The Resurrection of A Russian Hero…

As Stalin’s rehabilitation proceeds with renewed vigor in popular, academic and official circles of Putin’s Russia, the Soviet dictator is invariably re-presented as a great modernizer, war leader and international statesman – a true “vohzd” who industrialized Russia, defeated Hitter’s Nazi scourge and negotiated on an equal footing with Roosevelt and Churchill. Yet this latest re-incarnation of the “Red Boss” as the ultimate realpolitiker, whose principal aim was always Russia’s grandeur, security and recognition as one of the two equal superpowers of the post-World War Two world is, at best, a misleadingly incomplete narrative of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy during the Stalin Era. The opening of the archives of former Communist countries in the wake of the implosion of Communist rule in Europe resulted in a substantial amount of new research focusing on the critical role played by ideology in shaping Soviet foreign policy in general, and the origins and early course of the Cold War in particular.

Stalin and government in 1938, with head of NKVD Nikolay Yezhov far right

The predominant weight of evidence presented by these findings points to a fresh understanding of the causes and development of the Cold War, which emerges as the most likely outcome of a strategic confrontation between the foreign policy epistemic communities of the leading proponents of two mutually exclusive views of the constitutional structure of global order. Its determinant cause thus becomes the conscious refusal of these foreign policy elites to subordinate their respective paradigm of the moral purposes of the state to their adversary’s “horizon of experience” – defined as “the deep-seated ideological assumptions that lead states to formulate their interests within certain bounds, making some actions seem mandatory and others unimaginable”.

This essay will interpret the most representative findings of this new research through the prism of Christian Reus-Smit’s innovative holistic constructivist framework emerging out of his historically-grounded sociological comparison of four distinct societies of states: ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, absolutist and modern Europe. Each such society of states was structured around a different understanding of the moral purpose of the state, unique conceptualization of the organizing principles of sovereignty, and particular systemic notion of procedural justice, resulting in four “coherent ensemble[s] of metavalues, defining the terms of legitimate statehood and broad parameters of state action”. We will focus on three critical series of events which best assisted historians to reassess the causes, outbreak and early development of the Cold War: the foreign policy process of the USSR in the 1940s, the impact of the 1947 Marshall Plan on US-Soviet relations, and the re-organization of the Communist bloc between 1947 and 1950.

Stalin’s Soviet Foreign Policy in the 1940s

Despite the wealth of new evidence from former Communist states’ archives which has come to light since 1989, controversies regarding the role of ideology in Soviet foreign policy and its impact on the origins and development of the early Cold War have by no means been settled. A detailed analysis of even the most important lines of argument and the various debates they generated among historians is well beyond the scope of this essay. We will therefore focus on key points of agreement between them and on the actual evidence on which they based their arguments. We will thus develop a new understanding of this “hinge” period of the Twentieth Century: the transition between the Second World War and the Cold War.

Perhaps the most important such point of agreement is the critical role played by Stalin in determining not only the foreign policy of the USSR during this period, but that of the entire Eastern bloc. Zubok and Pleshakov have best described his role as the wielder of a “revolutionary-imperial paradigm” representing a marriage of Russian imperial geopolitics with Marxist-Leninist revolutionary idealism, resulting in a more or less skillful and successful exploitation of both the strategic attributes of the former Russian Empire’s territory and of the emotive power of Russian nationalism to safeguard and expand the Communist revolution as directed by the CPSU elites by means of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” literally embodied in the person of the “Boss” himself.

Blum’s conceptualization, at the agency level, of a hierarchical, tri-partite belief system of core, intermediate and peripheral beliefs in examining evolution and change in Soviet foreign policy from Stalin to Gorbachev, which mirrors Reus Smit’s “generative structure” of modern international society at the structural level, based on constitutional structures, fundamental institutions, and issue-specific regimes, will both help us to situate Stalin’s role and the impact of the revolutionary-imperial paradigm on Soviet foreign policy throughout the 1940s.  Stalin’s core level of beliefs, personified in the dominant role he created for the CPSU and its General Secretary in the governance structure of the USSR by sidelining both the original Soviets and the more traditional state functions of President and Ministers in favor of an inner circle he could direct and control, is based on his formative years as a revolutionary and his unstinting, if not always sophisticated, belief in and adherence to the Marxist principles of global revolution arising out of the inevitable conflict between the major capitalist countries promoting the interests of their respective national forces of monopoly capital. This core set of beliefs, on which the entire ideological, structural and operational framework of the Bolshevik Party, the CPSU and the USSR was constructed by Lenin himself even before the October 1917 Revolution, represents Stalin’s “horizon of experience”, from which everything else in his belief system is ultimately derived.

The imperial-revolutionary paradigm, corresponding to Blum’s intermediate set of beliefs, constituted a flexible framework of foreign policy decision-making and control of his closest collaborators, which Stalin employed to advance the revolutionary cause both within and outside the USSR. Its two key axes, one gravitating between a national / imperialist pole and a communist /revolutionary pole, and a second oscillating between a technocratic command state and a repressive militarized state, gave rise to four distinct foreign policy approaches: great power politics, most compatible with the Western society of states defended by the USA and the UK, and best illustrated in the diplomatic activities and writings of Litvinov and Maisky; cooperative internationalism as exemplified in positions taken by Beria and Malenkov both before and after Stalin’s death; aggressive imperialism, evident in the Soviet identification of security with continuous territorial expansion; and global revolutionary, emphasizing the inevitable conflict between major capitalist powers and the enlargement of the Communist society of states at their expense.

However, these approaches should not be equated with US foreign policy paradigms, each with their own core group of supporters, vying to supplant its respective competitors in steering US foreign policy. Rather, they are best understood as policy options whose best mix and use at any one time was determined solely by Stalin himself, depending on the manner he perceived the international threats and opportunities he faced. By surrounding himself with “Team Stalin” -collaborators and subordinates who represented, on his instructions, one or the other of these approaches and who he “conceived… collectively as his instrument, not a consultative body”, Stalin could shift his foreign policy stance quite dramatically by discarding or replacing such personnel and still maintaining internal authority and external credibility with both his great power counter-parts and communist supporters in Europe. This flexibility of his tactical actions, corresponding to his peripheral beliefs, enabled Stalin to move from a virulent anti-Nazi stance in the mid- to late 1930s and attempts to conclude some form of alliance with the UK and France, with Litvinov as Foreign Affairs Minister, to the entirely unexpected Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, after Litvinov’s replacement by Molotov, to the war-time alliance with the USA and the UK culminating in the Teheran and Yalta Conferences and the creation of the United Nations, to finally an increasingly “hot” confrontation with his former Allies leading to the Berlin blockade of 1948 and the Korean War of 1950, by which time Molotov himself had been replaced by Andrei Vyshinsky.

Although historians continue to argue about the effectiveness of Stalin’s foreign policy throughout this period and the extent to which he wanted, and planned for, a Cold War, Gaiduk best summarized a line of general agreement between most historians who have researched the archives of the former Communist countries:

“No one would argue against Stalin’s belief in and adherence to the idea of world Communist revolution. But at the same time he apparently regarded this revolution as an ultimate goal, desirable though it was, but realizable only in the distant future. He was therefore prepared to postpone its advent, even to disregard it in favor of more pressing problems. He could afford this, since he had accomplished the first stage of this revolution: he had built its bastion in the form of the Soviet Union, he had created an example of its eventual success for all other countries and peoples. Then, before and after World War II, he was apparently more preoccupied with strengthening and defending his child, guaranteeing its security and peace. He was hardly prepared to sacrifice it for attractive but nevertheless ephemeral ideas of the victory of communism all over the world. But he always kept this idea at the back of his mind and was eager to test capitalism whenever and wherever possible by political, ideological, and even military means.”

Stalin’s core belief that the moral purpose of the state he built was the subordination of individual freedom to the historic requirements of an inevitable world-wide triumph of a communist society of states structured hierarchically around the leading role of the USSR and its “vanguard”, the CPSU, is best illustrated by a brief analysis of new documents shedding light on two key events marking the transition from war-time cooperation to Cold War: the Marshall Plan and its impact on the relations between the Big Three, and Stalin’s reorganization of the Communist bloc from the 1947 Szklarska Poremba Conference to the start of the 1950 Korean War.

From Cold Peace to Cold War

A second point of agreement between historians revolves around the critical role played by the Marshall Plan as the “tipping point” of the Cold War. Stalin’s refusal to allow Poland and Czechoslovakia to participate in the 1947 Paris conference, after summoning their leaders to Moscow and dictating his terms to them –which caused Czech Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk to comment bitterly that “I went to Moscow as the Foreign Minister of an independent sovereign state; I returned as a lackey of the Soviet government”, must be understood through the prism of the now famous “Novikov long telegram” of September, 1946. This document, carefully edited by Molotov and reflecting in the end the Foreign Minister’s thinking rather than just that of the Soviet Ambassador to Washington, DC, Nikolai Novikov, stated that the US had abandoned its pre-war tradition of isolationism, was now ready to “assume the role of the most powerful force in resolving the fundamental questions of the postwar world” and was determined “to limit or dislodge the influence of the Soviet Union” by means of “enormous shipments of goods and importation of capital into countries hungry for consumer goods”.

As Stalin had explained to Yugoslav communist leader Milovan Djilas in 1945 when discussing the outcome of the Second World War, “[t]his war is not as in the past, whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system… It cannot be otherwise”. The Marshall Plan, as seen through the prism of the Novikov telegram and Stalin’s core set of beliefs in the inevitability of a global conflict between the communist and capitalist camps, convinced him that the USA was reneging on the Yalta agreements and was attempting the take-over, by economic means, of his richly-deserved Eastern European chasse gardée. The inevitable result was the abandonment of any semblance of inter-Allied cooperation and an accelerated consolidation of the Communist bloc under Soviet rule –thus marking the beginning of the Cold War.

The Conference of Szklarska Poremba, in Poland, held in September 1947, was the direct result of Stalin’s latest foreign policy shift. Organized by Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s heir-presumptive, then in charge of relations with Communist parties throughout Europe, it led to the creation of Cominform, the deepening of the Stalin-Tito split and, most importantly, the notion -presented in Zhdanov’s report on the international situation- that the world was henceforth divided into “two camps” where no neutral parties could exist and where each Communist party throughout Europe could only choose, in the words of Jacques Duclos, a French Communist leader, “to subdue [to Stalin’s dictates] or to break off”. As Zubok and Pleshakov clearly explain,

“Stalin’s decision to boycott the Marshall Plan meant for the Soviet Union the end of a wait-and-see attitude toward neighboring countries and, for the transitional regimes in Eastern Europe, a death sentence. Seemingly, Stalin faced a simple choice –to create a bloc using either formal diplomatic or “formal-ideological” instruments: proclaiming a Warsaw Pact in 1947 or restoring the new Comintern. He did neither. Instead, he chose another route that fit his needs remarkably well: he used the common ideology of Communist parties to organize Eastern Europe as a “security buffer” for his state.”

Zhdanov also asserted renewed control over the Western Communist parties, in particular the French and Italian Communists, by berating them for their failure to fight back against American imperialist aggression and destabilize their respective governments and countries. However, Zubok and Plekhanov miss the mark when they assert that “in 1947 the revolutionary-imperial doctrine was back”: Stalin had, in effect, never abandoned it. He was now simply shifting his foreign policy stance from one based predominantly on the Great Powers Politics approach to one relying primarily on the Global Revolutionary approach.

It is in this context of a renewed centralization of all Communist parties under the leadership of the CPSU and hence, of Stalin himself, and their succession to power in all Eastern European countries within the next year, that must be understood the dictator’s reorganization of the Far East. His initial reluctance to support Mao’s Communist revolution in China was based on his fears that Mao would not accept the leadership of the CPSU and of the “Red Boss”. After 1950, with the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty and China’s entrance in the Korean War, Stalin felt confident enough in the CPSU’s primacy throughout the Communist bloc, from Berlin to Beijing and Pyongyang, to exclaim to Mao, who was raising concerns about the possible interference of the Sino-Soviet treaties with the decisions of the Yalta Conference: “To hell with that! If we make a decision to revise treaties, we must go all the way. True, we will have to struggle with the Americans, but we have already reconciled ourselves with that fact”.

The hottest phase of the Cold War was about to begin: Stalin was now prepared to fight the Americans to the very last North Korean and Chinese soldier…

Soviet Ideology and the Moral Purpose of the State

The evidence and research discussed above present us with a consistent long-term attempt on the part of the CPSU ruling elites to create an anti-hegemonic society of states diametrically opposed to the western Allies’ modern society of states, whose moral purpose of the state was not the augmentation of individuals’ purposes and potentialities but rather a subjection of individuality to a reified, utopian future social order; whose organizing principle of sovereignty was not the liberal notion of equality between nation-states but rather a neo-feudal, hierarchical paradigm of a “sovereign USSR” surrounded by “vassal” communist states; whose systemic norm of procedural justice was not legislative justice deciding like cases alike in accordance with the rule of law, but rather instrumental justice where rulings were made subject to the needs and whims of the Communist party apparatus; and where the fundamental institutions of the entire system were not contractual law and multilateralism, but rather unequal, hierarchical relations between the CPSU and national communist parties of semi-dependent states.

In 1945 the western Allies where striving to renovate the modern international society of states emerging out of the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, which itself had marked a purposive change from the old, absolutist European global order. In contrast, the Soviet Union’s long-term strategic goal was to establish a society of states entailing a configurative change of the constitutional structure of global order based not only on a shift in the moral purpose undergirding the system of rule from individual empowerment to individual subjection, but also a change in the organizing principle that governed the distribution of authority between states from the liberal sovereignty of equal nation-states to the neo-feudal relationship between the Soviet Union “sovereign” and satellite “liege” states. The evidence emerging out of the former Communist countries’ archives and the research it generated have built a powerful case supporting the conclusion that it is within this clash of two incompatible ideological “horizons of experience” and each side’s refusal to subordinate their own Weltanschauung to that of its adversary that can be found the true origins of the Cold War and the explanation of its early development. It is only when a generational change in the governing elites of the CPSU brought with it a collapse of the Soviet rulers’ fundamental belief in the generative structure of Soviet ideology that the Cold War could truly end.