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The secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 gave Stalin the opportunity to annex the three Baltic states, a part of Poland, Bessarabia (Moldova), and to attack Finland. All this had nothing to do with the international class struggle, but everything to do with the restoration of the pre-1917 tsarist empire. During the Second World War internationalist and universalist claims were—at least temporarily—put aside. The war was celebrated neither as a “Great Proletarian War,” nor as a “Great Soviet War,” which one might have expected, and even less as a war against the capitalist “class enemy.” It went into Soviet history books as the Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna—the Great Patriotic War. After the Stalinist Purges of the 1930s^[56] stirring up nationalist fervor was the only effective way for Stalin to unite the people behind the regime. It is telling that even old Pan-Slav slogans emerged during and after the war. According to Hannah Arendt, “Stalin came back to Pan-Slav slogans during the last war. The 1945 Pan-Slav Congress in Sofia, which had been called by the victorious Russians, adopted a resolution pronouncing it ‘not only an international political necessity to declare Russian its language of general communication and the official language of all Slav countries, but a moral necessity.’”^[57]

The Yalta Conference of February 1945, which gave Stalin a free hand in Eastern Europe, was, in fact, the realization of an old Pan Slav dream: the unification of Eastern Europe’s Slav peoples under Russian hegemony. According to George Kennan, not communism, but territorial expansion was Stalin’s ultimate goal:

If Russia could not rely on the Western nations to save her, it then seemed to Russian minds that the alternative lay not only in the utmost development of Russian military power within the 1938 borders, but also in new territorial acquisitions designed to strengthen Russia’s strategic and political position, and in the creation of a sphere of influence even beyond these limits. In drawing up this expansionist program, Soviet planners leaned heavily on the latter-day traditions of Tsarist diplomacy.^[58] . . . It would be useful to the Western world to realize that despite all the vicissitudes by which Russia has been afflicted since August 1939, the men in the Kremlin have never abandoned their faith in that program of territorial and political expansion which had once commended itself so strongly to Tsarist diplomatists.^[59]

In fact, despite the recurrent obligatory lip service to the ideal of “world revolution,” the ultimate goal of the Soviet leadership was the defense and enlargement of the Russian empire. This logic guided Soviet foreign policy until the very end of the Soviet Union’s existence, including the—failed—invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 the epoch of Russian imperial expansion seemed to have come to a definitive end. The question was, however, whether Russia was prepared to accept this new post-imperial reality—as other former European colonial powers, such as Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal, had done before. In the next chapter we will see how Russia struggled with the new status quo and how—after a short period of post-communist empire fatigue—the old imperial habits and attitudes soon reemerged.

Notes

1.

Carlos Malamud, Historia de América (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2005), 66.

2.

Voltaire, in his satirical novel Candide ou l’optimisme (1759), criticized Leibniz’s theorem that we live “in the best of possible worlds” and gave as one of his counterexamples the case of a slave in Surinam whose leg had been cut off because he had tried to escape. Diderot, in his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772), criticized French Admiral Louis Antoine de Bougainville who, in 1767, visited Tahiti and had laid claim to the island for France. Diderot let an old and wise Tahitian man describe the French visitors as follows: “ambitious and evil men: one day you will know them better. One day they will return . . . to put you in chains, slit your throats, or subjugate you to their extravagancies and to their vices, one day you will serve under them.” The (French) text is available at http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/8spvb10.txt.

3.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty (London: BBC, 1977), 111.

4.