World history, since 1914 has been the history of attempts to arrive at agreements and compromises which end in further explosions. The temporary agreement between the so-called democratic powers and the Soviet Union during the course of the war against Hitler did not last long after the collapse of the Nazi regime and of Japan. Towards the end of the war there had been an agreement between the Allied powers for the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan. But the imperialist powers changed that policy. The Japanese were ready to surrender but President Truman still ordered the dropping of two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs were a warning to the Soviet Union of what could happen to it, if it did not do what US imperialism wanted. However, Stalin realised that the troops of imperialism were war weary, and were demanding to be sent home as soon as the war was over. Russian troops invaded Manchuria and defeated the Japanese army in just ten days. So, the bombs failed in their purpose.
Very rapidly international relations entered the period of the cold war. This in its turn led to the arms race, dwarfing even the massive rearmament programme of Hitler between 1933-39. But the arms race cancelled itself out. One superpower’s attempt to gain an advantage in one sphere or another was immediately counteracted by the other. The cold war was followed by a period of relative détente but this was of a very shaky character. The arms race also served the purpose, for the West and the Soviet Union, of diverting the mass of people to look for an enemy outside the borders of their own country. Thus, American imperialism endeavoured to put all the blame for the explosions in the third world on to the shoulders of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bureaucracy. On the other hand, the Soviet bureaucracy portrayed itself (with more justification) as a beleaguered fortress threatened by imperialism.
‘Peaceful coexistence’ of different economic and social systems was Stalin’s, not Lenin’s idea. “We are living not merely in a state, but in a system of states,” Lenin said at the Eighth Party Congress in July 1919, “and it is inconceivable that the Soviet republic should continue to exist for a long period side by side with imperialist states. Ultimately one or the other must conquer. Until this end occurs a number of terrible clashes between the Soviet republic and bourgeois states is inevitable.” (Quoted by E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. 3, p. 123.) Again, only a year later, after the defeat of the foreign armies of intervention into the Soviet Union, Lenin said: “We have passed from war to peace but we have not forgotten that war will come again. So long as both capitalism and socialism remain we cannot live in peace. Either one or the other, in the long run, will conquer. There will be a funeral chant either for the Soviet Republic or for world capitalism. This is a moratorium in a war.”
Two years later, Lenin summarised the relations between the new Soviet state and the imperialists:
We have got a certain equilibrium, although extremely fragile, extremely unstable. Nevertheless, such an equilibrium can exist – of course not for long – in a capitalist environment.
Before the Eighth Congress of Soviets, Lenin repeated this idea:
We cannot for a moment believe in lasting trade relations with the imperialist powers: the respite will be temporary. The experience of the history of revolutions and great conflicts teaches us that wars, a series of wars, are inevitable. The existence of a Soviet Republic alongside of capitalist countries – a Soviet Republic surrounded by capitalist countries – is so intolerable to the capitalists that they will seize any opportunity to resume the war. (LCW, Vol. 31, p. 472.)
And Lenin’s prediction was proved right when ‘peaceful coexistence’ ended in the nightmare of the Second World War.
It is true that for relatively short periods ‘peaceful coexistence’ was maintained. But inevitably the contradictions between two conflicting social systems generated irreconcilable antagonisms. That explains the euphoria of the imperialists at the collapse of Stalinism and their support for capitalist counter-revolution in Russia and Eastern Europe. Periodic diplomatic crises and accords between imperialism and Stalinism went on throughout the post-war period. In 1955, Soviet bureaucrats and Western imperialists met at Geneva for the first time since Potsdam in 1945. Negotiations were again resumed when Khrushchev visited the USA in 1959. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1961 led to a round of negotiations that led to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty the following year. In 1969, with the advent of the Nixon administration, relations led to détente and a series of arms reduction talks and agreements. With the Russian invasion of Afghanistan to prop up the pro-Moscow regime in Kabul, and the election of Ronald Reagan as US president, diplomatic relations between the superpowers began to deteriorate, leading to what some have called the ‘second cold war’.
The negotiations between Russia and the United States and its allies, including the Reagan-Gorbachev summit, were supposed to guarantee ‘world peace’. These summits attempted to breed illusions that world peace and international harmony (‘peaceful coexistence’) could be achieved through ‘good will’ between the imperialists and the Stalinist bureaucracies. This was fundamentally false. It was the boom in the capitalist countries in the 1980s, coupled with the contradictions within imperialism and the crisis in the Stalinist states, which led to a temporary desire by the superpowers to arrive at a mutual agreement. But the underlying reality was of two fundamentally opposed social systems which could not tolerate indefinitely the existence of the other. Their basic antagonism could be softened only temporarily.
In the 1980s, Gorbachev was desperate to arrive at some sort of an agreement with world imperialism. In an attempt to get an agreement with the capitalist powers, the Soviet leadership openly renounced the strategy of revolution and denied the relevance of class struggle. This was really only putting a stamp on what had been the position for a long time before. Erich Honecker, the ex-East German Stalinist leader, without blinking an eyelid, wrote in the British Morning Star that:
Human beings include people from different, even antagonistic classes in society. They extend from the working class to circles of monopoly capital itself. We are far from reducing international relations to a class struggle stereotype.
Similarly, at the time of Gorbachev’s visit to Britain, the Morning Star (5/4/1988) was happy to state that:
New thinking suggests that there are universal human values – peace, security and justice; values that are common to all of us irrespective of our nationality, religion, ideology or class; values that transcend all such differences.
These sentiments were utopianism of the worst character. Gorbachev claimed to have broken with Stalin, on whom he blamed all the crimes of the bureaucracy in the past. However, he had adopted the fundamental ideas of Stalinism, of a society in the Soviet Union which is divided between the bureaucracy, on the one hand, and the working class on the other. He accepted Stalin’s nonsense that ‘peaceful coexistence’ between the capitalist states and the Soviet Union, a deformed workers’ state, could continue indefinitely. However, the attempt to freeze world relations into fixed blocs inevitably broke down, creating a new and convulsive period in world history. Unexpectedly for the Stalinists and imperialists alike, the bureaucratic regimes of Eastern Europe began to unravel and entered into crisis.