He had come to realize that any further expansion of communism would almost certainly lead to a world war, for which Russia was not ready. It is difficult to indicate the last critical point in the development of his policy. It may be that the war in Korea gave him a warning signal of the dangers ahead. But it is by no means certain that the initiative for the attempt to carry communism into southern Korea had come from Stalin — it may have come from Mao. At any rate, in the Korean war Stalin aimed at an international stalemate which would allow his camp to keep its positions without retreating, but also without advancing.
He was anxious that his party, having swallowed so much more than he had intended, should gain the time needed for digestion. He was not the type of conqueror who tries to cure indigestion by swallowing more.
He estimated that two more decades or so were needed to allow Russia to catch up with and surpass the United States industrially, to attain a standard of living that would assure popular contentment, to raise Eastern Europe to an industrial level superior to that of Western Europe, and to allow communist China to develop its economic resources up to the present Russian standard.
He believed that once those goals had been attained, the attraction of communism would become so overwhelming that nothing could stop the whole of Europe and Asia from turning communist. He saw that it was primarily American economic superiority, operating through the Marshall Plan and the Mutual Security agencies, that had defeated communism in Western Europe without much direct political intervention by the United States. On the other hand, Russia, because of her economic inferiority, maintained her preponderance in Eastern Europe primarily by the direct use of political and even military force. She had had to send out her political police to fight ‘dollar diplomacy’.
In what we may suppose to have been Stalin's vision of the years 1965-70 the picture was reversed. He saw a self-sufficient bloc of 800 million people, toiling within the framework of an integrated planned economy, which should in time be able to produce such wealth and attain such high standards of living that communism could rely on its economic preponderance rather than on political or military coercion; while a stagnant or decaying bourgeois West would be losing its power of attraction and would come to rely more and more on the use of force.
Stalin apparently held that to attain this goal it was, on balance, worthwhile for communism to adopt in the meantime a broad policy of self-containment within its third of the globe, especially as the rulers of the other two-thirds were bent on containing it.
These ideas emerge from between the lines of Stalin's last published writings (‘The Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.’). In these he came down heavily on the ultra-leftists, the Utopians and the adventurers, as he called them, who were ‘dizzy’ with Soviet economic power. Against their views, he insisted that the solution of the main economic problems confronting the Soviet Union was a long-term task. Time, time, and once again time was required. The unspoken yet inescapable conclusion of his argument was that in her foreign policy Russia must bargain for a long, a very long breathing space.
It may be assumed that he argued out these ideas in detail and handed them down to his Russian successors, to Mao Tse-tung, and to a few chosen communist leaders of Eastern Europe.
In his last writings one can almost hear the echoes of the debates which Stalin's views provoked among his entourage. ‘But will the West give us such a breathing space?’ was one obvious objection. Another seems to have run as follows: ‘Would it not be more realistic to assume that war in the near future is inevitable? That Russia would not, as in the Second World War, have bourgeois allies to whom she would need to make political concessions? Would she therefore not be better advised, in the interest of self-preservation, to press on with world revolution and to encourage further communist expansion?’
To such arguments and objections Stalin replied with an explicit and emphatic ‘No’. He argued publicly and at great length that the capitalist countries would cut each other's throats rather than attack Russia. War between the capitalist countries was still ‘inevitable’, he said; but their joint crusade against the communist bloc was not. In itself the argument was incongruous and scholastic, as Stalin's argumentation usually was. But in this particular context it had a definite meaning and it pursued a practical aim. It was an argument in favour of buying breathing space from the West, in favour of communist self-containment.