Harvard Professor Robert C. Tucker, a political scientist and historian in his second Stalin biography, Stalin in Power: The Revolution From Above: 1928-1941, wrote:
“… the diplomacy developed by Lenin had a resemblance, of which he may not have been aware, to the divisive diplomacy that the rising Muscovite state pursued in its hostile encirclement. Lenin saw diplomacy as a defensive weapon to ensure the Soviet Republic’s survival by keeping its enemies divided. “So long as we have not won the whole world, so long as we remain economically and militarily weaker than what is left of the capitalist world,” he said, “we must stick to the rule: be able to exploit the contradictions and antagonisms between the imperialists. If we had not followed this rule, we would long ago have been hanged on separate aspen trees to the capitalists’ general joy. Our basic experience in this respect came from concluding the Brest treaty.”20 The treaty of Brest- Litovsk was the territorially costly separate peace that the fledgling Soviet government, at Lenin’s insistence, concluded with Germany in early 1918. It was the first and for Lenin the classic case of an agreement with a capitalist government that served Soviet needs, in this instance the Revolution’s need to survive.
But if Stalin kept faith with Lenin in attaching supreme importance to the divisive diplomacy, he departed from him in finding a new use for it. In Lenin’s mind and practice, diplomacy was a defensive weapon to keep the capitalist cutthroats divided and thus unable to unite against Bolshevik Russia. For Stalin, diplomacy became at once a defensive and offensive weapon, with a mission of opening up a path to the revolution’s territorial advance in the very process of keeping enemies divided. Lenin had invited such a thought. After citing Brest as the first example of divisive diplomacy, he said: “One should not draw the conclusion that treaties may only be like Brest or Versailles. That is untrue. There can also be a third kind of treaty, advantageous to us.” He did not specify the distinguishing feature of the third kind of treaty. Lenin-textualist that he was, Stalin must have pondered the passage carefully. Brest and Versailles had in common, as disadvantageous treaties to Russia and Germany respectively, the loss of vital territorial interests. One could infer that the revolutionary interests to be served by the “third kind of treaty” were territorial ones. Stalin’s orientation, unlike Lenin’s, disposed him to do just that.
But how could Moscow make use of divisive diplomacy to promote a territorial advance of revolution? Stalin reasoned that it could do so by facilitating the outbreak of war between two sets of enemy states. Such a war would provide Soviet Russia with opportunities to expand its influence into neighboring countries that were candidates for inclusion in the “socialist encirclement…”
The Brest treaty, that primal act of Leninist diplomacy to which the Bolshevik Revolution owed its survival, was an accord between Moscow and Berlin. Subsequently, Lenin visualized an alliance with Germany as an attractive option for Moscow’s divisive diplomacy. “Germany is one of the strongest advanced capitalist countries, and so it cannot put up with the Versailles treaty. Herself imperialist but pinned down, Germany must seek an ally against world imperialism,” he said in his speech of 6 December 1920. “Here is a situation we must utilize.” Lenin’s prevision of a Soviet-German alliance bore fruit in the Rapallo treaty of 1922 providing for full resumption of diplomatic relations, mutual cancellation of economic claims, and most favored nation treatment. This coup of Lenin’s divisive diplomacy opened the way for an anti-Versailles partnership between the Soviet and German governments during the 1920s…
Stalin did not forsake his earlier orientation on a new and greater Brest—a divisive diplomacy leading to a new European war in which Moscow would remain neutral until a time of its choosing and then carve out his envisaged “socialist borderland.”
Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918 as Moscow capitulation to Germany >
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