STALIN'S MOTIVES
Fischer, Louis
Stalin s Motives By LOUIS FISCHER RUSSIAN foreign policy is very much in the news and very much misunderstood. The foreign policy of any country reflects and complements domestic policy and...
...she obviously does not want to annex any territory," forgetting that Russia did annex the Baltic states and parts of Finland, Poland, and Rumania in 1939 and 1940, and demanded Turkish territory in 1945...
...It was Russian nationalism...
...This is the source of the friction among the Big Three...
...Now, therefore, Moscow has befriended Ukrainian nationalism...
...Nor do I believe that the United States needs Okinawa for its security or that Britain needs India or Malaya for its safety...
...All peoples in the Soviet Union were equals...
...The Soviet population must now undertake the heart-breaking task of rebuilding what was so recently built at such tremendous cost...
...The defeat of Germany and Italy, and the weakness of France, created a vast power vacuum in Europe...
...So he took what he could...
...SIMILARLY, Stalin gives the Great Russians the Baltic states and a piece of Finland...
...The supremacy of one race or the idea that one nation ought to lead or control another was abhorrent to the Bolsheviks...
...Hence the treaties which Moscow has been negotiating with Hungary, Rumania, and other countries in Russia's new sphere of influence...
...The individual's tribute to his country was a constant burden, and terror added to tension...
...It failed...
...I do not believe it is...
...It was Bolshevik doctrine that an Ukrainian workingman, for instance, was much more akin to a Chinese workingman or to a French workingman than to an Ukrainian capitalist...
...Under the old policy, no people was the leader...
...In the 1920's and 1930's, Moscow endeavored to crush Ukrainian nationalism through several bloody purges which were alluded to at the time in the Soviet press...
...Britain and the United States, and France, consequently feel that Russia has seized the lion's share of the European power vacuum...
...Russia," they say, "is such a big country...
...Security has ever been the excuse of the imperialist and aggressor...
...Motive Number Two of Soviet foreign policy is economic...
...The defeat of Japan created a vast power vacuum in Asia, notably in China...
...Russia," they say, merely seeks security and friendly neighbors...
...The Soviet Ukraine had over 40 million inhabitants before the war...
...But about 1935, a new trend became noticeable...
...When it comes to interpreting Stalin's acts .owards the non-Soviet world, therefore, voice and pen commentators try to substitute "logic" for the facts they do not possess...
...SOVIET teaching used to go to show that what counted was class and one's position in the economic order, not the shade of one's skin or the shape of one's head or the place of one's birth...
...These are deductions reached without reference to what has been happening inside Russia...
...Russia," they say, "is now concentrating on the difficult task of postwar reconstruction and has no interest in foreign expansion," forgetting that foreign territories might be a lucrative source of materials and machines for Russian reconstruction...
...Motive Number Three is opportunity...
...This emphasis on blood ties conflicts with the fundamental tenets of Communism, Socialism, and Bolshevism, and with earlier Leninist practices in the Soviet Union...
...Today it is common Soviet usage to distinguish the Russians as the leading nationality...
...Dynamic nationalism needs food, and the food of nationalism is territory...
...Nationalist frenzy then became the motor fuel of Hitler's engine of aggression...
...A rich prize, larger than any that has tempted the nation for many decades, lies waiting in the arena of international politics...
...Each of the Big Three either wishes to occupy as much of the vacuum as possible, or, at least, to prevent the other from occupying the vacuum...
...The Soviet Union used to be the country of internationalism...
...Since then the Soviet Government, with characterictic pen-dulumism and energy, has fostered not only Russian nationalism but also Ukrainian nationalism and the concept of Slav brotherhood...
...IT will be noticed that I have not included security as one of the motives of Soviet foreign policy...
...This loot-sharing would then, they expected, constitute the basis of the postwar settlement which the Big Three would be interested in sustaining: Events have taken a different turn...
...This explains the tense rivalry recorded every day in the newspapers...
...But in the ebb and flow of the Soviet-German war and through deliberate Hitlerite vandalism, a big fraction of Soviet industrial achievements in European Russia was pulverized...
...This tended to make the Ukrainian workingman an internationalist instead of an Ukrainian nationalist...
...And he tells the Russian people at a banquet in the Kremlin on May 24, 1945, that they are "the leading power of all the peoples of the Soviet Union...
...The United States wonders about Russia's designs in China, The laws of equilibrium are not easy to observe in a vacuum...
...The aggressors were actuated more by opportunity than by necessity...
...Motive Number One of Soviet foreign policy is nationalism...
...Stalin looked out into Europe and saw no one who would stop him...
...Tadjika, Armenians, Ukrainians, Russians, Uzbeks, enjoyed the same rights on the same level...
...In this respect, the Bolsheviks were poles apart from the Nazis who put race above class, who, indeed, cultivated the feeling of race so as to create a nationalist frenzy that would end the war of the classes...
...Stalin undertook to bring all non-Soviet Ukrainians under the Soviet flag...
...Russia feels that America covets an inordinate share of the Asiatic power vacuum...
...The foreign policy of any country reflects and complements domestic policy and domestic conditions...
...For most persons, however, the Soviet Union is an intellectually closed area, "a riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma," as Winston Churchill said in 1939...
...To this end he has annexed the Ukrainian areas of Poland, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia (Carpatho-Russ or Carpatho-Ukraine...
...Outsiders have little appreciation of the political and physical strain under which Russia has lived since 1916...
...Great things were achieved...
...Governments act more often because they can than because they must...
...Now international politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum...
...Originally the Russians and their foreign supporters, as well as some Americans and Englishmen who believed in a power-politics peace, hoped that the spoils of World War II would be distributed amicably among the Big Three...
...I traced the development of this trend in my book, Men and Politict, which was published in 1941...
...Russian and Ukrainian nationalisms rounded out by Slavism with its magazine called Slavs published monthly in Moscow, and abetted by the newly-reestablished Greek Orthodox church, are Bolshevism's battering ram in the Balkans...
...The Kremlin authorities want to hasten the process and cut its price to the people by dovetailing the economy of Eastern and Central Europe with Soviet economy and making half of Europe work for Soviet reconstruction...
...a backward nation erected many new cities and vast industrial enterprises whose output helped smash the Nazis...
Vol. 9 • November 1945 • No. 45
