Gendarme of the Revolution: The Soviet Union in the Interregnum Era (3 of 3)

Gendarme of the Revolution: The Soviet Union in the Interregnum Era

“This Gargantuan Machine of Social Disorder”: The Soviet Union Looks Abroad (Part 3 of 3) ​

_Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract bourgeois-universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete facts concerning the development of the productive forces in a given time and place. The individual may say for himself: “Fiat justitia, pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish),” but the proletarian state has no right to say so in the name of the international working class who is in its care. While the individual has a moral right to sacrifice himself in defense of a moral principle, the state has no right to let its moral disapprobation get in the way of successful political action which advances the interests of the international proletariat.

-_Hans Morgenthau, lecture in Konigsberg, 1938

The United States is not only the strongest, but also the most terrified country. One wonders if the blind fits of rage this terror induces cannot be put to good use.

-Leon Trotsky, 1937, declassified Sovnarkom conversation​

Excerpts from The March From Periphery to Center: The Soviet Union in the Interregnum World-System, Immanuel Wallerstein, in The Zurich Journal of Public Policy(Zurich: 1982)

…The beginning of the Interregnum Era brought with it a situation unprecedented in the history of capitalism: the emergence of an alternate world-system operating with its own functional logic, encompassing a sufficiently large portion of the globe to resist the typical methods of capitalist penetration. Though neither bloc was hermetically sealed off from the other, the circulation of goods, peoples, and capital were subjected to political controls which ensured that economic linkages would be a mere shadow of their levels before the Great War. In short, the process of economic deglobalization which began during the Great War continued during the following period, with neither the Stockholm Conference agreements nor the minor, mostly under-the-table agreements reached earlier serving to substantially revitalize global trade.

Claims of Proletarian Internationalism and Solidarity notwithstanding, the World-System constructed by IntRevMar in the Interregnum Era recapitulated key elements of the core-periphery structure of the capitalist world. Germany, which before the war had the largest and most advanced industry on the continent, emerged from it in a significantly stronger position to expand its metallurgy, steel-working, electrical engineering, and machinery production and emerge as the key industrial power of the new bloc. This was due in no small part to the impoverished and predominantly agricultural nations of Southeast and East Europe, which were now tied by the new trade structure to German trade. The Junkers and Industrialists had achieved their mitteleuropa, even if they had to observe it from afar, in New York and London.

Yet in the admittedly lurid fantasies of these self-same industrialists, Russia was to become a mere hinterland of German power, a kind of economic colony which absorbed German capital, provided the metropole with cheap food and resources, and offered a captive market for overpriced capital goods. The socialists, of course, hardly endorsed such a neo-imperialist vision, but Germany nonetheless gained enormous prestige within IntRevMar by virtue of being the most industrialized - and hence proletarianized - of socialist nations. Particularly in the 1920s, the Soviets displayed a kind of studied deference to Germany in diplomatic relations, and looked to German Universities, German political institutions, and German technical innovations as potential models. Russia did indeed become a key supplier of raw materials and foodstuffs to Central Europe; in return, it bought capital goods, sustaining German industrialization and tempering its chronic over-capacity. Such a relationship had all the marks of what we would call - in the capitalist context - one between the core and periphery. Yet Russia did not remain on the periphery - not even for very long. Russia was able to leverage its position to become, by the early 40s at the latest, the first amongst equals within the socialist world-order. How did a peripheral nation march so quickly, and so confidently, to the core?

The answer has to do both with the Soviet Union’s position within the international system and with certain distinct advantages it possessed by virtue of its own political institutions. Perhaps most obviously, the bargaining power of a raw-material exporter is more substantial when they are the only party which can provide the resource in the required quantity. While food continued to flow, unevenly, from the British dominions into the socialist world, non-ferrous metals and oil - demand for which rose at a significant clip in the 1930s - could not be supplied in the same quantities from outside the socialist bloc. Trade itself became increasingly politicized in the latter half of the Interregnum Era, due to both spiralling civilizational and “geopolitical” anxieties and chronic balance-of-payments disequilibria. The predictable consequence was that the Soviet Union became irreplaceable not just as a granary, but also as an oil field and provisioner of mineral wealth.

Patterns of resource flows only constitute one small part of the picture, however. More important, over the long-term, was the position of the Soviet State itself, which made it more capable of projecting power abroad than any of its socialist counterparts. By now, the old canard of socialist “Authoritarianism” has been replaced by a more balanced appreciation of the peculiar limits of the Central European polities. Italy and the Netherlands, in particular, had strong traditions of pacifism and substantial anti-war sentiment which prevented the militarization of society and the formation of large standing armies. Even in Germany, where anti-war feeling was tempered by anti-American and anti-British animus, the so-called “permanent volunteer” groups were substantially smaller than the pre-war German Army. The All-Union German Congress exercised stringent oversight over military budgets, skeptical of projects which did not possess a dual-use, civilian rationale.

In contrast to the Central European states, the Soviet Union had a fundamentally different settlement with its domestic population, and was therefore more capable of acting independently from society. A standing, professional army could be built up without inviting civilian rebuke. By the beginning of the Second Revolutionary Era, the Soviet Union possessed landship forces nearly twice as large as the rest of the bloc combined. Soviet armored divisions stationed in Germany and the Netherlands were a vital element of contingency planning in the event of a war with the Atlantic Union, which envisioned a rapid, overwhelming offensive into Western France to deprive the Atlantic states of a staging area on the continent.

The military dimension cannot be separated from the geographic one. A standing army of the Soviet scale would have been a far less significant asset had it remained confined to the interior of Eurasia; its decisive importance derived from the Soviet Union’s capacity to project it westward along overland routes that the Atlantic Union’s naval supremacy could not interdict. Here the deglobalization of the world-market, which in other respects constrained the socialist bloc, worked to the Soviet’s advantage. As maritime commerce became increasingly hostage to the political calculations of hostile naval powers, the value of continental integration rose correspondingly. The rail networks and pipelines that bound the Soviet Union to Central Europe were not merely conduits of trade but the sinews of a continental war-making capacity that did not depend upon the sea. The Soviet Union became, in effect, the strategic reservoir of the entire socialist world.

This continentalization had a structural consequence that few of the participants grasped at the time. The more the socialist bloc’s military and economic security came to depend upon overland integration, the more central the Soviet Union became to the bloc’s functioning, and the less the relationship resembled the German-centered core-periphery structure with which the Interregnum had begun. By the early 1940s, the question was no longer whether Russia would remain a German economic hinterland, but whether Germany’s industrial preeminence could continue to command the ideological and political deference that it had enjoyed in the 1920s, when Soviet material dependence had been more unidirectional.

It is this divergence between the structure of material and military power and the structure of ideological-cultural prestige that constitutes one of the most significant and least understood features of the late Interregnum socialist world-system. The cultural authority of Central European socialism rested upon foundations which had nothing to do with raw material endowments or the size of armored formations. It was constructed upon the density of German and Italian proletarian society, the sophistication of their socialist intellectual traditions, the council democracy that the Central European states embodied and the Soviet Union conspicuously did not, and the simple historical fact that Marxism was a German doctrine that the Soviet Union had received rather than originated. Germany - and, to a lesser extent, Italy and the Netherlands - were models of what socialism was meant to look like in practice, whereas the Soviet Union was spoken of always as an “experiment”, an attempt to build socialism in unpropitious conditions.

Yet the real material power of the Soviet Union flowed from exactly those features of the Soviet model that the Central European socialists regarded with the deepest suspicion: the developmental dictatorship, the relative autonomy of a state apparatus that could act without continuously deferring to a mobilized proletarian society, and above all the capacity to project military force on a scale that the Central European polities, with their pacifist traditions and political oversight of military budgets, could neither match nor entirely approve. The socialist model that produced the most usable power was thus also the model that commanded the least ideological authority, while the socialist model that commanded the most ideological authority was the model that produced the least usable power. This was not a temporary imbalance to be corrected by the further development of either model but a structural contradiction internal to the socialist world-system.

The contradiction was, for a time, capable of being managed. The Central European states provided the ideological and cultural leadership that legitimated the bloc; the Soviet Union provided the material and military foundation that secured it. So long as the two functions reinforced one another, the division of labor within the socialist world-system constituted a genuine complementarity. The Sverdlov-era doctrine of studied Soviet deference to Central European leadership was the diplomatic expression of this complementarity, and it held, with increasing strain, through the final years of the Interregnum.

What disrupted it was not a failure internal to the socialist world-system but the intrusion of the broader crisis that the Atlantic Union’s own contradictions were generating. As the colonial periphery entered into open revolt and the capitalist core descended into the fiscal and political turmoil that would define the Second Revolutionary Era, the socialist bloc faced strategic decisions about the extent of support for different colonial insurgencies, the management of confrontations with the Atlantic Union, and the acceptable risks of escalation that could no longer be resolved through the older formula. These were decisions in which material and military power were the decisive currency, and in matters of material and military power, the Soviet Union held the preponderance. The Central European states were thus forced to choose between making fundamental domestic changes in an effort to rewrite the balance of power within the socialist bloc, or else becoming increasingly dependent upon the Soviet Union. The structural contradiction between military-economic power and revolutionary prestige, productive so long as the bloc faced no decisions forcing a decisive choice between them, became acute the moment they could no longer be deferred. It is to the working-out of this contradiction, under the specific pressures of the so-called “Second Revolutionary Era”, that the final section of this essay must now turn…

Excerpts from Red Behemoth: Soviet Military and Ideological Expansion in the Interregnum Era, Adam Ulam in The Journal of Soviet Studies (Boston: 1961)

In spite of its colossal scale and generous buffer of friendly socialist states, the Soviet Union that emerged from the First Revolutionary Era was not a satiated power willing to adjust itself to a new, rules-based international order. It was a revolutionary state that had achieved sufficient territorial security and administrative capacity to project its power outward with a confidence perhaps unprecedented among regimes born from civil war.

The Sverdlov Doctrine

The Sverdlov era, running from Lenin’s death in 1923 through Sverdlov’s retirement from active leadership in 1934, established the basic patterns of Soviet external behavior. Sverdlov’s specific political character has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention, and the consensus that has emerged in recent years correctly identifies him as the pioneering organizational genius who reconciled Marxism’s universalist commitments with the practical requirements of state-building in a manner that neither Lenin nor any of the other Bolshevik figures of comparable stature could have accomplished. Sverdlov, however, was not simply a pragmatic mediator and state-builder; he was also a revolutionary leader who recognized that the Soviet state’s territorial scale, military power, degree of state autonomy, and geographical security could be deployed in service of revolutionary objectives that the more constrained socialist movements to the West could not pursue as systematically.

The 1923 interventions, near the end of the First Revolutionary Era, established the characteristic pattern which would be repeated over many decades. The Soviets leveraged their strategic position to push down into the rimlands of Eurasia at disparate points: Kurdish nationalism was weaponized against Turkey and the British presence in Iraq; troops were deployed to shore up the ailing agrarian-socialist government in Bulgaria and win its permanent sympathy and allegiance; existing discontent with Chinese authority in Xinjiang became a pretext to support secessionism and then incorporation; Afghan support for Central Asian nationalists was used as a pretext to launch devastating border raids. Rather than permit revolutionary opportunities to develop spontaneously, the Soviet state would deploy its military-organizational resources to create them opportunistically. The Sverdlov doctrine, though never formally articulated, can be inferred from practice: revolutionary advance in both the colonial and European periphery was to be determined not by objective social-historical conditions, but rather by the Soviet capacity to intervene and its adversaries’ ability to effectively respond.

Sverdlov did not pursue territorial expansion in the same manner as nineteenth-century imperial leaders. He did not attempt to conquer territories that lay beyond the Soviet Union’s existing sphere or, with a few exceptions, to absorb populations whose incorporation would have created onerous burdens. The Kurdish state that emerged from the 1923 operation became a Soviet client whose continued existence depended on protection but whose population the Soviet Union had no intention of absorbing. The Mongolian arrangement that the same period established initially produced a sphere of influence without imposing the costs of direct administration, and when it was folded into the Soviet Union’s sovereignty, much of the local government remained unchanged.

This pattern of indirect projection through limited intervention allowed the Soviet Union to maintain pressure on the Atlantic Union containment system across a continental frontier extending from the Anatolian plateau to the Pacific without committing the resources that direct confrontation would require. It produced a network of client states and dependent revolutionary movements that extended Soviet influence well beyond what its formal territorial boundaries would suggest. And it was politically sustainable in ways that more ambitious expansionism would not be, because each individual intervention was small enough to be presented as a defensive response to specific local conditions rather than as part of a larger strategy of expansion.

Military Expansion: Armies and Infrastructure

The military instruments that the Sverdlov strategy required were built up steadily throughout the interregnum period. The conventional analysis of Soviet military capacity has focused on the size and equipment of the standing army, developments in armored technology and the construction of a submarine force capable of breaking into the North Sea and Mediterranean. This analytical framework, derived from Atlantic Union military doctrine and the institutional preoccupations of the American and British general staffs, consistently missed what was most significant about Soviet military development. The Soviet armed forces were organized not merely for the prosecution of conventional inter-state war, but for the specific tasks that the Sverdlov doctrine required: quick deployment to distant theaters, on-going logistical support for client forces abroad, the maintenance of sizable garrison commitments across multiple frontiers simultaneously, and the integration of military operations with the political and organizational work that revolutionary intervention required.

Corresponding to the increase in military capacity was a breakneck expansion of Soviet transport infrastructure throughout the 1930s. Regardless of the claimed intentions of its leaders, new railways, ports, and canals served ultimately as a mechanism for the rapid projection of Soviet Power into theaters frequently thousands of miles away from Moscow. The standardization of rail gauges and the expansion of eastern rail lines in the 1930s between Russia and Germany permitted entire Soviet divisions to reach the French Worker and Soldier’s Republic in less than a week. ‘Commercial’ rail upgrades in Central Asia substantially increased British commitments in India by threatening a Soviet invasion in the event of another Indian revolt. And the colossal revamping of the Trans-Siberian railway - including the addition of two trunk lines - placed China and Japan under the permanent shadow of Soviet power.

Infrastructural expansion enabled increasing commercial and military integration with the states of Central Europe, directly challenging the emerging deterrence architecture. American and Soviet military planners alike recognized that a concerted socialist drive into Western France could not, in practice, be parried by the limited American presence in the area. American deterrence therefore depended primarily on delaying a socialist advance while hoping that the costs that a naval blockade would impose on socialist states would convince them to come to a negotiated settlement. Soviet infrastructure expansion in turn aimed to secure routes of overland trade that could make the socialist bloc meaningfully autarkic, rendering American retaliation inconsequential.

The deployment of more than one hundred thousand Soviet troops in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands by the mid-1930s, a fact reported in the Soviet press without apparent embarrassment and confirmed by every credible Western intelligence assessment, was the most visible manifestation of this military posture. The Soviet literature has consistently characterized this deployment as the natural consequence of the increase in American expeditionary forces in Western France. This propaganda evades the more important strategic reality: the Soviet forward deployment in Central Europe created a permanent military fact that shaped every aspect of the European balance. It made any Atlantic Union military challenge to the socialist position in Western Europe a direct challenge to Soviet forces, raising the threshold of any potential confrontation to levels that no Atlantic Union administration would be willing to contemplate, and granting the Soviet leadership a permanent military presence at the heart of European industrial civilization that no comparable Atlantic deployment could match.

This integration of Soviet military presence within the broader IntRevMar framework represented one of the Soviet leadership’s most sophisticated institutional achievements in the Interregnum Era. It granted the Soviet Union significant strategic benefits from its forward deployment: political leverage over the European socialist states, intelligence access to Central European political and economic conditions, and the ability to influence socialist bloc decision-making at moments of crisis. Simultaneously, it allowed it to present the deployment as a service rendered to the bloc’s collective security rather than a mere instrument of Soviet power.

Ideological Expansion: The Soviet Propaganda War

The ideological dimension of Soviet expansion has been frequently under-emphasized, even though it is arguably the most consequential. Sverdlov and his successors have understood that the revolutionary project requires the continued advance of revolutionary socialism into additional territories. The revolutionary state is dependent upon a continued propaganda drive of eschatological intensity for its domestic legitimacy. This understanding has driven a sustained Soviet investment in the institutional and intellectual architecture of international revolutionary activity that has no parallel in global history.

The Anti-Colonial Committee of IntRevMar, formally a multilateral body representing the entire socialist bloc, has in practice been frequently influenced by Soviet preferences. Its operational decisions about which anti-colonial movements to support, what forms of support to provide, and what political conditions to attach to that support have frequently reflected Soviet strategic priorities even when these have diverged from the preferences of other socialist states. In this sense the Committee became, if not a Soviet instrument, then at least a forum in which Soviet power could rarely be ignored. It is worth noting, however, that the Sverdlov doctrine’s specific orientation of supporting movements that weaken imperialism regardless of their specific social composition has not consistently prevailed over the more demanding ideological standards that German, Italian, Dutch, and Hungarian socialists have advocated. Precisely for this reason, there existed sustained independent Soviet investment in anti-colonial movements across the African, Asian, and Middle Eastern peripheries that brought it into conflict with the IntRevMar anti-colonial committee.

The larger dimensions of this projection deserve attention. The Soviet State funded agitational movements through a network of intermediary institutions, such as cooperative federations, cultural exchange programs, IntRevMar-affiliated publishing houses, technical assistance offices, and ostensibly private commercial firms that operate with sufficient deniability to permit Soviet officials to disclaim direct responsibility for specific revolutionary activities. The Druze funding scandal that prompted the IntRevMar formal inquiry of 1925 revealed only the most visible portion of this network, and the inquiry’s findings, predictably, identified institutional irregularities while leaving the underlying pattern of Soviet covert support substantially intact. Over the 1930s, Soviet educational programs would become particularly important as an alternative to the German and Italian anti-colonial network, which was affiliated more closely with IntRevMar’s committees.

Unlike the Central European states, the Soviet Union possessed a geographical position which permitted it to easily interfere with existing colonial arrangements. The Kurdish Republic was a vital beachhead into the Arab World, and the Soviets used it as a site to make contact with and patronize important figures in the rapidly crystallizing movement of Arab Nationalism. Azerbaijani separatists continued to receive support from Baku, destabilizing Persia, while nationalist Punjabi Peasant-Proprietors, incensed at having been placed under the jurisdiction of the Maharaja of Kashmir, received organizational assistance and weaponry from Soviet redoubts in Central Asia. All together, Soviet influence and propaganda operations attained a scale and effectiveness that no Atlantic Union institution could match in the interregnum period. The Foreign Service of the United States, with its modest budgets and its historic preoccupation with formal inter-state relations, operated in a different world from the Soviet apparatus, and the gap between their respective capacities grew rather than shrank throughout the interregnum period.

The relationship between Soviet ideological projection and the post-Sverdlov collective leadership requires careful analysis. The transition from Sverdlov’s personal direction to the collective arrangement that governed Soviet policy since the mid-1930s might have been expected to produce a more cautious external posture, given the institutional pressures that collective leadership typically generates toward consensus and risk-aversion. What has happened instead is that the Sverdlov doctrine has become institutionalized in ways that no longer require Sverdlov’s personal authority to sustain. The collective leadership continued the pattern of intervention in service of revolutionary objectives that Sverdlov established, moderating its tempo and intensity in response to specific circumstances but never departing from the basic framework. This continuity suggests that the Soviet expansionist orientation is not a function of particular personalities but of the fundamental logic of the Soviet state.

The Atlantic Union’s response to this situation was characterized by a pattern of episodic crisis management. The World-Fleet construction program and repeated army expansions represented the most significant American responses to the Soviet challenge, but their strategic logic addressed naval, military and economic dimensions of the competition while leaving the political and institutional dimensions unaddressed. The fleet that the World-Fleet Act of 1933 authorized was capable of imposing maritime blockade on the socialist bloc with greater effectiveness than the existing naval establishment can manage, but it did not adequately confront the Soviet apparatus of political influence operating through anti-colonial movements, civil society networks, and intermediary commercial institutions.

What was required, and what the Atlantic Union conspicuously failed to develop over the two decades, is an institutional response that operates on the same plane as Soviet activity: a sustained American and British investment in the cultivation of friendly political movements among frequently antagonistic populations, the development of intelligence and diplomatic capacities adequate to the scale of Soviet operations, and the cultural and intellectual infrastructure that could compete with Soviet ideological projection in the contested territories of the colonial and semi-colonial world. The fragmentary and reactive character of Atlantic Union efforts in these dimensions permitted the Soviet apparatus to operate with substantial freedom across vast geographies, accumulating positions whose strategic significance only became apparent when specific crises brought them to attention.

The Soviet Union entered the Second Revolutionary Era with a revolutionary apparatus refined over nearly three decades of state-building, oriented toward eschatological-revolutionary objectives whose pursuit its leadership had no intention of abandoning, and supported by a constellation of allied and dependent states whose specific contributions to the Soviet project the Soviet leadership has learned to coordinate with considerable sophistication. The consequences for American power have been grave, and only in the aftermath of the Second Revolutionary Era has the full lesson begun to be metabolized.