Jerzy Niezbrzycki

The rationale and objectives of Soviet foreign policy

I.

The moves of Soviet foreign policy in the last few months, the position taken by Soviet diplomacy at the Paris Conference in New York (UNO) and more recently at the Moscow Conference, the withdrawal of the Bolsheviks from Persia and partly from China, and especially Stalin’s famous statements, have provoked an enormous amount of commentary and, obviously to the Soviets’ credit, have confused international opinion.

Inclined to optimism and lingering in the sphere of wishful thinking, this opinion, especially that of the peaceful democratic states, is keen to see in these moves evidence of the weakness of the Soviet Union, especially its economic weakness, Russia’s renunciation of further political aggression and its desire to stabilise itself within the limits of the existing world division.

An analysis of the situation shows that such conclusions would be premature, to say the least. First of all, let us concretise the facts.

Beginning in September 1946, the Soviet Union reveals the following tendencies in its foreign policy:

1. the withdrawal of tactical offensives, either already advanced, such as in Iran, or just initiated, such as in Turkey, Greece, China, Trieste, beyond the line recognised by the agreements to date (of Crimea, of Potsdam, and of Moscow);

2. demonstrating, both through external and internal propaganda, its peaceful position and the role of the USSR as an international peacemaker;

3. promoting the idea of universal disarmament and declaring the most far-reaching readiness for its own disarmament;

4. presenting the economic potential of the Soviets as very weakened and therefore incapable of the war effort;

5. nevertheless keeping world diplomacy under constant tension and threat (e.g., the Spitsbergen affair).

In the field of their external unofficial and indirect policy, carried out by political agents or by Communist national parties, the Bolsheviks either provoke, orchestrate directly, or are interested:

1. in breaking up the team of the United States and Great Britain, and in counteracting attempts at international agreements outside the USSR as well as against any “blocs” in general;

2. in weakening the political, social and economic potential of the USA and UK by intensifying propaganda, subversion, sabotage and diversionary action, and in deepening class and social contradictions within the capitalist countries, in complicating economic difficulties and preventing economic regeneration and stabilisation within these countries;

3. in spreading defeatist, pessimistic and nihilistic ideas; in undermining constructive ideas such as Catholicism, socialism, Marxian revisionism, the co-operative movement, and in counteracting their revival, in counteracting state or national consolidation tendencies, in depreciating any political authority not wholly subservient to the supremacy of Soviet policy;

4. in the intensification of the action of the “democratic front” in all the countries of Europe and America, and in the gradual coming to power of the Communist parties in France, Italy, and in the strengthening of the influence of the Communist parties in the Scandinavian countries;

5. in blowing up political centres of inflammation such as in Spain;

6. in strengthening its influence in the satellites, the occupied countries, in deepening the processes of Sovietisation of these territories, of which the “elections” in Poland were a classic example;

7. in provoking, intensifying nationality and liberation movements among Arab and Iranian peoples, in India, Indochina, Africa, and in promoting “anti-imperialist” sentiments among colonial and semi-colonial peoples, especially in China;

8. in the promotion of Soviet statehood as the only agent of “true and lasting international peace” and of the Stalinist system as a system of already “realised socialism”;

9. in avoiding a final settlement of the German question.

II.

In the field of their own internal policy, the Bolsheviks are consistently striving to implement the Fourth Five-Year Plan, wholly and utterly geared towards militarising the Soviet Union and bringing the coutry to the state of the strongest war potential in the world. In addition, they are overcoming the internal difficulties revealed after the war, aiming not only to regenerate the total system of the 1939-1941 period, but also to make up for the forced period of liberalism of the wartime period in this area.

As far as Moscow’s policy towards the countries already occupied by it was concerned, the effort to bind these countries as closely as possible to the Soviet Union into a single integral economic and political unit continued to be connoted.

The Soviet assessment of the international situation, especially of the potentials of the great powers, boils down to the fact that the so-called “capitalist environment” is no longer in a position to mount preventive military action against the Soviet Union without the Soviets clearly provoking it. Moscow believes, besides, that the “capitalist world” is only just entering a period of economic, social and political difficulties and complications. The intensity of this crisis, in its view, will only reach its maximum at the turn of 1947-48, hence time is playing against this world.

For during this period, systemic problems in capitalist regimes will become more and more difficult, authority increasingly unstable. Consequently, states will find it increasingly difficult to make strong and powerful decisions. In the Kremlin’s view, a general ideological crisis is now deepening throughout the world, giving rise to an overgrowth of nihilism and pessimism. They are depreciating previous moral and ideological values and magnifying anarchy and inertia.

The present internal Soviet situation is characterised by a weakening of the total system under the influence of the war, and above all by a loosening of party discipline, a lowering of the level and doctrinal homogeneity due to the opportunist expansion of the party during the war, the penetration into the party of either revisionist currents towards idealism or democracy, or reactionary, nationalist currents, and this also under the influence of opportunist nationalist slogans put forward during the war. This is accompanied by the weakening of the bureaucratic apparatus, especially the administrative apparatus, its corruption and demoralisation, and the weakening of the party’s influence on this apparatus. In society itself, what is striking is the spread and deepening of liberal and democratic currents among the Soviet intelligentsia and the so-called professional “cadres”, especially among writers, journalists, art workers, professors, teachers, professional and office intelligentsia. There is also undoubtedly a weakening of discipline and a reduction in productivity among the masses of workers, because of exhaustion, liberal influences, the tendency to achieve better working conditions, etc. Oppositional sentiments, in a sense revisionist, are finally spreading among the peasantry, and are aimed at switching the system of totalitarian state collectivisation to a co-operative one, and at increasing the extent of the elements of private property. Another element in the Russian situation is the general economic devastation and weakening of the country as a whole.

Moscow still regards the German question as a key issue in Europe, but it has at the moment neither a clear and decisive programme nor concrete possibilities and means in this section. It is therefore refraining from deepening its communist influence, limiting itself for the time being to treating the issue solely from the point of view of conjunctural state interests.

In this respect the official Soviet materials are relatively accurate and sufficiently illustrate the state of affairs. However, the economic situation will only gain its proper expression if it is considered against the background of the phenomena of the weakening of the totalitarian system and, moreover, against the background of the tasks set by the Kremlin for the whole country in terms of strengthening the war potential while neglecting the needs of the population.

The Soviet search for the most modern weapons and means of destruction has been greatly advanced in recent months, and in this connection the political-military leadership has proceeded to work out a new plan for the political-military aggression of the Soviet Union using these means, which in itself requires some time.

Against the backdrop of the Kremlin’s understanding of the international situation, its own internal difficulties ascertained, and its prospects for strengthening its own power in the near future, Soviet policy has been shifted towards the “peacefulness” now observed.

III.

This “peacekeeping” is played out with due regard for the element of time, so that the Soviet state has the time necessary for the complete regeneration of the totalitarian system by strengthening the party and the bureaucratic apparatus, weeding out liberal, destructive or opportunist tendencies and reducing the intelligentsia and the working masses to an exclusively executive role. In addition, the aim is to intensify work discipline throughout the state apparatus and in all branches of industry and production, and to strengthen the economic potential of the state, primarily in a military direction, through the implementation of the Fourth Five-Year Plan, the further improvement of war technology in the field of modern weapons and modern tools of death, and the complete reorganisation of the rear from a military point of view, so that the capitalised area of the Soviet Union can be a flexible base in the event of a war effort. The conversion of war and organisational doctrine from the previous, operating with large masses, to a new offensive doctrine par excellence, operating with small armies equipped with improved war technology, also requires some time1.

The complete destruction of all independent constructional, political, social, and economic possibilities in the occupied countries and peoples, and the binding of these countries already definitively to the Soviet Union as the base of a single, great, universal, militarised total state, is a further point of Moscow’s peace policy. “Peacefulness” should, according to the Kremlin’s tendency, ensure to Soviet policy such complete isolation not only for the Soviet Union proper, but also for the occupied zone, as is necessary to bring the whole state to the totalitarian ideal.

In particular, all precedents relating to the so-called “threat to the Soviet Union by the capitalist environment” are being used inside the Soviet Union for these totalitarian purposes. Churchill’s speeches and, more recently, the new course of US policy, are regarded by Moscow policy as such precedents.

The time needed for the totalization and internal regeneration of the state is clearly intended by Soviet policy to be used in the direction of simultaneously weakening the “environment” by deepening contradictions between individual states and nations, by spreading international hatred and distrust, by deepening social and economic conflicts, by decomposing political parties, especially among the intelligentsia and in the trade unions, and by spreading disbelief in its own strength while promoting the “moral and political strength” of the Soviet Union.

IV.

A synthesis of Soviet policy can thus be formulated as follows: after the end of the war with Germany and Japan, the Soviet Union stood entirely on the offensive revolutionary doctrine of Stalinism and hence considers itself to be in conflict with the capitalist environment. This conflict, according to Soviet political doctrine, can only cease in the event of the final liquidation of the capitalist environment, either through internal transformations (revolutions) or through international war. The policy of the Soviet Union aims at arming its own state with means and tools corresponding to both these eventualities.

For conjunctural reasons, Soviet policy is at this time renouncing direct state aggression even at the cost of compromising its authority (e.g., the Azerbaijan affair). Such a policy is supposed to inspire a certain confidence of other countries in Russia as a partner and sympathy in the liberal and radical strata of “capitalist” societies. In the Soviet masses, on the other hand, it is supposed to cancel all hopes of an immediate war conflict between the Soviet Union and the capitalist environment, a conflict which would allow these masses to continue, and which had already begun during the past war, to win for themselves social and civil rights.

By abandoning direct aggression for the time being, the Soviet Union is activating all the more its policy of indirect aggression. The idea of a gradual unfolding of those objects of Soviet aggression which cannot be temporarily achieved by direct aggression is clearly outlined in this episode. In particular, the plan of temporary Soviet expansion is clearly arranged around three such objects:

1. Germany, by encircling the Reich from the Mediterranean through Italy and France and from the Baltic and North Sea through the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands;

2. Turkey, Iran and India by encircling the Iran-Iraq oil basin complex, by subduing or dismembering India, the Arab nations and the eastern Mediterranean through direct or indirect means;

3. Japan and China.

No less fundamental is the policy of indirect aggression against the countries of the Americas, especially the diversionary work, both political and social, within South America.

Moscow is abandoning direct aggression for the time being and avoiding open warfare. Until such time as it considers itself ready for a further offensive, it will nevertheless attempt to complicate political relations between the great “capitalist” powers and the satellites it has occupied, which for the time being are not excluded from the Soviet Union, such as above all Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, Mongolia and Manchuria. It seeks by this means to create an easily inflamed isolation belt between the Soviet Union and the “capitalist environment”.

Translating the above conclusions into Bolshevik political vocabulary, they can be formulated as follows:

The USSR is currently preparing for the final clash and liquidation of the “capitalist environment”, on the assumption that this inevitably involves a war conflict. Accordingly, Soviet foreign policy is not guided by slogans of stagnant peace but is an integral part of the strategic concept of world revolution, based on an organised total state base.

Hence, the basis of today’s Soviet internal policy is exclusively totalitarian militarism, and Soviet foreign policy is the organisation and preparation of the terrain of the “capitalist environment” for an effective and unexpected blow from Moscow with all the material and moral force organised within the Soviet state.

A detailed analysis of both the internal Soviet potential and the recent Soviet political moves shows that the strength of the Soviet state still lies primarily in the essence and system of organisation of political and police power. This system has been greatly strained during the war years. All attempts to limit the expansion of Soviet statehood solely by externally limiting the sphere of this expansion without reaching out to the internal elements that make up the whole of Soviet potential – cannot yield positive results in the long run.

Przesłanki i cele sowieckiej polityki zagranicznej [The Rationale and Objectives of Soviet Foreign Policy], „Sprawy Międzynarodowe” [International Affairs] (Londyn) 1947, issue 1, p. 27-32.