenon most anticipated and indirectly prepared for by the Soviets. The situation in August 1939 provided Moscow with an opportunity for direct action. The non-aggression pact between Germany and Russia of August 1939 enabled Hitler to attack Poland and unleash the Second World War. In Moscow, it was felt that the long-awaited hour of war between the Western states had arrived, which the Soviets would watch neutrally until the possible bleeding out of both adversaries would allow for an easy final intervention and create the atmosphere for a world revolution.

Optimism proved to be exaggerated. The USSR had to break its neutrality in Europe and– thanks to Germany’s aggression after the rapid defeat of France – from the west did so too early, whereas in the Far East it gained the courage to break its neutrality and intervene against Japan too late. The situation which occurred after the break-up of the Axis states as a result of the Second World War undoubtedly did not correspond to Moscow’s doctrines, predictions and hopes.

It should be considered from the Soviet point of view in more detail.

Soviet Russia today is by no means an island of military strength, state power and prosperity, amidst a sea of states of the rest of the world devastated and bleeding in reciprocal battles, bickering and paralysing each other, ripe after experiencing internal revolution, as the communist party theory predicted. On the contrary, because of the Second World War, the Soviets are obviously – despite the achieved but inconclusive territorial gains – further away from their fundamental goal of breaking the “capitalist encirclement” and in a worse international position than in 1939.

Firstly, because they emerged from the war more devastated, militarily weaker, especially technically and economically, than the democratic powers, and secondly and above all because they no longer face blocs of states incapacitating each other, but as a single and increasingly cohesive camp of Christian and democratic nations led by the great Anglo-Saxon nations. The “capitalist encirclement” is therefore today both more direct (the boundaries of the spheres of influence and at the same time of military occupation extend from Europe via the Middle East to the Far East), and – most importantly – represented by a much more homogenous factor than in the period before the last war, when, apart from Poland and the smaller states, the Axis powers, Germany and Japan, stood opposite the great democracies and kept them separated them from the USSR. Today, this divisor is a group of states bound together by the strong clasp of the ever-deepening interaction between Great Britain and the United States. At the same time, the pinnacle as well as the symbol of the technical superiority of the camp of democracy became the secret of the atomic bomb, the instrument of control over the “one world” of the future.

On the plane of the USSR’s superpower territorial aims, the outcome of the war gave it conquests that were great, but by no means essential or decisive, especially under the conditions of today’s warfare technology. The capture of the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and half of Germany gave the Soviets a strong position in Europe, but neither decisive nor lasting. It has not given them dominion over Europe, namely for the main reason that they do not have the whole of Germany, and the dismemberment of that nation must be regarded by all as a temporary phenomenon, a half-way settlement and a bone of contention between the two sides. On the most important, southern direction of Russian expansion, aiming to go out to the warm seas via the Dardanelles, into the Persian Gulf, and to consolidate itself in the Middle East. The USSR had merely achieved the starting points for further action by gaining control of the Balkans and a military footing in northern Iran. In the Far East, Soviet achievements are the most modest and dubious. Manchuria is to be Chinese and Korea independent, and only communist Chinese troops would achieve for Moscow some settlement desirable, but against officially concluded agreements.

The overall balance of Soviet territorial achievements in this war can therefore be characterised from the Soviet point of view as partial, and from the point of view of relations between the Soviet Union and the great democracies as a long line of sweltering, fiery disputes as well as already burning, as in China, sources of new conflicts. The co-administration of Germany planned at Potsdam came to nothing and turned into a deepening separation of the existing zones of occupation. In the Balkans, there is a diplomatic struggle over the size and degree of dependence of the Balkan nations on Moscow. In the Middle East there is some such insistent push by the Soviet Union from the north that Minister Bevin3 recently mentioned in the House of Commons the danger of cutting through the British Empire and grabbing England by the throat. In the Far East, there is no agreement on control of occupied Japan and increasingly violent fighting is taking place between Chinese communist troops and Chiang Kai-shek’s National Army4, aided by the United States.

Soviet Russia’s territorial gains in this war, which we have described as partial and insufficient for the purposes of Soviet imperialism, are nevertheless, on the other hand, a clear violation of the principles of the Atlantic Charter, also signed by the USSR and binding on all the nations of the anti-German coalition. Soviet imperialism was, however, conscientiously concealed during this war, especially when the Soviets were threatened by Germany, and Soviet propaganda told the democratic states that the old worldly aspirations of Bolshevism had long been laid to rest. Democratic governments had for a long time manifested confidence in these assurances from Moscow, but in recent months there has been a fundamental change in this respect. The most glaring expression of this change is the reluctance to share the secret of the atomic bomb with Russia and the characteristic condition recently formulated by Prime Minister Attlee5 during the meeting in Washington for “the Soviets to make a detailed statement of their ultimate claims which they consider indispensable to guarantee their security”. The tactics of the democratic powers regarding the atomic bomb, and the demand for a definitive statement as to the limits of intended Soviet expansion, indicate that the Anglo-Saxon nations had already realised the purely imperialist character of Soviet policy.

Is Moscow willing and able to give a satisfactory answer to the question formulated by the British Prime Minister? The answer must be sought in the assumptions of Leninism and in the experience of the twenty five-year history of the Soviet Union.

Soviet policy has essentially only two alternatives before it: to seclude itself from the rest of the world, close itself within the confines of the Chinese wall of isolation and begin a new five-year period of armaments against the “capitalist encirclement”, as Kalinin recently announced, or to consider the current period already as an opportunity to break this “capitalist encirclement”. The third path proposed to Moscow, that of an open-door policy, mutual arms and industrial control and a significant democratisation of the system, combined with the provision to the Soviets, necessary to them, of economic assistance, is regarded by the present rulers of the USSR as a voluntary and peaceful liquidation of the Soviet system, probably not without justification.

Moscow is at a dangerous crossroads in its history and has probably not yet made up its mind, as demonstrated by Stalin’s silence. The Soviet government is being pushed towards immediate further expansion by arguably younger and military elements, the difficulties of a multimillion-strong army with relaxed discipline and, finally, the fear of the enormous, arguably unrepeatable effort of a new policy of self-sufficiency and quinquennial policy. Stopping the unleashed machine of Bolshevik imperialism could end in an internal collapse and a loss of faith in the reality of the aims of the universal revolution, once again postponed. When the moment of victory of the “one world” arrives, and when the materialist dialectic instructs the followers of Leninism-Stalinism that things cannot stand still, it could well be that the world of Christian and democratic nations, which is on the offensive, will be left victorious on the field.

But the decision to immediately march further forward is also hard and difficult. Spiritual and material strength may be lacking.