All we know is that the process is in a very advanced stage. Russia may still be mired up to her ankles or to her knees in the epoch of primitive magic; but she is not plunged in it up to her neck and ears, as she was a quarter of a Century ago.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE LEGACY OF STALINISM
II. FOREIGN AFFAIRS
The contrast between the beginning and the close of the Stalin era is equally striking when we consider Russia's attitude towards the world and her foreign policy during that period.
It will be remembered that by the middle of the 1920's the Bolshevik mind had become profoundly disturbed by the isolation of the Russian revolution. It then began to reconcile and to adapt itself to isolation, and even to glory in it. This mood found its apotheosis in the slogan ‘socialism in one country’, the dogma with which Stalin proclaimed the self-sufficiency and self-containment of the Russian revolution. Henceforth, adherence to this dogma became the test of loyalty to Bolshevism. Any deviation from it was branded as treason; and those who represented the revolutionary internationalism of earlier days were marked as apostates.
The halcyon days of ‘socialism in one country’ lasted until the Second World War.
Throughout the late 1920's and 1930's Stalin's diplomacy sought, implicitly or explicitly, to preserve the international status quo and to enhance Russia's position within it. ‘We do not want a single square yard of foreign land’ was the maxim of Chicherin and Litvinov, the two Foreign Ministers of the time.
‘Not a square yard of foreign land’ might also be said to have been the watchword inspiring the Communist International, which continued to claim, however, that no land on the globe was foreign to it.
The main purpose of the Stalinized Comintern was to do political guard duty for the ‘only proletarian State’ so that the building of socialism in ‘one-sixth of the earth's territory’ should not be disturbed by capitalist pressure or — by revolutionary developments in the remaining five-sixths, which might interrupt the Soviet Union's ‘peaceful coexistence’ with capitalism.