The Soviets Abroad

Throughout its existence, the Soviet Union played the role of both liberator and oppressor.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they didn’t give much thought to the foreign policy their new state would follow. Lenin admitted as much in 1921: “Before the Revolution and even after it, we thought: if not immediately then in the worst case scenario very soon, the revolution would win in other more developed countries from a capitalist point of view; if this did not occur, we would have to succumb.”

By then, the leader was forced to concede that “the movement has not been as linear as we expected.” The Bolsheviks had managed to defeat their opponents in a bloody civil war, seeing off interventions by several foreign powers, and their position looked secure for the time being. Yet European revolution had not materialized — the Soviet Union would now have to survive in a world of hostile capitalist states for a period whose length nobody could foresee.

This unexpected scenario posed a dilemma for the Bolsheviks. On the one hand, they would have to govern a vast multinational state and set about constructing a socialist economy as best they could; on the other, they had promised to direct a worldwide revolutionary movement, the Communist International (Comintern), from its Moscow headquarters. The Soviet leadership’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of any dilemma made it harder still.

When Stalin won the power struggle after Lenin’s death, and the Bolshevik dictatorship began hardening into the system that we know as Stalinism, he gave priority to socialist construction on the home front, while insisting that there was a perfect harmony between Soviet national interests and the world revolution. In practice this meant subordinating the Comintern to the twists and turns of Soviet foreign policy. In the words of Stalin: “He is an internationalist who is prepared to defend the USSR unreservedly, without hesitations, without conditions.” “Defence of the USSR” was implicitly conflated with the power of the ruling bureaucracy, and of Stalin himself.

The structure of the Comintern allowed its Moscow-based directorate to oust leaders from the various Communist Parties (CPs) if their performance was deemed unsatisfactory. Stalin used this power to ensure that every CP had a leadership team that would do exactly what it was told. The instructions from Moscow were often based on a faulty assessment of local conditions, and sometimes proved to be disastrous, as in China and Germany. The habit of reliance on outside authority drilled into leading Communist cadres was also profoundly debilitating. Party leaders trained to follow orders from afar weren’t likely to make the right call when a sudden political crisis put revolution on the agenda.

Unity Against Fascism

For much of the 1930s, Stalin’s priority was to cultivate a defensive alliance with the capitalist democracies of Western Europe against the threat of Nazi Germany. This led the Comintern to push for broad antifascist coalitions, resulting in the election of Popular Front governments in France and Spain. When the Spanish right staged a coup against the new administration, the popular classes’ reaction snowballed into a revolution without parallel in the interwar period.

In theory, this moment should have been exactly what the Comintern was designed for, but Stalin saw the upheaval as a threat to his alliance policy. The Soviet Union was the only European state willing to assist the Spanish Republic, and threw its weight wholeheartedly behind the most conservative elements on the Republican side. Soviet agents were also dispatched to pursue a murderous vendetta against the POUM, a party of the anti-Stalinist left, casting an ugly shadow over the struggle against Franco. This was all justified in terms of the necessity to win the war, but the Republic was crushed anyway, leaving Europe’s fascist powers triumphant.

A conservative policy in Spain could not even secure the alliance Stalin wanted, as the French and British governments preferred to appease Hitler. Purges of the officer corps had also gravely weakened the Soviet military just as war seemed imminent. In August 1939, Stalin repaid the cynicism of the Munich agreement with interest by signing a nonaggression pact with the Nazi regime. The pact came as a shock to the European cps, whose antifascist line now went against the grain of Soviet policy. The British and French parties tried to walk a tightrope by endorsing Stalin’s agreement while supporting a military struggle against Hitler by their own governments, but Moscow quickly brought them into line: Communists were told to argue that the main responsibility for war lay with Anglo-French imperialism.

The Soviet leader was hoping for a lengthy conflict that would sap Germany’s strength. Instead, the Wehrmacht conquered most of Western Europe in a lightning offensive, and Hitler was free to turn his attention eastwards. In June 1941, a giant invasion force crashed into Soviet territory and penetrated as far as the Moscow suburbs before it was contained. The Soviet government and the Comintern now swung back to the antifascist policy of the 1930s, negotiating a military alliance with Churchill and Roosevelt and organizing resistance movements throughout Europe. After suffering enormous casualties, the Red Army started to roll back its genocidal adversary from 1943 onward, continuing the pursuit all the way to Berlin. By the time Germany surrendered, Soviet power was at its peak, along with that of the Communist movement.

Superpower

Soviet foreign policy would be dominated for the next four decades by its rivalry with the United States. Talk of a Cold War between two “superpowers” obscured the fundamental asymmetry between the two states. The US was already the world’s richest economy before the war began, and its position had only grown stronger in the meantime. There had been no fighting on American soil, and limited battlefield casualties.

The contrasting Soviet experience was later described by John F. Kennedy, in a rare moment of empathy for a US president: “At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including nearly two-thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland — a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.” For the most part, this trauma was shrugged off by American officials, who denied that the Soviet Union could have any legitimate security concerns.

According to the Cold War ideology that soon took root in Western countries, the Soviet Union was hell-bent on expansion and would only be deterred by the threat of overwhelming force. In fact, Stalin’s policy was relatively cautious and pragmatic. His main priority was to secure the USSR against future attacks so that it could set about repairing the damage suffered during the war. That meant keeping a firm grip on the territory occupied by the Red Army in Eastern Europe, but there was no question of launching an aggressive war beyond this sphere of influence. As long as the wartime alliance endured and there was still hope of obtaining US aid for reconstruction, Stalin was even willing to allow some degree of political pluralism in his East European buffer zone. But when the Cold War began in earnest, he ruthlessly imposed Soviet-style regimes on all the satellite states.

This was certainly a crime against democracy and self-determination, but it did not form part of a scheme for world conquest. US military planners found no evidence of any Soviet plan to invade Western Europe in the late 1940s, and concluded that war would be the result of miscalculation if it came about. The main flash point of the early Cold War was Korea, where US and Chinese forces confronted each other directly on the battlefield. Stalin had given Kim Il-sung a green light to invade South Korea in 1950, but only on the understanding that he shouldn’t expect Soviet troops to bail him out if things went wrong — that would be China’s responsibility.

Washington’s Crusade

In order to explain why the Cold War developed in the way that it did, we have to look beyond the stated goal of US policy — to contain Soviet aggression — and recognize that Washington had a much wider ambition: to make a world safe for capitalism in general, and US capitalism in particular. The main threat to this project came from homegrown revolutions, not Soviet military aggression.

Cold War ideology maintained that Soviet power and world revolution were two sides of the same coin: revolutions were made on orders from Moscow, and successful ones would produce new satellite states under its thumb. On both counts this analysis was false. Stalin was deeply ambivalent about the prospects for revolution outside his security zone in Eastern Europe. He had ordered Communist Parties in France, Italy, and Greece to cooperate as traditional elites were restored to power. When the Greek communists took up arms against the monarchist regime in 1946, Stalin gave them lukewarm support, believing their cause to be hopeless.

And when communist-led revolutions did take place after the war, it was in spite of Stalin’s advice, not because of it. The Soviet leader told Chinese and Yugoslav communists to form governments of national unity with their rivals, only to have his instructions disregarded. Having come to power without the help of the Red Army and the NKVD, these new regimes had a life of their own. By 1948, the Yugoslav leader Tito had broken with Stalin after deciding that Soviet arrogance was too much to bear.

At the very outset of the Cold War, this was clear evidence that, even when a revolution was led by Communists trained in the Moscow school, it need not simply result in the extension of Soviet power. But this ideological fantasy was much too valuable for the US ruling class to discard. By presenting every revolutionary movement as a Soviet proxy, they could mobilize support for a global crusade in defense of the established order. Freely elected, non-Communist reformers who threatened US economic interests would be targeted by this crusade as much as Communist insurgents. Such reformers would often have no choice but to ask the Soviet Union for its help against US aggression.

Coexistence and Conflict

After Stalin’s death in 1953, his successors tried to ease tensions with the West. Three years of immensely destructive war in Korea ended in stalemate. The new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev began speaking of “peaceful coexistence” as the framework for international relations, with economic competition between capitalist and communist states replacing violent revolution as the lever for systemic change.

For Moscow, maintaining control over Eastern Europe was challenging enough: troops had to be sent into Hungary to crush an anti-Soviet rebellion in 1956. Khrushchev had no desire to get involved in clashes with the United States or its allies further afield, and would have liked to dial down the arms race so money could be spent on raising living standards instead. But there was one insuperable barrier to long-term coexistence between the superpowers. As long as the Soviet Union continued to support revolutionary movements, the US would never accept it as a normal player in world politics.

The Soviet leaders had inherited this commitment from the early years of the revolution, and could never shrug it off entirely, even if the aid they supplied was selective and opportunistic. Giving up on the idea of “proletarian internationalism” would have meant abandoning the main ideological prop for their occupation of Eastern Europe (and for the multinational Soviet Union itself, which might otherwise look very much like the old, Russian-dominated tsarist empire). Support for revolutionary struggles was also a valuable weapon in the contest for global influence with the United States. The USSR was never in a position to wage full-scale wars on the other side of the world, as the US did in Korea and Vietnam. Beyond its East European protectorates, Moscow relied more on “soft power.” And when the Chinese communists broke with Khrushchev in the early sixties, there was now a rival communist power willing to support Third World revolutions if the Soviet Union turned its back on them.

Third World in Revolt

With politics in Europe seemingly frozen, the main theater for superpower competition during the 1960s and ’70s lay in the postcolonial states of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Stalin had shown little interest in the non- European world — he once described the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh as a “communist troglodyte” — but his successors cast their net wider in search of allies. The goal of Soviet policy in the Third World was by no means to promote revolution across the board. On the principle that an established government in the hand was worth any number of communist guerrillas in the bush, Moscow often struck up warm relations with nationalist regimes that were staunchly anticommunist at home. This helped scupper a once-powerful Arab communist movement: in Egypt, communists dissolved their organization to join Nasser’s Arab Socialist Union; in Iraq and Syria, they were dragooned into subordinate alliances with the ruling Ba’athists.

From Europe to Latin America, Moscow-aligned Communist parties generally moved away from promoting revolution in favor of constitutional politics. One of the main exceptions was in Vietnam, where the local Communist leadership decided to launch a revolutionary war against the US client state in the south. The Vietnamese Communists held their Soviet and Chinese allies responsible for pressuring them to sign a compromise peace deal in the 1950s; they kept their own counsel thereafter, soliciting military aid from Moscow and Peking alike but allowing neither to determine war strategy. Without Soviet backing, the Vietnamese Communists probably could not have held their own against the US invasion, but that assistance was always of secondary importance: the main fuel propelling the revolution came from inside Vietnam.

If Soviet policy led Communists in the Middle East to prostrate themselves before nationalism, elsewhere its effect was to pull nationalists towards communism. The most important example of this phenomenon was Cuba. Fidel Castro and his allies took power in 1959 with a program of social reform that soon put them at odds with the United States, and had little choice but to reach out to Moscow for support against the threat of invasion. As Soviet economic aid flooded in, Castro merged his organization with the Cuban Communist Party and declared his allegiance to Soviet-style Marxism.

“Krushyovka” apartment building in Germany.

Khrushchev welcomed the Cuban Revolution, which gave his country an unexpected ally on Washington’s doorstep. But the Soviet leadership found Castro to be a troublesome protege. He accused them of conservative immobility and tried to foment revolutions throughout Africa and Latin America. In the late 1960s, relations between Moscow and Havana were so poor that many expected an open breach. Castro later settled down as a more predictable Soviet client, but his government kept looking for opportunities to disrupt the status quo in world politics, when Moscow would have preferred to let sleeping dogs lie.

The Cuban experience was later repeated in a number of countries where radical nationalists came to power, from Mozambique to South Yemen. Soviet economic and military assistance often played a crucial part in helping these revolutions survive in the face of pressure from the US and its allies, and enabled them to raise living standards in some of the world’s poorest countries. But the turn to Moscow usually meant importing the pathologies of the original Soviet model, based on a one-party state and a rigid, centrally planned economy. Only in Nicaragua did a group of Marxist revolutionaries break with this pattern and construct a model of socialism based on democratic pluralism.

Indian Summer

In the late 1970s, there was much talk in Washington of a worldwide Soviet offensive behind all of the recent setbacks for US foreign policy. This argument was used by Ronald Reagan and his New Right backers to justify a massive military buildup and a spate of Third World interventions that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. It led to a period of heightened tension between the two blocs and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

In truth, most of the unwelcome (from Washington’s perspective) developments of the period had little or nothing to do with the USSR. Robert White, the US ambassador to El Salvador who was cashiered by Reagan, explained to his bosses that the revolutionary movements in Central America were fueled, not by Cuban or Soviet money, but by “decades of oppression and a studied refusal on the part of the elite to make any concessions to the masses.” The Marxist-Leninist who deserved most credit for the liberation of Portuguese Africa was the Guinean leader Amílcar Cabral, not Leonid Brezhnev. And the most traumatic experience of all for US public opinion, the Iranian Revolution, was led by Islamic fundamentalists who were equally hostile to both superpowers.

Brezhnev and his colleagues naturally welcomed these setbacks for their rival, which came as a timely distraction from the problems they faced closer to home. The Soviet economy was slowing down, an aging leadership had no idea how to get it moving again, and Moscow had effectively abandoned any hope of winning consent for Communist rule in Eastern Europe after sending in troops to crush a reform experiment in Czechoslovakia. Even the cps of Western Europe had started to distance themselves from the USSR. Any relief from this depressing vista could only delight the Soviet leadership. But for the most part, they were spectators observing the new wave of Third World revolutions and hoping to take advantage where they could.

There were three notable exceptions to this rule. In Angola, the left-wing nationalists who had taken power after decolonization in 1975 were threatened by rival CIA-backed movements, supported in the field by South Africa and Zaire. Fidel Castro decided to send a Cuban task force to beat back the South African invasion, and the Soviet navy helped ferry them across the Atlantic. This enraged the foreign policy elite in Washington, whose leading figures had expected to get rid of Agostinho Neto’s MPLA as easily as they had dealt with Patrice Lumumba in the Congo a decade earlier. Thwarted in their bid to impose Jonas Savimbi as the Mobutu of Angola, they gave enough support to his UNITA force to allow it to wreak a decade of havoc in the country.

Another large-scale Soviet and Cuban intervention in Africa had much less admirable results. Support for the military junta of Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia helped it repel a US-backed Somali invasion, but also kept one of Africa’s most brutal regimes in power as it massacred the civilian left and crushed the Eritrean independence movement (ironically led by pro-Soviet Marxists, who eventually disposed of Mengistu, in partnership with their Tigrayan allies, after his lifeline from Moscow was cut in the early nineties).

A Soviet Vietnam

But the most disastrous Soviet adventure was in Afghanistan. The Afghan Communists had seized power in a 1978 military coup and tried to impose radical reforms despite having a minuscule base of support. Facing violent opposition, they responded with mass executions, and also began purging their own cadres. At first the Soviet leadership rejected pleas for military assistance. As the KGB boss Yuri Andropov remarked in March 1979: “To deploy our troops would mean to wage war against the people, to crush the people, to shoot at the people. We will look like aggressors, and we cannot permit that to occur.”

But within months, as the regime looked set to collapse, a full-scale Soviet invasion began: the first time troops had been deployed outside the East European buffer zone since the Cold War began. The Afghan leader Hafizullah Amin, a thuggish figure disliked intensely by Soviet officials, was summarily executed and replaced by Babrak Karmal, who had been given strict orders to broaden the base of his government and moderate its policies. Whatever benefits this reorientation might have brought to Karmal were more than cancelled out by the stigma of being seen as a Soviet puppet.

Initially the intervention was meant to last for a few months, but the Afghan rebels had ideal terrain on which to fight and backing from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. The Soviet Union found itself fighting an unwinnable war, no matter how many bombs it dropped. US officials could hardly believe their luck. Though the Soviet invasion was the product of desperation, not overconfidence, it supplied the ideal backdrop for Reagan’s election campaign and the global offensive that followed. As CIA chief Bill Casey gleefully observed: “Here is the beauty of the Afghan operation. Usually it looks like the big bad Americans are beating up on the natives. Afghanistan is just the reverse. The Russians are beating up on the little guys.”

Withdrawal

When Mikhail Gorbachev became the new Soviet leader in 1985, he wanted to end the war in Afghanistan and scale back the nuclear arms race, a crippling burden on the Soviet economy. Gorbachev soon developed this foreign policy turn into a blueprint for a new world order based on cooperation and universal human values. This was certainly an attractive vision, which did much to explain his soaring popularity outside the USSR. But Washington had no interest in playing along.

At one of his summit meetings with Reagan, Gorbachev proposed a joint statement affirming that “equality of all states, noninterference in internal affairs and freedom of sociopolitical choice must be recognized as the inalienable and mandatory standards of international relations.” It was rejected out of hand by Reagan’s team of advisers. US demands for Soviet cooperation in solving regional conflicts in practice meant that Washington would be given a free hand to impose its will on countries like El Salvador and Nicaragua by force.

The end of the Cold War proved to be as uneven as its prosecution. Gorbachev followed through on his rhetoric, allowing the East European satellite regimes to fall in 1989 after promising not to repeat the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. But there would be no US withdrawal from Latin America to match the Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe. Desperate to normalize relations with the West, Gorbachev was prepared to make sweeping concessions which meant abandoning Moscow’s role as revolutionary sponsor for good.

Angola was a notable exception. As the Cold War fizzled out, the apartheid regime in South Africa geared up for an all-out offensive to oust the MPLA for good. Without consulting Moscow in advance, Castro again dispatched a huge military force that inflicted a crushing defeat on the South Africans — a crucial turning point in the demise of white supremacy across the region, and one that was achieved in spite of Reagan’s triumphalism and Gorbachev’s placations.

It is unlikely that the fortunes of socialism will ever again be identified with a single country in the way they were with the Soviet Union. However, the idea of a simultaneous worldwide revolution is clearly utopian — power will be taken one state at a time, or not at all. International solidarity is vital, but the interests of political forces in different countries and continents will inevitably come into conflict. The best way to manage the ensuing tensions will be to acknowledge their existence and resolve them through negotiation, without subordinating an international movement to the interests of one state. The demise of the Soviet Union has posed challenges for anticapitalist struggle around the world, but the absence of a single coordinating center is not one of them.