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The Undeclared Condominium

The USSR As Partner in a Conservative World Order

 

Introduction

Although the Right has typically framed the Soviet Union and “International Communism” as an aggressive and subversive revolutionary force, the reality is — at the very least — considerably more nuanced. In fact, it would be more accurate to describe the USSR’s relations with the West over most of its history as collusive: it has facilitated capitalist states’ repression of revolutionary forces far more than it has backed such forces.

Soviet Russian foreign policy certainly went through a heady phase of anticipating international revolution in the years immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution. But following the failure of these revolutionary hopes — with the Spartacists in Germany, similar maximalists in Vienna, the soviet regime in Bavaria, and Béla Kun in Hungary, in 1919; and the catastrophic alliance of the Chinese Communist Party with the Kuomintang in 1927 — its relations with the outside world took on a considerably different character.

This was partly owing to Stalin’s combined caution and authoritarianism, and partly to the situation of the USSR given the stabilization of Bolshevik rule and failure of revolution abroad. The exact apportionment of causation is debatable, and indeed has been extensively debated.

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