Motivational-Ideational Analysis of Stalin’s Foreign Policy

Abstract

Professor Tucker's twofold task in Emergence of Stalin's Foreign Policy is both to describe Stalin's about foreign policy and to explain Stalin's practice of foreign policy, particularly toward the WNest. With regard to Stalin's thinking, Tucker's approach takes place on two levels. On one hand, his investigation of Stalin's attitudes, motives, and purposes leads to basically psychological phenomena. These are largely unconscious and implicit in Stalin's writings and speeches. Specifically, Tucker assigns importance to two identity formations: (1) Stalin's self-identification as leader of the successor state to historic Russiacausing him to favor internal and external policies that would make Soviet Russia a world power-and (2) Stalin's self-identification with and competitiveness witlh Lenin-compelling him to aspire to bring about a better Brest-Litovsk providing Soviet Russia with additional territory and ultimate security in the form of contiguous socialist states. On the other hand, Professor Tucker's examination of Stalin's conceptual framework for foreign policy-Russia's position in the world, goals, strategy, tactics, and so forth-deals basically in ideational and ideological constructs. These are for the most part conscious and explicit in Stalin's utterances. On this plane of analysis, Tucker concludes that Stalin believed that Soviet Russia might survive in a hostile international environment where war was inevitable and might eventually attain a commanding world position by u'sing divisive diplomacy in order to: (1) avert war while building military strength, (2) precipitate war at the right moment, and (3) avoid participation during the war's early stages. Russia would enter such a war only when to do so would result in territorial aggrandizement and the expansion of socialism through guided revolution in adjacent countries. Although Professor Tucker skillfully interweaves the psychological and ideological levels into a single motivational-ideational interpretation of Stalin's thinking, the two psychological identity formations serve an important function for the whole. The Lenin identification suggests why Stalin uniquely stressed war as the manner in which Russia would regain territory and spread revolution. The Great Russian national-historic identification explains why Stalin considered that the path of territorial aggrandizement and revolutionary advance would be in areas near the present Russian borders. And not least important, both identity formations lend support to the view that Stalin's commitment to the goals of territorial and revolutionary expansion was real rather than ritualistic. Concurring with Professor Tucker's overall formulation of Stalin's thinking about foreign policy, I would make some observations concerning certain details. If, as Tucker suggests, Stalin changed his 1926 concept of armed revolution into one that was centered on his own Red Army, this revised notion was perhaps the more compelling because it was consistent with one of Lenin's passages that Stalin frequently cited in support of his own theory of socialism in one country. In 1915 Lenin had written: