The Soviet leadership, after the departure in
1922 of the Japanese, the last foreign troops
on Soviet territory, was able to fashion and create
Soviet society free from outside interference. The
Allies had withdrawn. The Whites were defeated.
Bolshevik armies had established control over the
Caucasus region, central Asia and the whole of
Siberia during 1920 and 1921. With the end of
the civil war, and Russia’s own foreign war with
Poland – fighting stopped in October 1920 – not
only was Soviet revolutionary power established,
but for two decades, until Hitler’s invasion of
1941, the expected concerted capitalist attack did
not materialise. It never in fact materialised as the
Soviet Union eventually fought Germany in
alliance with capitalist Britain and the US. But the
fear that the half-hearted Allied intervention
immediately after the revolution was not the end
but the precursor of an attempt by the capitalist
world to liquidate the first communist state
powerfully influenced the Soviet Union’s foreign
relations.
To preserve Soviet power every weapon
appeared to be justifiable. Britain and the West
were to be weakened by pursuit of a vigorous
anti-imperialist policy in Asia and the Middle
East. Western communist parties, members of the
Comintern (the First Congress of the Third
International was convened by Lenin in Moscow
in March 1919) were to join the struggle for the
survival of the Soviet Union, however much such
a policy might conflict with a purely national
interest. Simultaneously, foreign relations with
the West were conducted so as to exploit divisions
between them. Arrangements for mutual military
and technical aid were developed with Weimar
Germany after the signature of the Treaty of
Rapallo in April 1922. Such a policy was com-
bined with the apparently contradictory support
for the German Communist Party’s attacks on the
‘social fascists’ which contributed to the fall of
Weimar and the coming to power of the Nazis.
Even when the German communists became the
first victims of Nazi violence, they held to the
doctrinal correctness of the analysis that the over-
throw of bourgeois socialists had brought the
communist revolution a step closer.
The imminent danger of foreign intervention
was thus as much an illusion of the Soviet leaders
in the 1920s as the expectation of communist rev-
olution spreading in the West which, as late as
1921, the Soviet leadership still believed was the
only hope of Russia’s survival. But, for anyone liv-
ing in Russia in the winter of 1920–1, there could
be no illusion about the country’s virtually total
collapse after six years of war and civil war. Then a
new disaster struck: in the summer of 1921 the
grain crop failed. Added to the millions killed in
war, countless more millions now died of starva-
tion and disease. This time the West ‘intervened’
in a humanitarian mission of relief. In March
1921, even before the actual famine, Lenin told
the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party: ‘We
are living in such conditions of impoverishmentChapter 16
SOVIET RUSSIA
‘COMMUNISM IN TRANSITION’