Foreign Relations of The Soviet Union - Before World War II

Before World War II

It is possible to detect three distinct phases in Soviet foreign policy between the conclusion of the Russian Civil War and the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, determined in part by political struggles within the USSR, and in part by dynamic developments in international relations and the effect these had on Soviet security.

Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, once in power, believed their October Revolution would ignite the world's socialists and lead to a "World Revolution." Lenin set up the Communist International (Comintern) to export revolution to the rest of Europe and Asia. Indeed, Lenin set out to liberate all of Asia from imperialist and capitalist control.

The first priority for Soviet foreign policy was Europe, above all Germany, which was the country that Lenin most admired and thought most ready for revolution. The historian Robert Service noted that Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders had a very idealized picture of Germany that bore little relation to reality. Lenin was most disappointed when, following the October Revolution, a similar revolution did not break out in Germany as he had expected and hoped for, forcing him to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 to take Russia out of World War I. Brest-Litovsk was an immense shock to the Bolsheviks, and afterwards a new policy emerged of both seeking pragmatic co-operation with the Western powers when it suited Soviet interests while at the same time trying to promote a Communist revolution whenever possible. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, the Soviets encouraged Communist uprisings in Germany and saw Béla Kun briefly establish the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Had it not been for the Russian Civil War, Lenin would had sent the Red Army into Central Europe into 1919 to export Communism. After the failure of these efforts, Lenin, assuming that capitalism was not going to collapse at once as he had hoped, made a major effort in the early 1920s to lure German corporations into investing in the Soviet Union as a way of modernizing the country. Lenin's Germanophila was controversial within the Bolsheviks, with many of his colleagues complaining that he went too far with his liking for all things German. As part of the effort to join a German-Soviet alliance, the Soviets signed the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922.

Lenin's plans failed, although Russia did manage to hold onto the Central Asian and Caucasian domains that had been part of the Russian Empire. The revolutionary stage ended after the Soviet defeat in the war with Poland in 1921. As Europe's revolutions were crushed and revolutionary zeal dwindled, the Bolsheviks shifted their ideological focus from the world revolution and building socialism around the globe to building socialism inside the Soviet Union, while keeping some of the rhetoric and operations of the Comintern continuing. In the mid-1920s, a policy of peaceful co-existence began to emerge, with Soviet diplomats attempting to end the country's isolation, and concluding bilateral arrangements with capitalist governments. Agreement was reached with Germany, Europe's other pariah of the day, in the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922.

There were, however, still those in the Soviet government, most notably Leon Trotsky, who argued for the continuation of the revolutionary process, in terms of his theory of Permanent Revolution. After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky and the internationalists were opposed by Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin, who developed the notion of Socialism in One Country. The foreign policy counterpart of Socialism in One Country was that of the United Front, with foreign Communists urged to enter into alliances with reformist left-wing parties and national liberation movements of all kinds. The high point of this strategy was the partnership in China between the Chinese Communist Party and the nationalist Kuomintang, a policy favoured by Stalin in particular, and a source of bitter dispute between him and Trotsky. The Popular Front policy in China effectively crashed to ruin in 1927, when Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek massacred the native Communists and expelled all of his Soviet advisors, notably Mikhail Borodin.

The following year, after defeating opponents from both the left (led by Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev) and the right (led by Nikolai Bukharin), Stalin began the wholesale collectivization of Soviet agriculture, accompanied by a major program of planned industrialization. This new radical phase was paralleled by the formulation of a new doctrine in the International, that of the so-called Third Period, an ultra-left switch in policy, which argued that social democracy, whatever shape it took, was a form of social fascism, socialist in theory but fascist in practice. All foreign Communist parties – increasingly agents of Soviet policy – were to concentrate their efforts in a struggle against their rivals in the working-class movement, ignoring the threat of real fascism. There were to be no united fronts against a greater enemy. The catastrophic effects of this policy, and the negative effect it had on Soviet security, was to be fully demonstrated by Adolf Hitler's seizure of power in Germany in 1933, followed by the destruction of the German Communist Party, the strongest in Europe. The Third Way and social fascism were quickly dropped into the dustbin of history. Once again collaboration with other progressive elements was the key, in the form of the Popular Front, which cast the net still wider to embrace moderate bourgeois parties. Soviet-German cooperation, extensive until 1933, was now limited.

Hand-in-hand with the promotion of Popular Fronts, Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs between 1930 and 1939, aimed at closer alliances with Western governments, and placed ever greater emphasis on collective security. The new policy led to the Soviet Union joining the League of Nations in 1934 and the subsequent conclusion of alliances with France and Czechoslovakia. In the League the Soviets were active in demanding action against imperialist aggression, a particular danger to them after the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria, which eventually resulted in the Soviet-Japanese Battle of Khalkhin Gol.

However, against the rise of militant fascism, the League was unlikely to accomplish very much. Litvinov and others in the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs continued to conduct quiet diplomatic initiatives with Nazi Germany, even as the USSR took a stand in trying to preserve the Second Spanish Republic, and its Popular Front government, from the Fascist rebellion of 1936. The Munich Agreement of 1938, the first stage in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, gave rise to Soviet fears that they were likely to be abandoned in a possible war with Germany. In the face of continually dragging and seemingly hopeless negotiations with Great Britain and France, a new cynicism and hardness entered Soviet foreign relations when Litvinov was replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov in May 1939. The Soviets no longer sought collective but individual security, and the Pact with Hitler was signed, giving Soviets protection from the most aggressive European power and increasing the Soviet sphere of influence.