[RedsPwnAll]

I do have a question regarding Soviet help to other countries. I think it’s been officially proven that the Soviet didn’t have much of a ‘world domination’ policy in mind in the overall scheme of things, but how would one go about explaining several aspects like these:

1. One of the first things the Soviet Union did was found the “COMMINTERN” i.e. the Communist International, whose explicit purpose was to convert the rest of the world into communism.

“The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International (1919–1943), was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919. The International intended to fight “by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State.”[1]”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comintern

2. The Soviet Union had invaded or fomented revolutions and forcibly converted to Communism Belarus, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan… Need I go on?

3. Of course after WWII another dozen nations would become communist. Ho Chi Minh was a founder of the French Communist Party. At the height of the Vietnam War the Soviet Union was spending half of it’s GDP on the communist revolutions in indochina. Of course China and North Korea would soon follow, both with Soviet Communist support.

[profcj@profcj.org]

There was always a split between the “worldwide revolution right now!” and the “Socialism in One Country” Bolsheviks. The former were epitomized (in the first couple decades of the USSR) by Trotsky, the latter by Stalin. The difference wasn’t over ultimate goals — both wanted worldwide communism as the ultimate goal — but over priorities & timeline. The former believed that Soviet socialism wouldn’t be safe as long as powerful non-communist governments existed in the world, so spreading communist revolution was an immediate priority; the latter group thought that communism needed to be fully instituted & perfected in the USSR first, before it would be prudent for the Soviet state to be the Johnny Appleseed of worldwide revolution. Of course, during & after WWII Stalin would become more aggressively expansionist, in his mind as a defensive measure — best defense is a good offense. But those 2 schools of thought continued throughout the existence of the Soviet Union. It’s like a darker communist version of the debates in the US between those who wanted the US to focus on perfecting itself first in order to serve as an example to the world, & the Wilsonian/Liberal Internationalist (& later Neocon) schools that thought the US needed to expand in an imperial fashion in order to perfect itself & to keep itself safe from perceived (largely imaginary, or at least greatly exaggerated) threats.

It is interesting to note that most of the USSR’s interventions throughout most of its history were in countries that were on or very near to its borders, while the US during the 20th century was often intervening in places much farther from its own imperial center. That might just be a function of the US’s (relatively) freer economy making it so much more capable of intervening further away than the Soviets, with their much, much less productive economy.

[Author]

Posts