Obviously, this whole complex of “bourgeois” ideas was repugnant to the Bolsheviks. As revolutionaries determined to overthrow the existing order, they could hardly have been expected to acknowledge the sanctity of the international state system. Appealing over the heads of governments to their populations was the very essence of revolutionary strategy. And as concerned honesty and goodwill in international relations, the Bolsheviks, in common with the rest of the Russian radicals, regarded moral standards to be obligatory only within the movement, in relations among comrades: relations with the class enemy were subject to the rules of warfare. In revolution, as in war, the only principle that mattered was
In the weeks that followed the October coup, most Bolsheviks expected their example to set off revolutions throughout Europe. Every report from abroad of an industrial strike or of a mutiny was hailed as the “beginning.” In the winter of 1917–18, the Bolshevik
But these hopes waned somewhat in the spring of 1918. The Russian Revolution had as yet found no emulators. The mutinies and strikes in Western Europe were everywhere suppressed, and the “masses” continued to slaughter each other instead of attacking their “ruling classes.” As this realization dawned, it became urgent to work out a revolutionary foreign policy. Here, the Bolsheviks lacked guidelines, since neither the writings of Marx nor the experience of the Paris Commune were of much help. The difficulty derived from the contradictory requirement of their interests as rulers of a sovereign state and as self-appointed leaders of world revolution. In the latter capacity they denied the right of other (“non-socialist”) governments to exist and rejected the tradition of confining foreign relations to heads of state and their ministers. They wanted to destroy root and branch the entire structure of national, “bourgeois” states, and to do so they had to exhort the “masses” abroad to rebellion. Yet, inasmuch as they themselves now headed a sovereign state, they could not avoid relations with other governments—at least until these had been swept away by the global revolution—and this they had to do in accordance with traditional standards of “bourgeois” international law. They also needed the protection of these standards to ward off foreign intervention in their own internal affairs.
It is here that the dual nature of the Communist state, the formal separation of party and state, proved so useful. The Bolsheviks solved their problem by constructing a two-level foreign policy, one traditional, the other revolutionary. For purposes of dealing with “bourgeois” governments, they established the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, staffed exclusively with dependable Bolsheviks and subject to instructions from the Central Committee. This institution functioned, at least on the surface, in accord with accepted norms of diplomacy. Wherever permitted to do so by host countries, the heads of Soviet foreign missions, no longer called “ambassadors” or “envoys,” but “political representatives” (
This separation of functions, which reflected a similar duality inside Soviet Russia between party and state, was described by Sverdlov at the Seventh Congress of the Bolshevik Party in the course of discussions of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Referring to the clauses of the treaty which forbade the signatories to engage in hostile agitation and propaganda, he said:
It follows inexorably from the treaty we have signed and which we must soon ratify at the Congress [of Soviets] that in our capacity as a government, as Soviet authority, we will not be able to conduct that broad international agitation which we have conducted until now. But this in no wise means that we have to cut back one iota on such agitation. Only from now on we shall have to conduct it almost always in the name, not of the Council of People’s Commissars, but of the Central Committee of the party …4
