Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics

University of California Press

In the late 1950s, George E Kennan set out to explain to his fellow Americans how Soviet Russia's place in world politics had been transformed, as he stated it, from "the initial weakness of 1921 to the pinnacle of power and success it occupies in the wake of World War II." In doing so, he gave a major share of the credit for that transformation to the effectiveness of Soviet diplomacy and to what he termed "Soviet resourcefulness and single-mindedness of purpose."1 In this work, I examine the beginnings of the Soviet Union's historic rise to world power in the twentieth century and explore the role that diplomacy and other instruments of foreign relations played in that ascent. I consider the formative years of Soviet foreign relations, from the time Soviet Russia first entered world politics in 1920-21-following the Russian Revolution, the Paris Peace Conference, and the Civil War—to "the great turning point" in Soviet history in 1928-29, when the economy, politics, and foreign relations of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) were cast in the form they were to retain for decades. The 1920s take us from Lenin's domination of Soviet politics up to Stalin's emergence as the new leader with increasingly dictatorial powers. It is in these years that the foreign relations of the USSR took on their characteristic features. In examining this period, I hope to clarify the terms on which the USSR entered world politics, to contribute to an understanding of how Soviet foreign relations were originally formulated and conducted, to estimate how much credit can be assigned to diplomacy in making the USSR a world power, and to identify some of the fundamental tendencies of Soviet foreign relations.

Within Euro-American scholarship, the interpretation of early Soviet foreign relations began with Louis Fischer's The Soviets in World Affairs (1930), the work of a historian with direct knowledge of the events of thetime, with personal access to important Soviet diplomats, and with strong sympathy for Georgii Chicherin, the people's commissar for foreign affairs (1918-30), and his efforts to find for the USSR a place of equality, respect, and stability among the major world powers. Interpretation continued with three monumental achievements of perceptive and thoughtful scholarship completed at various stages of the Cold War—Theodore von Laue's "Soviet Diplomacy: G. V. Chicherin, Peoples Commissar for Foreign Affairs" (1953), George E Kennan's Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (1961), and Adam Ulam's Expansion and Coexistence (1968).2 It was further advanced following the déente of the 1970s by Teddy J. Uldricks in his article "Russia and Europe: Diplomacy, Revolution, and Economic Development in the 1920s" (1979), which analytically integrated early Soviet politics, foreign relations, and strategies of economic development, and which transcended the "totalitarian" and "Communist ideology" models of Soviet foreign relations that had prevailed since the 1950s.3 Each of these works considered the foreign relations of the 1920s comprehensively and within a framework of concepts. Each advanced the analysis of policy to a new level of sophistication.

The concept of early Soviet foreign relations informed by the totalitarian and Communist ideology models was highly complex and nuanced; specific aspects of it varied with time, circumstance, and proponent; however, it also had a basic logic, consistency, and coherence. As synthesized briefly, it included the following concepts: (1) the USSR's foreign relations were driven primarily by revolutionary ideology during this period; (2) the destruction of capitalism by direct insurrectionary offensive was the central intention of the first Soviet leadership cohort and the ultimate aim of their regime; (3) the conduct of normalized political and commercial relations was not genuinely representative of Soviet foreign policy and amounted to no more than a facade and a temporary expedient to be adopted only until proletarian revolution (aided by the Red Army if necessary) destroyed democracy and capitalism everywhere; (4) Soviet foreign relations were completely coherent and under the highly centralized control of the Politburo, which directed them by means of a coordinated set of foreign policy instruments; (5) the diplomats of the Foreign Affairs Commissariat played no influential role in the actual formulation of policy; and (6) the Bolsheviks, their mentality, and their diplomacy were exceptional in the history of world politics, not readily comprehended by observers untrained in the ways of the Kremlin and not to be analyzed in the same categories and terminology as were the foreign relations of the liberal democracies of the free world.

By the late 1970s the explanatory power of these hypotheses had sharplydiminished. The totalitarian and Communist ideology models did not stand up well to the close investigations and the changed perspectives that had been incorporated into historical scholarship since the 1960s. Beginning at that time, an ever-increasing body of documentation available from government, business, and personal archives in Germany, England, France, the United States, and Eastern Europe enabled scholars to reconstruct some of the contacts made between the diplomats, politicians, and trade representatives of these nations and their Soviet counterparts during the 1920s.4 By utilizing these records, often in conjunction with published sources from the USSR, diplomatic historians in Canada, the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, and Israel defined and analyzed the policies of the governments of Europe and America toward the USSR. Along with some Soviet historians, they arrived at a more complete understanding of early Soviet diplomacy itself and of Russia's role in the international relations of the pre-Stalin era. Much of this scholarship was based on primary research. It assiduously avoided overinterpretation and eschewed the assumptions of Cold War history writing. Meanwhile, other scholars working primarily in the United Kingdom and America undertook a reevaluation of the economy, society, politics, and culture of the USSR during the 1920s.5 Much of this scholarship depended on a continually increasing flow of documentation from the USSR. Together with work done by Soviet historians during the period of "the Khrushchev thaw" (1956-1964),6 it transformed the interpretation of early Soviet history. These two research endeavors—one directed to foreign relations, the other to early Soviet society—developed simultaneously. For the most part, however, they were undertaken without reference to one another, a condition which by the late 1980s had come to be deplored by experts in the field, Soviet and non-Soviet alike.7

From the advances made in the study of early Soviet foreign relations, the outlines of an interpretation that differs significantly from the one influenced by the totalitarian and Communist ideology models can be discerned and defined. The assumption that a revolutionary offensive in Europe remained the distinguishing characteristic of Soviet foreign policy after the end of the Civil War is giving way to three closely related notions: (1) that the survival and consolidation of the revolution in Russia became the paramount concern of Lenin's foreign relations sometime between 1917 and 1921; (2) that the security of the early Soviet state...