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Soviet Domestic Foreign Policy: Universal Ideology and National Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Roman Szporluk
Roman Szporluk*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

At the turn of the century a major social, economic and political transformation was taking place in Russia, which at the time was a vast trans-continental empire extending from Warsaw in the west to Vladivostok in the east. Many rival currents of thought and various political movements presented their solutions for Russia's political, social and ethnic conflicts. In 1917, adherents of one Marxist current, the Bolsheviks, seized power in Russia and after a prolonged and extremely bloody Civil War consolidated their regime in the early 1920s. Among the nations of the world Russia alone adopted as its guide for the solution of its problems and conflicts Marxist ideology, invented about seventy years earlier in Germany, an ideology that its founders thought offered a solution for all of the important problems of humanity at large. For, indeed, Marxism was a comprehensive system of thought, which claimed to explain the entire history of humanity and to offer a vision, a scientific blueprint, for humanity's future. In that blueprint the phenomena of conflict, power, and politics were to make room for totally new principles of social organization: solidarity, cooperation, and a rational management of resources and people, i.e., planning.

Type
II The USSR and Beyond
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 22 , Issue 1: Special Issue - Ethnopolitics in Poland , Spring 1994 , pp. 195 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 Association for the Study of Nationalities of Eastern Europe and ex-USSR 

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References

Note

1. See Walker Connor, The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) and Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), for Marx's view of nationality and nationalism, and for reference to other relevant works on the subject. Margot Light, The Soviet Theory of International Relations (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988) considers the Marx and Engels legacy in the Soviet theory.Google Scholar

2. The very title of Elliot R. Goodman's book, The Soviet Design for a World State (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), must sound strange if not quaint these days, but there was a time when the idea reflected in it was taken seriously. Goodman documents an important phase in the history of Communist thought on international relations.Google Scholar

3. The literature on the subject of “continuity and change” in Russian and Soviet history is so vast that to name any sampling of works would inevitably and rightly provoke questions regarding those left out. The reader her/himself will have to choose but such authors of broader syntheses as Richard Pipes, Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Hugh Seton-Watson, and Donald W. Treadgold would probably be on everybody's list.Google Scholar

4. Edward L. Keenan, “Muscovite Political Folkways,” The Russian Review, Vol. 45, 1986, pp. 115–181.Google Scholar

5. Keenan, “Folkways,” pp. 157–158.Google Scholar

6. Keenan, “Folkways,” pp. 168–169.Google Scholar

7. Keenan, “Folkways,” p. 179.Google Scholar

8. A. J. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).Google Scholar

9. This becomes very clear from Donald J. Munro’ s chapter in this volume, “One-Minded Hierarchy versus Interest Group Pluralism: The Chinese Approaches to Conflict.” One might further develop Mao's point, as quoted by Munro, that “human nature that transcends classes does not exist,” to concede that “human nature that transcends states and nations does not exist.”Google Scholar

10. This startling intellectual discovery was made by Pravda, July 14, 1963, here quoted from William Zimmerman, Soviet Perspectives on International Relations, 1956–1967 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 5. Zimmerman covers an extremely important period in the evolution of Soviet thought and presents an analysis of the rise of a new academic discipline in the Soviet Union—that of International Relations, and its connection to the policy-making process. For a more recent work in the same subject see Allen Lynch, The Soviet Study of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

11. See William Zimmerman, “Soviet-East European Relations in the 1980s and The Changing International System,” in Morris Bornstein, Zvi Gitelman and William Zimmerman, eds., East-West Relations and the Future of Eastern Europe (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), pp. 87–104.Google Scholar

12. Thus, for example, P. N. Fedoseyev, ed., Leninism i natsional'nyi vopros v sovremennykh usloviiakh (Moscow 1972), pp. 285–299, saw similarities between the “military alliance” of Soviet republics prior to the formation of the USSR and the organization of the Warsaw Pact. See also the collective volume published in Russian in Prague, Sovetskii Soiuz i sovremennyi mir (Prague 1972), with contributions by Soviet and East European ideologists. In Ukraine, official statements claimed that the Russian language was becoming a language of interstate communication of Eastern Europe, not only one used in communication between the USSR and Eastern Europe, thus adding an argument in favor of using Russian in Ukraine. I cite these works in Roman Szporluk, “Nationalities and the Russian Problem in the USSR: An Historical Outline,” Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 27, No. 1 (1973), pp. 3–37, where I argue that after 1968 Moscow adopted a policy of intensive and accelerated Russification in the republics—a policy that went farther than anything that Stalin had done—because it reasoned that if the non-Russian republics retained their distinct cultural identity, they would become (or remain) receptive to the same disease which had affected Eastern Europe. Quite literally, as we now see, this was a race against time.Google Scholar

13. Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 75.Google Scholar

14. Rothschild, Return, p. 222. See also p. 221:” … there is no signal that Stalin's heirs are prepared to retreat from it [East Central Europe], nor any flagging of their political will to dominate the area. The domestic Soviet imperatives that were operative at the close of World War II still apply … that victory remains the most powerful legitimizing experience of the Soviet Communist system, the most authentic bond between the Soviet elite and its Slavic peoples as well as within that elite. Hegemony over East Central Europe compensates for their enormous sacrifices in the war and their enduring grievances since its end. It validates the Soviet system to itself.”Google Scholar

15. “Demokratiia est’ konflikt. Poisk pravovogo resheniia natsional'nykh problem v SSSR,” Vek XX i mir, no. 12, 1988, pp. 8–17.Google Scholar