Date: Sun, 17 Nov 1996 09:15:01 -0500 (EST) From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena) Subject: M-I: Re: Lenin's Foreign Policy Chris Burford is unable to locate Roxanne Gardner's original post because it is one in a series of private messages to me concerning this thread on the Western proletariat. Roxanne is a graduate student at Dartmouth College who lurks on this list from time to time. Though she is in a position to knowledgeably contribute to M-I, she for her own reasons elects not to do so. I have accordingly taken the liberty of posting details of her remarks in order to render more intelligible my responses to them. Hopefully, both will advance the discussion on this very important thread. I have done likewise in the past with messages from "Jon" (Jon Flanders), "Robert" (Robert Perrone) and "Candice" (Candice Riefler), all of whom possess a knowledge of Marxism and of history far in excess of my own. I have a minor pique with Chris' cavil regarding the Trotskyist position on Brest-Litovsk. This touches upon the old bugaboo of "Socialism in One Country," over which much blood has been spilt on this list. May I be allowed to briefly present my own feelings on this? It very much involves this "third component" in Soviet foreign policy-- national interest-- that I broached in my previous post. Lenin, with his sense of realism, was the first to perceive that a Soviet republic, living even for a limited period in a world of States, would be compelled in many respects to behave like any other State. In an article in 1915, which afterwards did manly service in the controversy about "socialism in one country", Lenin had pointed out that the country or countries in which socialism was first victorious would have to stand up for a time against an agglomeration of hostile capitalist States; and in 1917, when some stalwart internationalist put up the slogan "Down with frontiers", Lenin sensibly replied that the Soviet republic, coming into existence in a capitalist world, would necessarily have State frontiers, as well as other State interests, to defend. If the rest of the world was organized on a system of States, it was not open to a single region to contract out of the system by an act of will. It would, however, be rash to deduce from all this either a theoretical or a practical clash in Soviet foreign policy between the claims of world revolution and those of national interest. It was such a clash, and the priority given to national interest, which had in Lenin's view destroyed the Second International. No such clash could occur in Soviet policy for the simple reason that all the Soviet leaders were agreed in believing that the survival of the Soviet regime in Russia was bound up with the success of the revolution in the rest of the world, or at any rate in Europe. Chris Burford, in common with many others, exaggerates the difference between Lenin and Trotsky on this point. Trotsky's famous remark that "either the Russian revolution will cause a revolution in the west, or the capitalists of all countries will strangle our revolution," was not the isolated idiosyncracy of one Bolshevik leader. Half a dozen statements of the same tenor can be found in Lenin's works, of which one, precisely contemporaneous with that of Trotsky, may be quoted as a sample: "Anglo-French and American imperialism will *inevitably* strangle the independence and freedom of Russia *unless* world-wide socialism, world-wide Boshevism triumphs." And in the purely hypothetical event of a clash, Lenin gave the same answer as Trotsky and in no less categorical terms. "He is no socialist", Lenin wrote after Brest-Litovsk, "who will not sacrifice his fatherland for the triumph of the socialist revolution." The debate between Lenin and Trotsky over Brest-Litovsk turned therefore on a question of timing and tactics rather than principle, since the same premise was common to both. Bitterly as it was contested, Brest-Litvosk led imperceptibly to a kind of synthesis between national and international aspects of Soviet policy; for while Trotsky supported his case for staking everything on world revolution (or, more specifically, on revolution in Germany) by the argument, which Lenin at this time fully accepted, that without such a revolution the Soviet regime in Russia could not survive, Lenin, on his side, argued that nothing would be so certainly fatal to the cause of revolution in Germany as the overthrow of the Soviet republic by German imperialism, and that to defend and strengthen the Soviet regime by a prudent national policy was the surest ultimate guarantee of international revolution. Lenin was right. But the irony of the situation is that he was right for a reason which contradicted the premise accepted both by Trotsky and by himself-- namely, the dependence of the survival of the regime in Russia on revolution elsewhere. The synthesis established at the time of Brest-Litovsk between national and international policy, between the interests of the Soviet republic and those of world revolution, proved lasting. A whole generation of communists--Russian and foreign-- was nurtured on the dual conception of the promotion of world revolution as the ultimate and necessary crown and reinforcement of the Soviet republic, and of the strengthening of Soviet power as the immediate and necessary spearhead of world revolution. --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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