THE world of capitalist democracy was shocked from end to end by the turn of events. Here and there one or two journalists had interpreted rightly the speeches of Stalin and Molotov and the article of Zdanov and had warned the people of the possibility of a pact between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Few had believed them. The mass of the people, and especially the Labour and Socialist Movements in every country, were taken completely by surprise. Five years of propaganda for ‘Collective Security’ had taken control of their minds. Russia had become to them so much an accepted part of the scheme that such a pact was completely outside the scope of their reckoning.
The Communist Parties also were taken by surprise. Whether Stalin and Molotov had been too preoccupied with State affairs to give attention to the Communist International, the fact is, they had not prepared this organization for the changed situation. All the parties affiliated to it had been campaigning for ‘Collective Security’ and the ‘People’s Front for the Defence of Democracy’ in which they had called upon all and sundry to unite and stand firm against the aggressor. The thought of a possible Soviet-Nazi Pact had not entered their heads. They were so busy warning everybody that the British Government was preparing a deal over Danzig that they had lost sight of the larger situation. The warnings of Stalin, Molotov, and Zdanov were regarded as pressure on democracy to force the Democratic Governments to make haste and form the ‘Peace Front’. The Communist International leaders had failed badly to prepare their forces outside Russia for the new deal.
Once the Pact was signed, however, we were told that it was ‘the greatest stroke for peace the world had ever seen’. It certainly secured peace or, as I prefer to put it, a lengthening of the ‘breathing space’, for Soviet Russia. By no stretch of imagination, however, could the claim that it helped to preserve the peace of the world be maintained. Rather might it be said that the Russians turned on the capitalist world and said: ‘We have done our best to line up the non-aggressive Powers and nations against the aggressors. They would have none of it. Hence our bargain with the aggressors. We now wash our hands of both parties.’
Molotov put the matter thus when he reported on the pact to the Supreme Soviet on 31st August, 1939: ‘As the negotiations had shown that the conclusion of a pact of mutual assistance could not be expected, we could not but explore other possibilities of ensuring peace and eliminating the danger of war between Germany and the U.S.S.R. If the British and the French Governments refused to reckon with this, that is their affair. It is our duty to think of the interests of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. All the more since we are firmly convinced that the interests of the U.S.S.R. coincide with the interests of the people of other countries.’
A spate of claims was made concerning the virtues of the pact as the politicians and writers tried to adjust themselves to the new situation. The pact had ‘shattered the anti-Comintern pact’ and ‘driven a wedge of antagonism between the aggressor Powers Japan, Italy, and Germany’. We were told that it meant that the position in the Mediterranean would now be improved for Britain and France. Mr. Pritt wrote in Light on Moscow that ‘instead of having our sea communications imperilled by Italy and Spain, and the French army cut off from its African reinforcements, we have for the present substantial if not too secure, command of the sea, etc.’ It was also said to have worked wonders in the Far East. Mr. Pritt quotes The Times diplomatic correspondent who said the pact ‘has greatly strengthened the political position of Great Britain’. Mr. Pritt added: ‘The elimination of Japan from any idea of active support of Germany has also the additional advantage for Great Britain, that it has relieved us, for the time being and to some extent, of the necessity to detach naval forces for dispatch to the Far East.’
As a matter of fact the pact did none of these things as subsequent events quickly proved. These arguments are derived from the continual refusal or inability of the Western peoples to understand the nature of the war as a world war, and to grasp the nature of Fascism in particular. They regard the war as a series of national wars only incidentally related to each other, and not as a fundamental social process, involving the fate of social systems, from which none can escape. Fascism or Nazism as a social system has been described as capitalism in desperation. There is a great deal of truth in that description. Wherever it has appeared the circumstances governing its appearance have been desperate. In each case the State is raised to pre-eminent importance. It ceases to have the appearance of impartiality which is held to be one of its principal virtues in capitalist democracy. Fascism openly suppresses all opposition, proclaims opposition to be a crime and under its banner mobilizes all social forces to the service of recovery and expansion by means of war. It does not abolish capitalism. It organizes capitalism. It is not state capitalism in which the state is the principal owner of the means of production. But through the State it organizes capitalism, limits profits, controls wages and prices, regiments the life of all classes and subordinates everything to the central aims of State aggrandisement and conquest. Its ideology is that of State worship, racial supremacy, martial values, grandiose imperialism, world supremacy.
The politicians of the democracies at first regarded these manifestations as excesses arising from the difficulties in the situation following the war of 1914-18. They excused the Fascists and their wars. But anyone who chose to consider these facts concerning the nature of Fascism or Nazism, whichever name is preferred, and who troubled to look at a map of the world with an eye on the strategical position of the Fascists, would have seen three Powers aspiring to world conquest; each of them announcing to the world their identity of interest against the ‘decadent Powers that selfishly keep the world to themselves’, and a common hatred of Bolshevism. They would have seen the world of Bolshevism consolidated and growing increasingly powerful within the frontiers of the U.S.S.R., while the ‘Democracies’ lay sluggishly spreadeagled across continents and seas. In between these empires and the Fascist Powers lay relatively weak and small countries waiting to be swallowed the moment the Fascists began to march.
Nevertheless, at every stage since Fascism set out to conquer, the big Powers thought they could turn the Fascist armies on to the U.S.S.R. and come to terms with them when they had overrun the small nations on their periphery. Their refusal to join with the Bolsheviks against this aggression has brought us to the present desperate position in which the British Empire has been thrust into the front line of the unfolding world war. Instead of the Soviet-Nazi pact bringing the advantages to the Democratic Powers foreshadowed by Mr. Pritt and others, the anti-Comintern pact was superseded by a Tri-partite Military agreement between the Fascist Powers, and Italy entered the war on the side of Germany. Instead of a march forward to world peace the world war rolled on with Russia standing on ‘neutral’ ground.
Is Russian ‘neutrality’ any different from the neutrality of any other country? The Pact itself reads as follows:—
Article 1.—The two contracting parties bind themselves to refrain from any act of force, any aggressive action and any attack upon one another, both singly and also jointly with any other Powers.
Article 2.—In the event of one of the contracting parties becoming the object of warlike action on the part of a third Power, the other Contracting Party shall in no manner support the third Power.
Article 3.—The Governments of the two Contracting Parties shall in future remain continuously in touch with one another, by way of consultation, in order to inform one another on questions touching their joint interests.
Article 4.—Neither of the two Contracting Parties shall participate in any grouping of Powers which is directed directly or indirectly against the other party.
Article 5.—In the event of disputes or disagreement arising between the two Contracting Parties on questions of this or that kind, both parties would clarify these disputes or disagreements exclusively by means of friendly exchange of opinion or, if necessary, by arbitration committees.
Article 6.—The present agreement shall be concluded for a period of ten years on the understanding that, in so far as one of the Contracting Parties does not give notice of termination one year before the end of this period, the period of validity shall automatically be regarded as prolonged for a further period of five years.
Article 7.—The present agreement shall be ratified within the shortest possible time. The instruments of ratification shall be exchanged in Berlin. The Agreement takes effect immediately after it has been signed.
According to this document it would appear that the relations between the two countries are stabilized for at least ten years. Hardly had the ink had time to dry upon the document than Russia herself proceeded to show that this was not the view of the Bolshevik leaders, whatever the opinions of their friendly advocates abroad. The German army crashed into Poland and within a few weeks had laid Poland prostrate. From the standpoint of the agreement just signed Soviet Russia should have remained ‘strictly neutral’ in this war between Germany and a foreign state. But she did nothing of the sort. Although she did not declare herself at war with Germany her own army marched into Poland and Russia asserted her right to territory which had previously been Russian and handed a part of it to Latvia which had previously been Latvian.
Nor did the Soviet Russia stop there. With remarkable swiftness she negotiated with the three Baltic States, Esthonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, whose security she had stipulated in her negotiations with Britain and France should be guaranteed against the aggressor. There was no doubt in anybody’s mind that Germany was regarded as the aggressor. Immediately Germany, Britain, and France were preoccupied with war, Russia determined to take what she had failed to secure by negotiation with Britain and France. The story is now old. Direct negotiations were started with the leaders of these states. There were agreements, political penetration, the marching in of the Red Army, direct appeals to the masses, and finally the incorporation of the three states within the frontiers of the Soviet Union.
It has been suggested that these things were done in agreement with Germany and with Nazi approval. No evidence has been produced in support of this astonishing suggestion, which, if substantiated, would mean that for the first time in history a Great Power had voluntarily withdrawn its nationals from three countries, agreed to the establishment of a rival political and social system therein, and conceded military strategical positions on land and sea directed against herself! The only realistic explanation is that the Bolsheviks took advantage of the preoccupations of the other Powers to enhance her own military position in readiness for eventualities. The Germans did not interfere because they were determined not to face a war on two fronts at this stage of the struggle.
The new situation produced still stranger developments. The Soviet Government now raised with the Finnish Government the questions of an alteration of their common frontiers and the use of military and naval bases of interest to the Soviet Union. The frontiers between the two states had been agreed upon when Soviet Russia was a comparatively weak Power exhausted by war and famine. They were disadvantageous to Russia. The south-eastern frontier of Finland, heavily fortified, came within easy gunfire of Leningrad, a great port and industrial centre of Soviet Russia. The negotiations proved futile. Finland refused to accept the terms offered by the Soviet Government. War was declared. The Red Army marched and Soviet Russia took by force what had been refused in negotiation.
A variety of arguments in justification of this act of aggression have been put forward by communists and other friends of the Soviet Union. The simplest and most fundamental explanation is that the Bolsheviks, anticipating a ‘switched war’ or a more probable attack by Germany at some future date, seized the opportune moment to smash the military preparations in the Mannerheim Line, secure the effective defence of Leningrad and the Murmansk railway, and establish themselves in outstandingly important strategic positions ready for eventualities.
The position of Germany is here of far more significance than that of Britain, France, and America, although Molotov in his speech to the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. on 20th March, 1940, made play with a quotation from The Times of 17th April, 1919. The Times then said: ‘If we look at the map we shall find that the best approach to Petrograd is from the Baltic, and that the shortest and easiest route is through Finland, whose frontiers are only about thirty miles distant from the Russian capital. Finland is the key to Petrograd and Petrograd is the key to Moscow.’ 1919 is not 1939. In 1919 Germany had no fleet. In 1940 the fleet of Nazi Germany dominated the Baltic. Germany has played a far larger part in the internal affairs of Finland since 1918 than have the other three states. It was a German army that joined with Mannerheim to crush the Finnish revolution and drive out the Bolsheviks in 1918. The dominant political party of Finland is pro-Nazi. The new strategic positions and frontiers established by the Bolsheviks as a result of their foreign policy from the date of the signing of the Soviet-Nazi Pact are contiguous to those of Germany. A glance at a map is sufficient to establish the fact that whatever interests other Powers may have in Finland and the Baltic they can do little about them without the consent of Germany. The new strategic positions secured by the Bolsheviks are therefore primarily directed against Germany. Germany’s acquiescence in these developments is an indication of her respect for the power of the Bolsheviks and her reluctance to face a war with the Soviet Union at the same time as she is measuring her strength against the West.
Nor did the Bolsheviks rest content with their achievements on their north-western and western frontiers. On 29th March, 1940, Molotov said in his report to the Supreme Soviet: ‘. . . the question of Bessarabia whose seizure by Rumania the Soviet Union has never recognized. . . we have never raised the question of recovering Bessarabia by military means.’ The Soviet Government did not let that stand in the way, but proceeded to deliver an ultimatum to Rumania demanding the return of the province under a threat of force. Rumania capitulated without a fight. The province was duly occupied by the Red Army and the frontier of the Soviet Union reached the mouth of the Danube.
Thus in twelve months a remarkable change had taken place. The ‘cordon sanitaire’ of Clemenceau designed for the Allies at Versailles was no more. The Bolsheviks had ceased to be ‘non-aggressors’ and mere defenders of the status quo. Stalin’s declaration that ‘they did not want an inch of other people’s territory’ had ‘dated’. Declarations change and treaties vanish as power relations alter. Here we must also observe that with the aggression the Bolsheviks raised the banner of social revolution. The Red Army marched into Poland calling on the workers and peasants, whose government had run away, to form their soviets. They did so. The technique varied in the three states, Latvia, Lithuania, and Esthonia. Their capitalist governments accepted the terms offered in diplomatic negotiation. The Red Army marched peacefully to its new positions with bands playing and banners flying. The people held new elections. The new Parliaments voted that the Parliamentary systems be dissolved and in their stead they established Soviet Republics and asked to join the Soviet Union. They joined.
In Finland there was still another variant. Here was a blunder, due either to over confidence or misinformation concerning the inner situation of Finland. When the war between the Soviet Union and Finland began, the Bolsheviks set up a Finnish Revolutionary People’s Government headed by Kuusinen, the Finnish Communist leader. This was done on the assumption that the Finnish workers and peasants were ready for social revolution. When it became clear that they were not, the Revolutionary Government was dropped out of the picture and the Bolsheviks made terms with the capitalist government of Finland in keeping with the original demands made in the diplomatic negotiations preceding the war. In Bessarabia there was neither an army to overcome nor a Parliament to be dissolved. The province was taken over direct from the Rumanian Government under threat of force.
Immediately it became part of the Soviet regime. Thus the frontiers of the social revolution were extended, and once more there appeared on the horizon of Europe the red glow which had blazed so brightly in 1917. From the Bolsheviks came the same call for soviets of workers and peasants where the situation was deemed ripe, the same readiness to accept a compromise decision when the situation was unripe for consummation in revolution, as in the case of Finland.
This revolutionary prelude to the period of ‘strict neutrality’ has been defended in its incidence by a variety of explanations—‘restoration of rightful frontiers’, ‘restoration of proper ethnic groupings of peoples’, ‘democratic decisions of the people’, ‘military necessity’—all of which may be correct or otherwise. The outstanding fact is, that taken together they represent a formidable extension of the socialist revolution in which the Soviet Union took the offensive, a distinctly new feature of Soviet foreign policy, but strictly in accord with the Bolshevik principles and aims I have outlined.
These developments are in flat contradiction to the ‘greatest stroke on behalf of world peace’. The signing of the Pact with Germany did not mean even peace for the Soviet Union. On the contrary it meant war, as events in Finland soon proved. It did not mean even a limitation of the spreading world war as the entrance of Italy into the war and the new tri-partite agreement of Germany, Italy, and Japan quickly demonstrated. It meant rather, a new relationship of the Powers, a spreading of the Bolshevik Revolution to include another 23,000,000 people, the elimination of buffer states between the Soviet Union and Germany; an intensification of the struggle between the rival systems of capitalism, and the onward flow of the world war to the shores of America.
Such changes in the situation should dispose of the repeated charges that the Bolsheviks are pursuing a pro-Nazi policy. Had the Bolsheviks such a partiality and a special antipathy for the Democratic Powers, it must be fairly obvious that instead of ‘strict neutrality’, based upon a non-aggression pact, the time was abundantly ripe in September, 1939, for the Soviet Union to join the tripartite combination. It has recently been announced that the Soviet Union was invited to join this group of Powers and refused. (Pravda, 18th April, 1941.) It is only necessary to consider the magnitude of this proposed combination in relation to the position of Britain and France in September, 1939, and the fact that it has not happened, although certain persons in this country did their best to bring it about, to realize that there is a fundamental stumbling block in the way of its being freely established. That stumbling block is nothing other than the completely different aims and character of the political and social systems represented by the Soviet Union and the Fascist Powers. The sooner we accept the statement of the Bolshevik leaders that they are pursuing an independent policy the less likelihood will there be of miscalculating the trend of events.
M. Kalinnin, the President of the Soviet Union, said in a recent speech that his country was ‘a beleaguered country’—a country surrounded by enemies. These enemies are held off by their own quarrels. Could they compound those quarrels they would unite to dispose of her. That is how the Bolsheviks regard the world outside the frontiers of the Soviet Union. Still fresh in their memory are the years of intervention, the years of contumely and insult, the knowledge of the ceaseless conspiracies to resume intervention on a grand scale and the bitterness resulting from their frustrated efforts from 1934 to 1939 to secure collective security against aggression.
It is a mistake therefore to assume that the Bolsheviks were pro-British and pro-French when they were striving for collective security against the aggressor, or that they became pro-Nazi when they signed the non-aggression pact with Germany. They are simply pro-Bolshevik. Their interest in collective security was based on two principal considerations—to stave off war with Germany at the head of an anti-Bolshevik combination and to prevent Nazi-Germany becoming all powerful in Europe. They struggled for collective security under the banner of peace because the combined power of the Soviet Union and the Democracies at that time was overwhelmingly greater than that of the Axis Powers, and was so deployed, that in the event of war the Fascists would have been faced with a war on all fronts. The least such a combination would have secured was a considerable postponement of the conflict. Although the Soviet-Nazi pact secured the postponement of the conflict for the Soviet Union, the prospect of Nazi triumph over Europe and the British Empire is not viewed with unconcern by the Bolsheviks. They also have read Mein Kampf and understand the nature of Fascism. They know that such a victory would confront them with an aggressive Power such as the world has never seen, a nation drunk with power and pledged by word and by its programme to mortal combat with Bolshevism. That outcome no Russian Bolshevik contemplates with equanimity however confident he may be of the strength and power of the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks know that however strong the desire may be in the ranks of the British ruling class for a war against Soviet Russia as ‘the main enemy’ Britain would be compelled by the nature of its geographical position to find another nation to be the spearhead of the attack. This fact lies behind all the conspiracies for ‘Four Power Pacts’ and the like. Britain alone cannot invade Russia. Even Britain victorious over a defeated Germany cannot invade Russia. Hence the efforts of the Bolsheviks to secure a military alliance with Britain and France before the latter were thrust into the war they did not want and could not avoid while they acted on their own.
But there were other reasons for the attempted alignment with the Democracies. However much the Bolsheviks decried the political democracy of capitalism as a ‘sham democracy’ they regarded it as preferable to the Nazi terror system which destroys the working class organizations. This consideration has been overridden by circumstances for which they deny all responsibility. Now they wait on events, proclaiming that ‘We stand for peace and the strengthening of business relations with all countries. . . . That is our position; and we shall adhere to it as long as other countries maintain like relations with the Soviet Union and as long as they make no attempt to trespass, directly or indirectly, on the integrity and inviolability of the frontiers of the U.S.S.R.’.
We can now sum up what the new phase of ‘strict neutrality’ has to tell us in the light of the history of Bolshevik policy. Its ‘revolutionary prelude’ tells us as plainly as any event can do that the Soviet Union will take the offensive in the cause of world socialism and use its military forces to that end wherever the Bolsheviks consider the situation ripe for such an offensive. Where the capitalist class firmly holds the reigns of power in any country, they will come to terms with it on the basis of mutual respect for each other’s power and the mutual regard for the state interests of each. They are not interested in ‘aggression’ or ‘non-aggression’ as ends in themselves but only as they effect the defence of the Soviet Union and the advance of the social forces making for its security. They will manœuvre as hitherto to prevent the capitalist Powers of the world making a united block against the Soviet Union and determine their relations with this or that Power accordingly. The Bolsheviks are not interested in peace as an end in itself but peace on conditions. These conditions are primarily concerned with the integrity of the Soviet Union and its interests. But the presence of a revolutionary situation in the countries beyond its frontiers, especially those within easy reach of its forces, would undoubtedly set the Red Army on the march.
The interests, direct and indirect, of U.S.S.R. are by no means confined to one frontier or one sea. Let us examine them.
Next: 7. ‘Interests—Direct and Indirect’