The Kremlin and Peace
Can the so-called Soviet “trade offensive” of 1953-54 really be explained as an effort to establish a just and lasting peace, as the West understands the word? If we could believe that, the world might suddenly seem a more comfortable place to live in. We must always keep the door ajar for any genuine steps to abandon the Soviet brand of imperialism, to abandon the basic unfriendliness of purpose toward everything not under Moscow’s control. The free world was looking for such a movement at the Berlin Conference in the early part of 1954, but it did not show up.
The only way peace could be accepted as a Soviet trading motive would be to define peace as the Soviet leaders themselves have defined it in the past, not in their propaganda but in their party teachings.
“The peace policy of the proletarian state,” according to a Comintern Congress resolution of 1928, “certainly does not imply that the Soviet state has become reconciled with capitalism ... It is merely ... a more advantageous form of fighting capitalism, a form which the U.S.S.R. has consistently employed since the October Revolution.”
Lenin, in a statement which was reprinted in 1943, said that “every ’peace program’ is a deception of the people and piece of hypocrisy unless its principal object is to explain to the masses the need for a revolution, and to support, aid, and develop the revolutionary struggle of the masses that is starting everywhere. ...”
There is no evidence that the new Soviet regime has overnight embraced free-world ideas about peace and warfare. To the disciples of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, the world is always in a state of warfare. The warfare waged by them is three-fold: psychological, economic, and military. Military action is a last resort, but psychological and economic action never ceases. Stalin did not invent this concept, though he put it into action on a large scale. Nor was it exclusively Russian. The German military philosopher, Clausewitz, whose mid-19th century writings were carefully noted by Lenin and Stalin, wrote: “Disarm your enemy in peace by diplomacy and trade, if you would conquer him more readily on the field of battle.”