File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1996/96-11-17.131, message 107


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.




  



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