For Stalin, as had been true for Lenin before him, the primary aim of Soviet security policy was to stay clear of entanglement in conflicts between capitalist powers. Since the mid-1920s Stalin had emphasised a concern with building ‘socialism in a single country’. This did not mean that he urged pacifism or envisaged permanent abstention from military activity; indeed he looked forward to the possibility that the Red Army might exploit difficulties among capitalist powers as a result of their wars. He had never revoked his statement in
Such considerations conditioned Soviet foreign policy in the inter-war period. But they were of a generalised nature and led many contemporary politicians and diplomats — and subsequent writers — to suppose that Stalin was a pragmatist who had put ideology behind him. This is a tricky topic. It is true that, if account is taken of the somersaults in Soviet diplomatic activity, Lenin and Stalin showed little consistency. In Lenin’s time the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had been signed in 1918 and some observers, including a lot of communists, treated this as an abandonment of Bolshevik revolutionary goals. Yet the Red Army invaded Poland in 1920 and engaged in ‘revolutionary war’. Similar inconsistency was evident from the late 1920s. At first Stalin used the Comintern to instruct communist parties in Europe to regard social-democratic and labour parties as their greatest enemies; but he then insisted that communists should join ‘popular fronts’ with such parties. Of course the Marxist–Leninist stress on the importance of flexibility in Soviet foreign policy was hardly distinctive: it is an almost universal characteristic of diplomacy regardless of time, place or political orientation. Marxism–Leninism after 1917 was reinventing the ancient wheel of international relations.
And even when Stalin appeared ‘ideological’, he never overlooked practical considerations. The USSR was an isolated state whose structure of politics and economy posed a challenge to the world’s capitalist powers. Hostility to the Soviet Union had led to military intervention in the Civil War; this put the Politburo on constant alert for a possible repetition. Stalin and his associates had a pragmatic interest in ending their international isolation; they looked for opportunities for revolutionary self-assertion. There were few ways to alter the fundamental situation short of demolishing the legacy of the October Revolution. At the very least the USSR would have had to reintroduce the market economy and recognise the debts owed by Russian governments before October 1917.
Nothing about Stalin suggested that he would contemplate such a step. Accused by Trotski of betraying the October Revolution, he indeed distorted and eliminated much of Lenin’s legacy. But a Leninist of a sort he remained while introducing a personal dimension to his handling of international relations. He acted as if politics were fundamentally a matter of unmasking and neutralising conspiracies at home and abroad. Lenin had not been averse to impugning the motives of foreign states; he had not failed to trump up the charge in March 1921 that the Kronstadt mutineers were in league with governments hostile to the Soviet state. Stalin, moreover, made little distinction between types of capitalist state. He was equally ready to deal with fascists, liberal democrats and socialists in governments abroad; the popular-front policy was premised on pragmatic judgement rather than ideological preference. Yet this was no different from the attitude struck by Lenin, who in 1920 had urged the German communists to form an alliance with the German extreme right as a means of undermining the Weimar Republic and tearing up the Treaty of Versailles. Trotski in exile exaggerated the discrepancy between the viewpoints on Soviet foreign policy taken by Lenin and Stalin.5
