The General Strike: striking workers read the latest news on 1 April 1926 Fox Photos · Getty (background) / Photo12 · UIG · Getty (newspaper)

The Bolsheviks initially refrained from formulating principles of foreign policy. They believed Russia would not be secure until the threat of imperialist intervention was removed by a revolution in the industrialised West; yet the technical and economic support of those countries was essential to the establishment of socialism in economically backward Russia.

For these reasons, Trotsky, the apostle of ‘permanent revolution’, was contemptuous of his position as commissar for foreign affairs, and saw little point in establishing diplomatic relations with capitalist regimes when he believed their end was imminent. He told commissariat employees of his intention to publish the secret treaties the old regime had signed with imperialist governments and then ‘shut the shop’ and dismiss them. Barely a decade later, the British Foreign Office noted with relief the rise of the ‘strong, stern, silent’ Joseph Stalin as the unchallenged leader of the party: ‘It is not surprising that the defeat of the fanatic Bolshevik opposition indicates a foreign policy which utilises “national tools”.’

Today we have entered a new era in which we are recognised as an important factor in the international arena Lenin

The gap between these two pronouncements reflects the change in Soviet foreign policy during the first decade after 1917. Even after the setback to the revolutions in central and eastern Europe, class antagonism long remained a key element in Soviet foreign policy. Normalising relations with other countries was rarely presented as an ultimate goal, but rather as a tactic to allow a breathing space. Lenin formulated these ideas as early as November 1920: ‘So far, we have still not achieved an international victory that, for us, is the only guarantee of true security. However, today we have entered a new era in which we are recognised as an important factor in the international arena.’

The new regime was at first successful with these tactics: the Peace Decree (without annexations or indemnities) in the wake of the Revolution, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ending the war in Germany, and the Treaty of Rapallo between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1922.

Yet recognition and political stability, even if temporary, represented a contradiction to a regime purporting to be dynamic and internationalist. The Bolsheviks, desperately attempting to keep to their revolutionary tenets, were forced to adopt a dualistic foreign policy: attempting to achieve national security by fostering diplomatic relations with the West, while simultaneously encouraging subversion and revolutionary activities when conditions became propitious. (They supported the failed Hamburg Uprising of October 1923.)

‘United Front’ policy

This contradiction deepened in 1924, when Britain, France and Italy recognised the Soviet Union, to the great surprise of the Bolshevik government, and the Comintern admitted that worldwide revolution would not be happening as soon as hoped. Under these circumstances, how would it be possible to protect the Soviet Union’s national interests without damaging its image as the vanguard of world revolution? The Comintern was gradually enlisted to support Soviet diplomacy, while its internationalist identity was maintained as a façade. This ‘United Front’ policy, adopted at the 11th party congress in 1922, opened the possibility of a compromise by preparing for reconciliation with non-Communist workers’ organisations.

Relations with Britain during the critical period of 1924-7 clarify the contradictions in this policy. In February 1924, Britain’s first Labour government, led by Ramsay MacDonald, recognised the Soviet Union, albeit reluctantly, but the prime minister’s resentment of the Soviet experience and feeble political standing hampered any genuine improvement in relations. In November, the Conservative Party returned to power after an election campaign in which it compared the Labour Party to the ‘Communist Peril’. The Soviet Union, on the defensive, directed its efforts towards gaining diplomatic advantage from the fraternal ties established with British workers’ movements.

It is hard to understand the extraordinary Soviet belief that British trade unions would succeed in forcing the Conservative government to adopt a benign policy towards the Soviet Union. The clue to this expectation lies in Russia’s experiences between 1918 and 1920, when the British left had criticised military intervention in Russia’s civil war and, under the slogan ‘Hands off Russia’, had consistently opposed the dispatch of troops and munitions to the Russian front. Rank and file pressure forced Labour and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to demand that the government ‘immediately take appropriate steps to return British forces from Russia.’ As the Red Army advanced toward Warsaw in August 1920, the dockworkers’ trade union prevented weapons from being loaded onto the ship Jolly George, bound for Danzig.

Lenin had great hopes of the revolutionary ‘British Soviets’ and said he believed that ‘the British Mensheviks are preparing the ground for the Bolshevik Revolution.’ It is doubtful that the trade union organisations would have filled the role of the Mensheviks in the anticipated revolution: though influenced by the Russian Revolution, their actions also reflected strong pacifist sentiment after the first world war. This was the first and last serious attempt of the British left to force the government to adopt a foreign policy by extra-parliamentary means.

Just how far Soviet diplomacy had diverged from the original ideology became clear in 1924, with the acceleration of the creation of a ‘united front’ with the leaders of the TUC, against a background of characteristic pragmatism. Many trade unions leaders were elected to Britain’s first Labour government, and leftist leaders — previously aligned with the Communist Party and with pro-Soviet ties — took their place at the head of the TUC. During the nine months of Labour rule, this leadership undoubtedly influenced relations with the Soviet Union. Aware of the potential, the Russians hurried to cement an agreement with the TUC. The diplomatic intent was well concealed by Marxist dialectic acrobatics, which made it possible to present the agreement as pure class solidarity. The British Communist Party was obliged to support the process, despite the fear that it might blur its identity and destroy itself.

As soon as the Conservatives returned to power, the Bolsheviks pressed British trade union leaders, who were visiting Moscow at the time (lured by the hospitality of the new rulers in the Kremlin), to establish a joint committee with Soviet trade unions. This led to the creation in April 1925 of an Anglo-Russian Joint Advisory Council with an ill-defined mission to ‘weld closer the friendly relations’ between the movements. The Russians hoped this ambiguity would make it possible to present the committee as a revolutionary organisation while allowing them to use it for political purposes. But with the fall of the Labour government in a general election governed by apparent Russian meddling (with the so-called ‘Zinoviev letter’ published by the Daily Mail), more moderate figures such as Ernest Bevin and Walter Citrine had resumed leadership of the TUC. Their motives for cooperation were strictly economic: to ease unemployment by opening Russian markets for British goods.

Moscow realised that the amorphous nature of the cooperation had a serious disadvantage, allowing its British partners to abstain from militant action or diplomatic activity during a crisis. The Soviet approach was anachronistic. Just as it had exaggerated the threat of renewed British military intervention, it overestimated the assistance that British workers’ organisations would provide. The latent tensions in this dualistic policy and the need to establish priorities were the focus of a bitter debate launched by the Trotskyist opposition, which demanded the dismantling of the partnership at 14th congress of the Communist Party in December 1925.

Russia’s efforts to achieve a diplomatic accommodation with Britain coincided with a loss of interest in the activities of the joint trade union committee. Yet when a dispute in the British mining industry erupted in 1926, the Kremlin decided not to disband the committee, which the Trotskyist opposition criticised as opportunistic. The decision is partly explained by the party leadership’s wish not to concede anything to its left wing. A more substantial reason was recognition of the committee’s diplomatic potential, important as the Soviet Union was in danger of international isolation. The die-hards in the British Conservative Party pressured the government to sever relations. The Locarno Treaty of 1925, inspired by Britain and aimed at reconciliation with Germany, took the sting out of the Rapallo Treaty and threatened Moscow with further isolation. It also paved the way for the entry of Germany into the League of Nations, which the Russians regarded as leading a crusade against the Soviet Union.

The danger inherent in the dual tactics of the ‘united front’ approach was finally revealed with the TUC’s declaration of a general strike in England in May 1926, in support of a miners’ strike. The Soviet regime, taken by surprise but attached to its role as leader of world revolution, was forced to give its full support to the strike in its first stages. After its failure, the regime blamed the TUC, accusing it of betraying the miners and refusing to accept any economic assistance from the Soviet Union. The mere mention of what became known as the ‘red gold’, symbolic or real, was enough to trigger calls for the expulsion of the Russians from Britain. The Soviets could not implement the formula that the dual policy had dictated. Stalin, having just overcome Trotsky’s opposition, approved the continued cultivation of solidarity with the TUC, clearly intending to take advantage of it as an instrument of diplomacy. The Comintern and Profintern (the Communist-oriented international organisation of trade unions) continued to criticise their partners without reserve, which soured relations with the TUC at a time when its support had become vital because of calls in Britain for the government to sever relations with Moscow.

This sequence of events led to the earliest reappraisal of the policy. In autumn 1926, Soviet diplomats Ivan Maisky (later ambassador to Britain) and Leonid Krasin (who had a reputation as a conservative and traditionalist) were rushed to London in a last-ditch attempt to avert a crisis, while the Comintern’s activities were substantially curtailed. These emergency measures were too little and too late to prevent a chain of diplomatic defeats in 1927. Germany’s western orientation was invigorated. In April Chinese police, acting on a British request, raided the offices of the Soviet delegation to Peking and Chiang Kai-shek’s forces slaughtered communists. In May the British government raided the offices of the Soviet trade delegation in London and, claiming to have found documents proving subversion, broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The door slammed on the policy of solidarity when the TUC abandoned the Anglo-Russian Joint Advisory Council. In September, economic talks with France reached an impasse and Khristian Rakovsky, the Soviet ambassador to France, was declared persona non grata.

This gloomy year led to a ‘war scare’ and pessimism in Moscow, and a realisation of the failure of its foreign policy. In 1930 the commissar for foreign affairs, Georgy Chicherin, was replaced by his deputy, Maxim Litvinov, who preached conventional policy and integration within the European system. After this, the Soviet Union’s unbending hostility towards capitalist regimes gave way to favouring peaceful coexistence based on mutual expediency. These ‘periods of respite’ throughout the Soviet era irreversibly eroded revolutionary aspirations. Soviet diplomacy gradually came to resemble western diplomacy, and even to enjoy some of the prestige reserved for diplomacy elsewhere.