Soviet Alliance Policies in Retrospect

Abstract

Some of the Fathers of the Soviet State, fifty years ago, obviously thought that they had produced a completely unique and unprecedented type of social organization. The first foreign policy declaration of the new state the Decree on Peace proclaimed loudly the Bolsheviks' intention to be different from other governments in the conduct of external affairs. According to Trotsky, the foreign policy of the Soviet State would be honest, popular, truly democratic; and of all the major governments, Lenin's first Council of People's Commissars came perhaps closest to Woodrow Wilson's ideal of open covenants, openly arrived at. Yet very soon, at Brest-Litovsk, the Soviet Government found out about the realities of power, and both internally and externally the new state had no choice but to behave as other states. Ideology became a very secondary consideration: Soviet foreign policy rightly became obsessed not with world revolution, but with national security. Indeed, it became indistinguishable from that of any other great power, though it was faced with special difficulties of its own. The road from the publication of the secret treaties to the Secret Protocols attached to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 was not an easy one. Once the Soviet leaders had accepted the fact that their state would have to exist as one of a community of states, they soon adjusted their policies accordingly. The machinery of their diplomacy was perhaps more complex than that of other states, but the aims of foreign policy quickly became utterly orthodox. If the pursuit of national interest required that alliances be concluded, the Soviet Government was prepared to conclude them with all comers, provided they served the national interest. In the course of the last fifty years, the Soviet Union joined and abandoned alliances for the same reasons as any other state. Hans Morgenthau's definition of the purpose of alliance politics add their own power to that of other nations [or]