United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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lished, calling upon the British Communist Party for armed insurrection and although the Soviet charge Rakovsky declared it to be a forgery it had a pronounced effect on the elec¬ tion. The Anti-Soviet Tory Party was elected to power. After the failure of the General Strike of May, 1926, to which the Soviet trade unions donated £1,000,000, all Soviet efforts to effect a settlement were coldly rejected by the English Government. On May 26, 1927, Prime Minister Baldwin terminated the trade agreements and severed diplomatic relations. On May 30, 1929 the election of a Labor-Liberal majority to the House of Commons brought a hope of renewal of friendly relations. On October 1, 1929, diplo¬ matic relations were resumed followed by a temporary commercial treaty on April 16, 1930. Relations with the United States continued to be unfavorable despite the similarity of in¬ terests and actions pointed out earlier. Trade was carried on with the United States but Soviet representations for the opening of diplo¬ matic relations were dismissed as preposterous. In a reversal of its previous position the United States in 1922 recognized Esthonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In spite of the similar distrust of Japan in the Far East, friction continued be¬ tween the United States and the Soviet Union and reached a near crisis over the ownership and operations of the Chinese Eastern Railway. 1 Russia was invited to participate in the Pre¬ paratory Commission of the League of Nations established to prepare a general disarmament conference. Litvinov shocked the assembled delegates when, in 1927 at the fourth session in Geneva, he proposed an immediate world¬ wide agreement to abolish all military forces, fighting equipment, armaments, war materials and war preparations of any kind. When his proposals were rejected he offered a second plan for partial and gradual disarmament on a quota basis which suffered the same fate. To the Commission Litvinov issued a prophetic warning: “May those who believe that they have in¬ definite time at their disposal not receive a rude shock one day.” 2 1. On May 31, 1924, a Sino-Soviet agreement renounced all Russian privileges, concessions and rights of extra-territoriali¬ ty in China and provided for joint control of the Chinese Eastern Railway. Frederick L. Schuman, Op. Cit., p. 228. 2. Ibid, p. 30. 3. Ibid, p. 230. Facing the realization that it would be highly unlikely to establish iron-clad agreements of mutual aid, Russian strategists attempted to neutralize her neighbours and the great powers against participation in a war aimed against Russia. “The Narkomindel had meanwhile woven an impressive web of peace pacts. Through the use of the then popular panacea for preserving peace by outlawing war, the objective of Mos¬ cow was to thwart any combination of Powers against the U.S.S.R.” 3 The Locarno Treaty of Mutual Guarantee, October 16, 1925, providing a joint Anglo-French-German-Italian and Bel¬ gian guarantee of the German-French and Ger- man-Belgian frontiers and the supplementary treaties between Germany, on the one hand, and France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Po¬ land on the other, added fuel to the fires of Russian distrust that an armed coalition was being prepared against her. In 1925, Turkey and the U.S.S.R. concluded a treaty of neutrality in the event of a war in¬ volving either power and pledged themselves not to attack one another nor to enter into any blocks or coalitions against one another. A new Soviet-German treaty was produced in 1926 re¬ affirming the Rapallo agreement and providing for: neutrality in any war in which either party was involved, abstention from economic or financial boycotts of each other and the Ger¬ man government was pledged to oppose anti- Soviet moves at Geneva. Similar non-aggres¬ sion and neutrality pacts were signed with Lithuania (September 28, 1926), Afganistan (August 31, 1926), Iran (October 1, 1927), Es¬ thonia (May 2, 1932), Latvia (February 5, 1932), Finland (January 21, 1932), Poland (July 25, 1932), and finally with France (November 29, 1932). On February 9, 1929, the “Litvinov Protocal” was signed by representatives of the U.S.S.R., Poland, Roumania, Esthonia and Lat¬ via. Lithuania signed on April 1, Danzig on April 30 and Iran on July 4, 1929. This “proto¬ cal” was based on the Kellog-Briand Pact of Paris of August 27, 1928, signed by Russia (the first power to ratify it) on August 31. The Kel¬ log-Briand Pact renounced war as an instru¬ ment of national policy and pledged the signa¬ tories to settle disputes peacefully. The Soviet government, concerned with the threat of a war directed against her, aimed at neutralizing Page Twenty-three

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States at first refused to recognize the Treaty of Riga of March 18, 1921, following the close of the Polish-Russian war since it clearly violated the territorial integrity of Russia. The United States and Russia were in the early period the only major powers outside the League of Na¬ tions constantly advocating non-aggression, neutrality and disarmament. Nevertheless, the United States withheld recognition and made rapprochement between itself and Russia impos¬ sible while it maintained that the Soviet regime was based on ‘force and cunning’ and ‘the nega¬ tion of every principle of honor and good faith and every usage and convention underlying the whole structure of international law’. The Russian government’s support of the Third International made its diplomats ‘the agitators of dangerous revolt’ and rendered it incapable of discharging its international obligations. 1 In the mid Twenties Stalin emerged as the strongest single figure in the Communist party. With his ascendance came an even more clearly defined shift of Soviet strategy. Stalin enun¬ ciated and championed the ‘socialism in one country’ theory. This was not an entirely new theory since Lenin had foreseen possibilities for this as early as 1915, but Stalin was the first to champion this concept while pushing the world revolution to the background—not denying it but, in his viewpoint, putting first things first. When Stalin came to the fore Russia was reap¬ ing the first fruits of Chicherin’s efforts at Rappalo and London. The isolation of Russia had been broken. This hopeful situation made Stalin even more skeptical of the possibility of world revolution. Stalin, on June 9, 1925 in a speech before the students of Sverdlov Uni¬ versity, estimated that Russia could remain at peace with the Capitalist world until 1945. “Thus extreme skepticism about world revo¬ lution and confidence in the reality of a long truce between Russia and the Capitalist world were the twin premises of ‘socialism in one country.’ ” 2 The failure of an early world revolution was brought home with the debacle of German Com¬ munism in 1923. It may well have been that the failure of the German revolution was caused in no small part by Stalin’s undervaluation of the 1. Notes on the Colby Letter quoted by Frederick L. Schu- man, Op. Cit., p. 181, 182. 2. Deutscher, Op. Cit., p. 391. revolutionary potential in Germany. In 1927, the hopeful development in China collapsed with the seizure of power of Chiang Kai-shek and his middle class supporters. Chiang cruelly suppressed his former partners in the Kuomin- tang, the product of the Sun-Yat-Sen revolu¬ tion. The subsequent coalition of the Com¬ munists with leftist liberals of the Kuomintang broke down in turn and left the Communist hopes in China extremely poor. Here again it may be argued that Stalin directly contributed to the failure in China by his view that a bourgeois revolution was all that the Chinese could now achieve. He argued that a revolution in China would unify and modernize China but would not bring socialism. The failure of the revolution in Germany and the severe set back in China emphasized the hopelessness of pro¬ letarian revolution and gave support to Stalin’s theories of ‘socialism in one country.’ The need for strengthening the Soviet base of Communist world operations and tentative abandonment of world revolution in favour of security and ‘socialism in one country’ was evinced by Con¬ gress XV in 1927 when it voted to expel Trotsky and his supporters of world revolution as the immediate goal of Communist strategy. England was recognized by the diplomatic strategists of Russia to be one of the keys to Russia’s success or failure in its attempts to break down the hostility of the Capitalist na¬ tions tow ard her. England was probably the strongest of the victorious allied powers in Western Europe and had played a leading role in the wars of intervention against Russia. The Kremlin recognized that any armed coalition against Russia could very well be led by an English Tory government against her and there¬ fore it was of prime importance to win friend¬ ship with her or at least to come to some mutual agreement against a renewal of war between the two powers. Anti-Soviet sympathies played a key role in the election of 1924 in Britain. The Tories widely criticized the Anglo-Soviet trade treaty signed by the first Labor cabinet on August 8, 1924. The treaty provided for the most-favored-nation treatment and for an ex¬ tension to the U.S.S.R. of the British program of export credits and a loan to the Soviet gov¬ ernment guaranteed by the British government. On October 25, just five days before the general election, the famous Zinoviev letter was pub- Page Twenty-two

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herself from attack and making it impossible for any coalition of powers to be amassed against her. Soviet foreign policy in the 1920’s shifted frrom the early emphasis upon world revolu¬ tion to preservation of the Soviet State. A num¬ ber of leftist critics and historians suggest that the world revolution was betrayed, that Stalin consciously led the Communist party from vic¬ tory in Germany, China and elsewhere through¬ out the world. Trotsky, probably the most out¬ spoken theorist impatient for early progress of the revolution throughout the world, had not foreseen the consequences of attempts at world revolution in its initial stages -—• consequences resulting in the wholesale invasion of Russia by the Western Imperial powers and Japan. There is no doubt that if a well organized coali¬ tion of the intervening powers had been set up, the Soviet state would have been doomed. It is further highly likely that any new large scale attempt to spread the revolution would have caused a new war of intervention. Realistic Soviet policy therefore necessarily dictated a “go slow” policy in world revolution until the Russian base was secure. The Russian revolu¬ tion had been declared “permanent” even by Trotsky and Lenin but it could not be perma¬ nent for long unless Russia was re-established economically and the threat of renewed inter¬ vention was not allowed to materialize. The prospects of proletarian revolution early began to disintegrate with the emergence of social and political reforms and the emergence of stronger labor unions and reformist parties in Capitalist countries therefore necessitating a far more carefully planned and executed movement to bring about revolution in the West. With regard to China, Stalin was in fact reverting to the Marxian analysis of the emerg¬ ence of a “bourgeoisie-democratic” society first before a proletarian revolution could take place. This concept was held by the majority of the Communist leaders until the revolution was declared a success in Russia. There is certainly no real evidence to prove that Stalin abandoned the idea of world revo¬ lution but much more that he was extremely fearful lest the impatient revolutionaries, of which Trotsky was the foremost, seriously split the party while the threat of Capitalist attack hung fearfully over Russia. A bitter warning had been given to the new Russian state by the ware of intervention, a warning not lost on Stalin. “What is commonly forgotten in the West is that Soviet “totalitarianism” was not inevitable nor necessarily implicit in the Bolshevism of 1917-18 but was forced upon it, with death as the alternative, by the decisions of Russian democrats and of the Western Democracies.” 1 The emphasis was therefore placed by Stalin and his followers in the Politburo on security from attack. The Russian government once again was dependent upon power politics and the economic and armed strength of Russia for its survival, let alone the expansion of the Com¬ munist ideal. Stalin foresaw a strong possibil¬ ity of renewed war in Europe and hoped that Russia would be able to strengthen her eco¬ nomic position before it became involved in war. He and his ministers sought to break down the almost unanimous hostility of the Western countries of Europe and stave off war until she could benefit by it. In a speech made an Janu¬ ary 1925, Stalin said: “The banner of peace re¬ mains our banner as of old. But, if war begins, we shall hardly have to sit with folded arms. We shall have to come out, but we ought to be the last to come out. And we should come out in order to throw the decisive weight on the scales, the weight that should tilt the scales.” 2 Thus the overall policy of the Soviet Union in the 1920’s was conditioned by the threat of re¬ newed war and was therefore primarily based upon the need for security. 1. Frederick L. Schumann, Op. Cit., p. 127. 2. Ibid. BIBLIOGRAPHY Schuman, Frederick L., Soviet Politics At Home and Abroad, New York, Alfred A. Knoft, 1946. Deutscher, I., Stalin, New York, Oxford University Press, 1949. Beloff, Max, The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1929-1941, Vol. I, 1929-1936, Oxford University Press, 1947-49. Sayers, Michael, and Kahn, Albert E., The Great Con¬ spiracy Against Russia, New York, Boni and Gaer, Inc., Publishers, 1946. Pares, Bernard, Russia, Past and Present, New York, New York American Library, (A Mentor Book) 1943, 1949 (Revised Edition, 1951). Page Twenty-four