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The October Revolution of 1917 promised a totally new beginning. During his exile in Switzerland Lenin himself was one of the most severe critics of tsarist imperialism and a staunch defender of the right of national self-determination for the oppressed nations of the empire. However, this idealism was short-lived when, after the Revolution, in the newly independent states anti-bolshevist governments were installed. In the resulting civil war, from 1918 to 1922, the bolshevists reconquered most of the lost territories of the former tsarist empire.^[52] There followed a controversy between Lenin and Stalin over what to do with these territories. Stalin, who headed the People’s Commissariat (Ministry) for Nationalities, did not want to grant the Soviet republics even formal independence. He preferred to make them autonomous republics within Russia proper. For Lenin this project smacked too much of the old tsarist imperial dominance, and he proposed to federate the other republics with Russia on an equal basis in a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.^[53] Should Stalin have had his way, it would certainly have made the dissolution of the empire seventy years later more complicated and possibly bloodier. Lenin’s Soviet Union pretended that it was not an empire, but a voluntary association of socialist republics. Officially, Pan Slavism, social Darwinist racism, and Great Russian chauvinism fell into disgrace. The Soviet Union did not define itself primarily as a national community, but as the representative of a class: the working class. Moreover, representative not only of the working class of Russia, but of the working classes of the whole world. Russia’s inward-looking nineteenth-century nationalism had, apparently, changed into an outward-looking universalism. This universalism, even if it defended only one class, was, in theory at least, genuine: because, according to Marxist theory, the end result of the socialist revolution—a communist society—was supposed to be in the interest of mankind as a whole—former capitalists included.

However, despite the fundamental difference between the communist internationalism and the former Pan Slav nationalism, the two had some elements in common. There was, first, their messianism. Similarly, communist Russia remained a special nation—not so much because of the supposed spiritual, biological, or cultural superiority of the Russian people, but because of its vanguard role in the world revolution. The second common element was its paranoia. The encirclement syndrome that characterized the nineteenth-century tsarist regime—at that time engaged in the “Great Game” over Central Asia with the British Empire—was strengthened even further in the young Soviet Union, which was declared the enemy of the capitalist world. The communist leaders, and particularly Stalin, added another, third element that was reminiscent of tsarist times: autocracy. It was not long before these three elements, thoroughly mixed together, produced the same well-known result: Great Russian nationalism and imperialist expansion. New in all this was that Russia used the internationalist communist movement to further its national imperialist ambitions, a phenomenon that had already been observed by Joseph Schumpeter in 1942, when he wrote:

The Communist groups and parties all over the world are naturally of the greatest importance for Russian foreign policy. In consequence, there is nothing surprising in the fact that official Stalinism has of late returned to the practice of advertising an approaching struggle between capitalism and socialism—the impending world revolution—the impossibility of permanent peace so long as capitalism survives anywhere, and so on. All the more essential is it to realize that such slogans, useful or necessary though they are from the Russian standpoint, distort the real issue which is Russian imperialism.^[54] . . . The trouble with Russia is not that she is socialist but that she is Russia. As a matter of fact, the Stalinist régime is essentially a militarist autocracy which, because it rules by means of a single and strictly disciplined party and does not admit freedom of the press, partakes of one of the defining characteristics of Fascism.^[55]