Abstract:
The Soviet approach to external security was shaped by Russia's
history and ideology, and by internal debates over policy. In the
early 1920s, the Russian lay devastated by war, revolution and
foreign military intervention. Because the wave of workers'
revolutions that Lenin had predicted would transform the world had
failed to materialize, the Soviet leadership was compelled after
1919 to defend socialism with the resources of Russia alone. As the
Red Army's defeat by Poland in 1920 had underscored, this could be
achieved only if Russia industrialized to wage machine age warfare.
Joseph Stalin, who had outmanoeuvred his internal rivlas to become
sole leader of the Soveit Union in the late 1920s, recognized the
need for an internal revolution before socialism could be exported
abroad. In 1928, in order to build "socialism in one country", the
first Five Year Plan of crash industrialization was launched.
Industrialization, as well as the forced collectivization of
agriculture, was accompanied by the merciless suppression of
alleged internal class enemies and saboteurs. For orthodox
Bolsheviks too, there were compelling reasons to swiftly
industrialize. Soviet ideology prophesied that one day a crisis in
capitalism would compel the capitalist Great Powers to unite and
stamp out socialism. Hence Lenin's heirs saw it as their task to
forestall the formation of an anti-soviet coalition and to prepare
for the coming struggle. "We are fifty or a hundred years behind
the advanced countries," Stalin bellowed in a 1931 speech: "We must
make good this distance in ten years. Either we do or they crush
us."
