166

p The answer of Lenin and of socialism to the fundamentally new problem of relations between states with opposing socio-economic systems that arose in 1917 reflected ’the factual conditions and demands of social development; the imperialist approach, however, to the problem of international relations contradicted these requirements and reflected the anti-historic and reactionary nature of imperialist policy. But the pressure of objective circumstances .obliged the capitalist world to reckon with reality in a number of instances.

p An end to the undivided sway of imperialism, the world debut of socialism, the strengthening of its might and international status and the mounting activity and effectiveness of socialist foreign policy have caused a deep-going crisis in the aims and methods of imperialist foreign policy. This is most obvious in the sphere of struggle against the world revolutionary process and in relations with the Soviet Union and with world socialism.

p Imperialism tried to arrest the growth of revolutionary forces and to demolish the socialist state; true to its aggressive nature, it resorted primarily to its tried and tested methods of resolving its foreign policy aims through armed intervention and war. Many bourgeois ideologists did not conceal their extreme antipathy towards revolutionary Russia, dictated above all by class motivations. President Wilson of the United States, for example, said in November 1918 that the Allied powers had no intention of continuing to pursue passive tactics towards Bolshevism, which they saw 167 as the sole enemy worth joining forces against. Russia, he noted, was open to Allied troops on several sides if they wished to invade it. A Bolshevised and terrorised Russia, he said, could not be accepted into the union of democratic and free nations.

p In describing the policy of capitalist countries at that time and the place held in it by aggressive intentions towards Soviet Russia, Lenin said: ”. . .The main issue at stake is the victory of the British, French and American imperialists and their attempts to seize complete possession of the whole world, and, particularly, to destroy Soviet Russia.”  [167•* 

p The imperialist attempts to stop the advance of world socialism by armed means were repulsed. Their ultimate defeat was due not only to the exceptionally staunch resistance by the Soviet people, who put all they could into defending their revolutionary gains, but also to the class solidarity of the working people of the West with the working class of the Soviet republics and to the immense influence of revolutionary ideas. Lloyd George wrote to Philip Kerr, one of his advisers on foreign policy: “Were it known that you had gone over to Paris to prepare a plan of war against the Bolsheviks it would do more to incense organised labour than anything I can think of....”  [167•** 

p The reliance of the imperialist politicians on internal counter-revolution, which the Soviet people, led by the Bolsheviks, had routed, also ended in failure.

p The victory of the young Soviet state in single combat against the vastly superior military forces of the imperialist powers and internal counter-revolution, signified, essentially, the greatest and irreversible blow to the positions of world capitalism, although the capitalist ruling classes do not to this day admit the full depth of the defeat and the consequences it had.

p The preservation and subsequent consolidation of Soviet Russia had decisive significance for the revolutionary movement throughout the world. At the same time, it evoked 168 certain changes in imperialism’s political strategy in regard to the socialist state. “...International imperialism,” Lenin said, “has proved unable to strangle Soviet Russia, although it is far stronger, and has been obliged for the time being to grant her recognition, or semi-recognition, and to conclude trade agreements with her.”  [168•* 

p This fact had great significance. Having failed to put down the socialist system by military means, capitalism was obliged in essence to recognise the equal rights of the two property systems and had, as Lenin said, “to recognise, even if only indirectly, the collapse, the bankruptcy of the first property system and the inevitability of its coming to an agreement with the second, on terms of equality.”  [168•** 

p The disaster that befell aggressive anti-Soviet intrigues led to an even more acute struggle between the two principal trends within the capitalist world in relation to the socialist system: either to push on with attempts to destroy it by war or to somehow come to peaceful terms with it. The struggle between these two trends split the capitalist camp; it polarised political forces within each capitalist country and even within their ruling establishments. The specific political policy of the capitalist world in relation to socialism was born in the confrontation of these trends.

p The Soviet Union’s Plenipotentiary Representative in France, Leonid Krasin, addressing the French Ministers Aristid Briand and Joseph Caillaux in 1925, said: “One cannot deny that our social and political systems differ greatly, and even are antipathetic to one another. Naturally, the best thing from the point of view of any capitalist government would be to conquer and destroy us. You have conscientiously tried to do that in recent years, but you failed, and gradually many European governments have had to come to the inevitable conclusion of the need in one form or another of finding a modus vivendi for mutual proper regular relations.”  [168•*** 

p That several bourgeois governments renounced their 169 violent and armed forms of fighting socialism, as exemplified by the Soviet state, did not bring an end to the struggle between the two systems in the international arena. Although the imperialists were forced to give up armed intervention for a time and to enter into economic relations with the socialist state, they more than once tried to use the objective inevitability of these relations in their own counter– revolutionary and anti-socialist aims.

p Although they failed to suppress the Soviet state by economic methods either in the early years or later, the acute and tense battle of the capitalist countries against the Soviet Union continued in various forms.

p The economic rivalry of the two systems—to which Lenin attributed prime importance and which he described as “a kind of war, a duel between two methods, two political and economic systems—the communist and the capitalist”  [169•* — proceeded in difficult conditions for the Soviet Union. Despite its recognition by some governments, the Soviet Union was constantly confronted by the hostile attitudes of the major capitalist powers that played a leading part in the world of that time. As before, the United States stubbornly refused to recognise the Soviet Union, while recognition from other imperialist countries, including Britain, by no means meant an end to their anti-Soviet policy, to their attempts at organising a united anti-Soviet front of capitalist countries, and of the policy fraught with the threat of new wars against the Soviet Union.

p Nonetheless, the unity of imperialist policy in the fight against socialism often floundered on the rocks of the growing contradictions both between individual capitalist countries and within each one of them. The eve of the Second World War is especially instructive in that respect. The most reactionary circles in the Western countries decided to compromise with nazi Germany on an anti-Soviet basis, sacrificing both their own national interests and their allies in Central Europe. The behaviour in 1939 of the British Government in relation to the Soviet Union was described, for instance, by Lloyd George as “provocative and 170 unbelievably stupid”. The policy of anti-Soviet collusion with nazism, however, the setting of Hitler Germany against the socialist state, which has gone down in history as the Munich deal, shortly turned against its initiators.

p After the defeat of the fascist countries, with the Soviet Union making the decisive contribution to victory, aggressive, anti-socialist traits once again dominated the policy of Western countries, headed by the United States. They used every means possible in the struggle against world socialism and the states which had people’s democratic governments. In his notorious Fulton speech in 1946 Winston Churchill put forward a common programme of the aggressive American and British alliance against the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies. Insofar as the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies were, as mentioned in the Declaration of the Information Meeting of Representatives of Several Communist Parties in September 1947, had become an obstacle in the way of imperialist designs to establish world domination and to bring down democratic movements, a crusade against the Soviet Union and the new democracies was launched, backed up with threats of a new war from the most vengeful American and British imperialist politicians.

p Deprived of any chance in the early postwar years of directly resorting to arms against the Soviet Union (it possessed very strong armed forces which had been steeled in the war against nazi Germany, while popular feeling in the West, where the people regarded the Soviet Union as the main bastion of peace and democracy, would not have allowed such a war), the imperialists, however, by no means renounced their intention of using military means of deciding the outcome of the competition between the two systems. They now began a planned, far-reaching campaign of militarystrategic, economic and ideological nature designed to undermine the positions of world socialism.

p With the help of an unrestrained arms drive and atomic blackmail, which for a time brought the world to the brink of armed conflict, the imperialist politicians reckoned on preventing the rehabilitation and development of the Soviet economy, preventing the strengthening of the world 171 socialist system, hampering the growth of the workers’ movement, and suppressing the national liberation struggle in the colonies and dependencies. American imperialism built up a system of aggressive military blocs spearheaded against the Soviet Union and the other socialist states.

p The American Administration started to form special military forces from counter-revolutionary elements who had emigrated from the People’s Democracies, and earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars for training “liberation forces”. American Congressman Clement Zablocki admits that the official purpose of these forces was to overthrow the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and to resurrect the prewar order. Despite the unprecedented scale of the military and aggressive measures, they did not bring the imperialist politicians the desired results.

p The imperialists endeavoured to strangle socialism economically, counting on the huge losses that the economies of the Soviet Union and the countries of Central and Southeastern Europe which had embarked on the road to socialism had borne during the war. That was the idea behind the Battle Act adopted by American Congress and intended to isolate the socialist countries from economic ties with the West. Under US pressure, other capitalist states took the same line. Economic blockade, however, failed as a means of defeating socialism. In spite of the break in economic contacts with the West, the socialist countries restored their economies. The capitalist countries proved unable to prevent socialist construction.

p On the ideological front too, capitalism met one defeat after another: socialist ideas spread to all countries and continents. Imperialism was powerless to stop the victorious advance of the progressive ideas of our epoch. The ideology of anti-communism which lay behind the theory and practice of imperialist politicians fell into a deep crisis which is growing worse as communist ideals become embodied in practice and as communism gains new successes.

p The sharp postwar worsening of relations between countries with opposing social systems, engendered by aggressive imperialist activity, came to be known as the cold war. But the matter was not confined to general international 172 tension. Now and again armed conflicts flared up in various parts of the world, and imperialism resorted to acts of direct aggression in which, despite their local character, it was really a matter of a clash between the interests of the two world systems.

p The imperialists did not succeed in weakening the Soviet Union and the world position of socialism or in stopping the revolutionary process, despite the massive use of every type of method—military, political, economic and ideological. The overriding foreign policy aim of imperialism since 1917 had been to defeat the Soviet state, to destroy socialism, to suppress the world revolutionary movement and to reestablish the domination of capital; this policy proved a failure.

p The course of international events testified to the growing gap between the basic political aims of imperialism in relation to the socialist countries and the sharply reduced possibilities of their attainment; it testified to the exacerbation of the crisis of imperialist policy. One of the signs of this crisis is the discrediting of the political and strategic doctrines advanced by imperialism; they have become anachronisms one after the other. One recalls the Truman Doctrine, Acheson’s “positions of strength” policy, John Foster Dulles’ “brinkmanship”, and the notorious ideas of “liberation” and “rolling back communism”.

p Although neither the cold nor hot wars of the 1950s brought their proponents the desired results, the imperialists are stubbornly trying to retain in their arsenal every means of struggle against world socialism. In an attempt to destroy the forces of socialism and revolution, to maintain and strengthen their undermined and shaky positions, the imperialists are resorting to the most diverse methods of aggressive politics. The book Detente. Cold War Strategies in Transition, published in 1965 in America, says quite frankly: “The cold war has not concluded, but has entered a new and still more complex phase in which the spectrum of psychological, political, economic, and class warfare will be radically expanded. Such classic techniques as subversion, espionage, propaganda, sabotage, terrorism, deceit, and incited disorder will remain and be refined; but the new 173 techniques of nuclear blackmail arc also to be employed whenever feasible.”  [173•* 

The forces of imperialism and aggression operating in the world today are still powerful. Stubbornly seeking a way out of their foreign policy crisis, they sometimes attain partial success in increasing tension in relations between countries of the two systems.