8. Foreign Policy and the Army¶
Core Argument¶
In the decade following the October Revolution, the Soviet bureaucracy’s degeneration fundamentally transformed foreign policy from an instrument of world revolution into a conservative defence of the status quo. The 1924 doctrine of “socialism in one country” signalled this shift, while the Communist International was systematically subordinated to serve Soviet diplomatic ends. This represented a profound historical betrayal: the Soviet state had survived its first years only through international proletarian support—German and Austro-Hungarian revolutions ended Brest-Litovsk, French sailors mutinied, British workers forced troop withdrawals, and European protests prevented Entente aid to Poland in 1920. Early Bolshevik leaders never treated bourgeois treaty partners as “friends of peace” nor asked communists to support them; Lenin proposed institutionalising Chicherin for suggesting democratic concessions. The 1919 party programme denounced pacifist illusions—the League of Nations, disarmament, arbitration—as deceptions to disarm the proletariat. The bureaucracy now pursues “neutralisation” of the bourgeoisie, entering the League of Nations and signing the Franco-Soviet treaty, which gives France unconditional obligations while conditioning French help on British and Italian agreement.
Stalin’s March 1936 interview with Roy Howard stands as a precious document of bureaucratic blindness. Stalin claimed the friends of peace are growing stronger and rely on the League of Nations, lacking all realism: imperialist states do not divide into friends and enemies of peace. The Third International now stands under the banner of the League of Nations, as does the Second International. Stalin told Howard the Soviet Union never had plans for world revolution, calling the idea a “tragi-comic misunderstanding”—a statement that contradicts the unannulled 1918 decree defining the Red Army as support for socialist revolutions in Europe.
The army shared the regime’s degeneration. By 1935, a two-fold revolution occurred: the abolition of the territorial militia system, which had reached 74 percent of the army, and the restoration of officers’ ranks from lieutenant to marshal. The regime simultaneously restored the Cossack troops—the tsar’s most conservative cavalry—granting them privileges. These reforms bind officers to the ruling circles at the cost of weakening the army’s moral bonds. Military defeat for the USSR is inevitable if war remains purely military, given imperialism’s technical superiority. Without revolution in the West, the social bases of the USSR would be crushed in either defeat or victory. The fate of the Soviet Union will be decided on the map of the class struggle, not general staff maps. Only the European proletariat can protect it from destruction; the task is not defending the status quo but the revolutionary abolition of boundaries and a socialist United States of Europe.