Constant Reader Khruschev’s Foreign Policy

SOME Communist Party members objected loudly when a speaker from the Socialist Labour League’s platform in Hyde Park on May Day criticized the Soviet Government for not having done more against the rulers of South Africa, to help the Algerian revolution, and. so on.

Now, the Marxist movement has traditionally taken a realistic attitude on this question of what the Soviet Union can be expected to do by way of participation in the struggle inside other countries. When, for instance, in 1933, Fenner Brockway, then a spokesman of the Independent Labour Party, called on the Soviet Union to break off trading and diplomatic relations with Hitler’s Germany, and referred to something Trotsky had written two years previously, Trotsky took him up sharply on the matter. The forced collectivization of the peasants in Russia had thrown that country into such a crisis, economic and political, that any such action as Brockway advocated would now do more harm to the Soviet State than to the Nazis!

The main alibi for the Soviet Union in relation to the world revolution all through the 1930s and 1940s was the country’s relative weakness. On this pretext the Soviet government did much less to help the revolutionary movement abroad than it had done when in some ways even weaker, in the middle 1920s, when Soviet aid to the Chinese revolution was famous or notorious according to one’s point of view. After three months’ support of ‘non-intervention’ in Spain in 1936 the Soviet government, it is true, began sending arms and technicians to help the Republicans—but it soon became apparent that the purpose of this was more to keep Spain from taking the path of social revolution than anything else, and Soviet intervention in its political aspects played a major role in ensuring the victory of Franco.

Today, we are constantly being told by the Communist Party, and not without justification, how strong the Sovict Union has become, what a tremendous world power it now 3s, etc. Very well, then, the arguments for ‘non-intervention’ which are based on Soviet weakness no longer have any validity. Why does not the Soviet government do those things which were advocated from the SLL platform on May Day?

It is appropriate to quote here some words spoken by a Soviet leader in 1925 criticizing those who failed ‘to understand the elementary demand of internationalism, by virtue of which the victory of socialism in one country is not an end in itself, but a means of developing and supporting the revolution in other countries... .’

‘Support the liberation movement in China? But why? Wouldn’t that be dangerous? Wouldn't it bring us into conflict with other countries? Wouldn’t it be better if we supported “spheres of. influence” in China in conjunction with other “advanced” powers and snatched something from China for our own benefit? . . . Such is the new type of nationalist “frame of mind”, which is ‘trying to liquidate the foreign policy of the October Revolution and is cultivating the elements of degeneration.’

The speaker, of course, was the late J. V. Stalin; and the passage will be found on pages 169 and 170 of the English edition of Volume 7 of his Works. I reccmmend it for consideration by honest internationalist members of the Communist Party, in relation to the foreign policy of Khrushchev.

Gallagher versus Tom Mann Willie Gallagher’s article in the Daily Worker of April 22, on the occasion of Lenin’s birthday, was notable for his bringing in, amid his reminscences of Lenin in 1920, of a reference to Trotsky. ‘Lenin’s contemporary Trotsky was also a brilliant, striking figure, but full of vanity. In conversation you couldn’t think of the Revolution for thinking about Trotsky.’

Nobody else but Trotsky gets a mention alongside Lenin in this article. That reflects, of course, the actual situation in 1920, when all over the world men spoke of ‘Lenin and Trotsky’ together, and nobody but Trotsky was ever linked in this way with Lenin. -Not so long ago, Gallagher would have had to bring in a phoney reference to Stalin in this connection—as in fact he did in his autobiography. Let no one deny that there has been progress in respect for truth since 1956!

But as-regards Gallagher’s impression of Trotsky’s personality—well, perhaps that tells us more about Gallagher than about Trotsky. One can at any rate set against it the impression carried away by another old-timer, Tom Mann, as recorded in his pamphlet ‘Russia in 1921’, published by the British Bureau of the Red International of Labour Unions.

‘I was introduced to comrade Trotsky’, recalls Tom Mann. ‘Much more like his portraits than is the case with Lenin. Trotsky is different in type from Lenin, yet similarly lovable, quiet and kindly in conversation, equal at any moment to light pleasantries or the weightier matters of State. Fate has rendered service to mankind in bringing along two such men as comrades, the one the complement of the other.’

No Menshevik He A reader has kindly sent us a collection of pamphlets published by various British working-class organizations in the period just after the first world war. Among them is one by Maxim Litvinov, later Stalin’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, entitled ‘The Bolshevik Revolution, Its Rise and Meaning’, which was published in 1918 by the British Socialist Party— the nucleus around which the Communist Party was formed two years later.

I wonder how this pamphlet would strike the average Communist Party member of,today, brought up on the legend that Trotsky was a Menshevik, Litvinov explains that the Menshevik position was ‘that the revolution must be regarded essentially as one similar to those which had preceded it in Europe, that is, as a bourgeois revolution destined to bring the capitalist class to power and establish a bourgeois State.’ The Bolsheviks, however, ‘were of the opinion that inasmuch as the hegemony in the revolution belonged to the working class, with which the landless peasantry was in alliance, it must and should lead to the establishment of the proletarian rule, and at least to a considerable modification of the bourgeois State in a socialist direction. Trotsky went so far as to assert that the State could be directly established on socialist lines.’

Trotsky thus, on Litvinov’s showing, took up a position which, far from being ‘Menshevik’, was actually in advance of the Bolshevik position down to Lenin’s return to Russia in April, 1917. And when Lenin, in his ‘April Theses’, moved to Trotsky’s standpoint, this at first shocked the other Bolshevik leaders: in Litvinov’s words, ‘Lenin’s own closest friends shrank from it and refused to accept it.’

Bevin And Stalin

When a colleague put it to me that there were points of similarity between the career and role of Stalin in the Russian labour movement in the 1920s and those of Bevin in the’ British labour movement in the 1930s I did not at first sce what he was driving at. After reading Alan Bullock’s ‘Life and Times of Ernest Bevin: Volume 1, 1881-1940’ (Heinemann, 50s.), I now see his idea.

Stalin emerged to play his distinctive part in Russia against a background of exhaustion of the working class following the efforts of the civil war years, accompanied by apathy and demoralization due to the failure of the revolution in Germany. The basis of ‘Bevinism’ was similarly provided by the consequences of the failure of the General Strike in 1926, ihe mass unemployment of the slump years and the betray! by MacDonald and Co. in 1931, together with the crushing of che German and Austrian labour movements by fascism in 1933 Bullock quotes Bevin’s reply to Arthur Cook at the 1928 Trades Union Congress: ‘It is all very well for people to talk as if the working class of Great Britain are cracking their shins for a fight and a revolution, and we are holding them back. Are they? There are not many of them as fast as we are ourselves.’ And at the 1932 Trades Union Congress he was able to oppose a resolution for workers’ action to stop the transport of munitions to Japan, then in the early stages of her invasion of China, by jeering: ‘I have heard the nonunionist say: “Why don’t the dockers hold up munitions?” while he is looking for a job to make them.’

Bevin used the circumstances of the defeat of the German labour movement as an argument in favour of heresy-hunting and proscription: ‘If you do not keep down the Communists you cannot keep down the Fascists’, he told the 1934 Labour Party conference. ‘Our friends on the continent failed at the critical moment to maintain discipline as we propose to do now. This is where they went wrong and they got eaten out and undermined; when they had to take action, half of their members were in one party, half in the other.’

At the crucial Labour Party conference of 1935 he played upon panicky awareness of the contrast between the advance of fascism on the Continent and the apparent incapacity of the labour movement to resist, so as to break down the movement’s traditional attitudes to imperialist war: ‘People have been on this platform today talking about the destruction of capitalism. The thing that is being wiped out is the trade union movement. It is we who are being wiped out and who will be wiped out if Fascism comes here.’

Bevin’s notorious ‘anti-intellectual’ obsession falls into place here. Because of the temporary weakness of the working class itself, the Left in Britain in the 1930s (as in Russia in the 1920s) presented a disproportionately ‘intellectual’ appearance. Bevin, like Stalin, exploited this situation to the full to prevent the growth of support for Left tendencies among the workers. Surely no true horny-handed son of toil would be so lacking in self-respect (he loved to bellow) as to listen to these lawyers, historians, journalists and such-like rubbish, who were by definition a mob of cranks without any knowledge of the realities of working-class life?

BRIAN PEARCE.