The Emergence of Stalin’s Foreign Policy

Abstract

To understand Stalin as a political thinker, we must see him as a man whose thinking was strongly influenced by perceived parallels between present and past. Unlike other Bolsheviks, he found a parallel between Russia’s internal situation in relatively tranquil 1925 and on the eve of the October upheaval of 1917. He thrice stated in party forums during 1925 that the present international situation resembled the prelude of the World War’s outbreak in 1914. And having come to think in Russian historical terms, he discerned a parallel between Muscovite Russia’s situation in earlier centuries and Soviet Russia’s now. In a party speech of 1928, for example, he found a cue for present policy in Peter the Great’s attempted revolutionary leap out of Russian backwardness; and in the often quoted speech to managers in 1931 he spoke of the beatings that Russia had suffered in history as punishment for her backwardness and declared that Soviet survival now depended on conquering that backwardness in ten years.