Khrushchev admitted to the state abuse in his cel-
ebrated 1956 speech. By then more than 18 mil-
lion had been herded into these camps and, 15
million survived – 3 million, largely innocents, lost
their lives, families were destroyed, children
orphaned. The brutal reality of Soviet rule was
denied by armchair communists in the West and
admirers of Stalin, until the truth had to be faced
well after the end of the Second World War. The
material loss to Russia of skilled people was incal-
culable. The grip of the secret police under the
hated Beria was not loosened until after Stalin’s
death. There were thousands willing to do Stalin’s
bidding and commit all these crimes. He justified
them by claiming there were conspiracies with out-
side Western powers, with Japan, Germany, Britain
and France, to sabotage and attack the Soviet
Union. Did he believe it? Stalin thought it
theoretically possible and that was enough.
Stalin had little experience of foreign travel.
Behind his notion of Russia’s correct foreign pol-
icy two assumptions or principles can be discerned:
Russia’s defence in a hostile capitalist world must
come first at all costs; second, the behaviour of
other powers could be deduced by a Leninist
analysis. Not only were these powers motivated by
a joint hostility to the only communist state, but
they were also locked in an imperial struggle for
supremacy among themselves. Thus Soviet theo-
reticians, including Stalin in the 1920s, believed in
the likelihood of war between Britain and the US.
Later, in the early 1930s, Stalin hoped that rivalry
in eastern Asia would lead the US to check
Japanese expansion in China. But Soviet hopes
were disappointed by American non-intervention
during the Manchurian crisis of 1931–3.
The Soviet view of the West was grotesquely
distorted. The Western social democrats were cast
in the role of ‘right deviationists’ or ‘social fas-
cists’ from 1929 to 1934, more dangerous than
the real fascists. The Nazis were seen as a short-
lived right-wing excess against which the workers
would soon react. There was a lingering fear
of Poland and its ally, capitalist France, and of
‘hostile’ Britain. Thus, from the West as well
as from Asia, the Soviet Union appeared to be
in continuing and great danger.
From 1934 to 1938 there was some readjust-
ment of Soviet policy and a rapprochement with
the Western democracies. The Soviet Union was
recognised finally by the US when Roosevelt
agreed to establish diplomatic relations in 1933.
In 1934 the Soviet Union joined the League of
Nations, and the Commissar for Foreign Affairs,
Maxim Litvinov, now preached the need for col-
lective security against Hitler’s Germany and
Mussolini’s Italian expansionist policies. The gen-
uine search for peace did not mean, however, that
the Soviet Union was ready to go to war in alliance
with the Western democracies against Germany.
Rather, the Russians wanted to avoid a war break-
ing out altogether, and believed a firm stand
would deter Hitler and Mussolini. If it did not, as
it did not in September 1939, the Soviet leaders
were determined to avoid being involved in war
themselves. If there had to be a war – a situation
full of danger for Russia – then at least it should be
confined to a war between the Western powers. As
long as Nazi Germany could be prevented from
turning firston Russia, then the Soviet Union
would remain neutral and appease Germany to
any extent necessary to preserve peace. But the
nightmare of the Soviet leadership was a reverse of
that situation, that France and Britain would stand
aside while Hitler conquered Lebensraum(living
space) in the east. What is more, would the
Ukrainians and Georgians and other non-Russian
nationalities fight for Russia, when the people
were suffering from such terrible communist
repression? While socialism was still in transition,
Russia could not afford war without risking the
very survival of socialism.
The Soviet Union attempted to create a
‘barrier of peace’ by signing non-aggression
treaties with its neighbours, of whom the most
important was Poland. Until the autumn of 1938
Hitler employed no direct violence near Russia’s
borders. In eastern Asia the threat of war was met
by a combination of policies, in the first place by
appeasing Japan: in 1935 Russia sold its interest
in the Chinese Eastern Railway to the Japanese
puppet state of Manchukuo. It was lessened, fur-
thermore, by encouraging Chiang Kai-shek’s
nationalist resistance to Japan in the hope that
Japan would then be too busy fighting China to
1
SOVIET RUSSIA 179
