34. After the conquest of power, the proletariat itself goes over to the position of the “defence of the fatherland.” But this formula thenceforward acquires an entirely new historic content. The isolated workers’ state is not a self-sufficing entity but only a drill ground for the world revolution. Defending the USSR, the proletariat defends not national boundaries but a socialist dictatorship temporarily hemmed in by national borders. Only a deep understanding of the fact that the proletarian revolution cannot find completion within the national framework; that without the victory of the proletariat in the leading countries all the successes of socialist construction in the USSR are doomed to failure; that other than through the international revolution there is no salvation for any country in the world; that the socialist society can be built only on the basis of international co-operation – only these firm convictions, penetrating into the very blood and marrow, can create a safe basis for revolutionary proletarian policy in time of war.
35. The foreign policy of the Soviets flowing from the theory of socialism in one country, that is, the actual ignoring of the problems of the international revolution, is based on two ideas: general disarmament and mutual rejection of aggression. That in search of diplomatic guarantees the Soviet government has to resort to a purely formalistic presentation of the problems of war and peace follows from the conditions of capitalist encirclement. But these methods of adaptation to the enemy, forced upon it by the feebleness of the international revolution and to a great extent by the previous mistakes of the Soviet government itself, can by no means be raised into a universal system. But the acts and speeches of Soviet diplomacy, which have long transgressed the limit of unavoidable, admissible, practical compromises, have been laid down as the sacred and inviolable basis for the international policy of the Third International and have become the source of the most flagrant pacifist illusions and social-patriotic blunders.
36. Disarmament is not a means against war, since, as the experience of Germany itself shows, episodic disarmament is only a stage on the road to new rearmament. The possibility of new and very rapid rearmament is inherent in modern industrial technique. “General” disarmament, even if it could be realized, would only mean the strengthening of the military superiority of the more powerful industrial countries. “Fifty percent disarmament” is the road not to complete disarmament but to absolute 100 percent rearmament. To present disarmament as “the only real means to prevent war” is to mislead the workers for the sake of a common front with petty-bourgeois pacifists.
37. We cannot for one moment dispute the right of the Soviet government to define with the greatest precision the term aggression in any given agreement with the imperialists. But to attempt to transform this conditional legalistic formula into a supreme regulator of international relations is to substitute conservative criteria for revolutionary criteria, reducing the international policy of the proletariat to the defence of the existing annexations and borders set up by force.
38. We are not pacifists. We consider a revolutionary war just as much a means of proletarian policy as an uprising. Our attitude to war is determined not by the legalistic formula of “aggression” but by the question of which class carries on the war and for what aims. In the conflict of states, just as in the class struggle, “defence” and “aggression” are questions only of practical expediency and not of a juridical or ethical norm. The bare criterion of aggression creates a base of support for the social-patriotic policy of Messrs. Léon Blum, Vandervelde and others, who, thanks to Versailles, are given the possibility of defending imperialist booty under the guise of defending peace.
39. Stalin’s famous formula, “We do not want an inch of foreign soil but will not give up an inch of ours,” represents a conservative program for the preservation of the status quo in radical contradiction to the aggressive nature of the proletarian revolution. The ideology of socialism in one country leads inevitably to the blurring of the reactionary role of the national state, to conciliation with it, to its idealization, to reducing the importance of revolutionary internationalism.
40. The leaders of the Third International justify the policy of Soviet diplomacy on the ground that the workers’ state must utilize the contradictions in the camp of imperialism. This statement, indisputable in itself, needs concretization, however.
The foreign policy of each class is the continuation and development of its internal policy. If the proletariat in power must discern and utilize the contradictions in the camp of its external enemies, the proletariat that is still fighting for power must know how to discern and utilize the contradictions in the camp of its internal enemies. The fact that the Third International proved absolutely incapable of understanding and utilizing the contradictions between reformist democracy and fascism led directly to the greatest defeat of the proletariat and brought it face to face with the danger of a new war.
On the other hand, the contradictions between the imperialist governments must be utilized in no other way than from the point of view of the international revolution. The defence of the USSR is conceivable only if the international proletarian vanguard is independent of the policy of Soviet diplomacy, if there is complete freedom to show up its nationalist conservative methods, which are directed against the interests of the international revolution and thus also against the interests of the Soviet Union.