Stalin's Postwar Foreign Policy and the National Liberation Movement

Abstract

ONE of the major issues over which the Russians and the Chinese have disagreed is the emphasis to be placed on violent or nonviolent tactics in the “national liberation movement” in underdeveloped countries. Recent developments in Viet Nam have focused new attention on this dimension of the Sino-Soviet conflict. American bombings of North Viet Nam have elicited widespread protests in the West based on the fear that this militant response to the South Viet Nam “Liberation Front” portended the involvement of the United States in a major war on the Asian continent that might escalate into a nuclear holocaust. Some commentators have also expressed the fear that the American military reaction might close the split in the Sino-Soviet alliance and drive the two Communist giants together. It is perhaps timely then that we turn our attention to the study of the major features of Soviet strategy regarding Asia and reexamine the earlier phases of Moscow's involvement in underdeveloped countries as they emerged after the Second World War. This reexamination might provide insight into the conditions prompting the Soviet militant strategy between 1948 and 1951 and the subsequent tempered withdrawal and retreat from the risk of a direct confrontation with the West; it might also shed light on Moscow's formula for calculating costs and consequences and illuminate the roots of present conflicting Russian and Chinese approaches to the national liberation movement in underdeveloped countries.