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Soviet Policy Toward National Communism: The Limits of Diversity*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Bernard Morris
Bernard Morris
Affiliation:
American University
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Extract

On one thing the Soviet and Yugoslav Communists agree: “national communism” is a contradiction in terms. “The very expression ‘national communism’,” say the Soviet theoreticians, “is a logical absurdity. By itself communism is really international and it cannot be conceived otherwise.” Tito was just as emphatic when he told New York Times commentator, C. L. Sulzberger, that “national communism doesn't exist. Yugoslav Communists too are internationalists.”

That the Soviet and Yugoslav positions appear to agree on this point is no accident. Marxist theory has never acknowledged a genuine alternative to socialism or capitalism, and socialism was a profoundly international idea. But in its effort to abolish national strife, create a world-wide economic and social order, and establish political and social internationalism, the socialist movement had to start within the framework of the nation-state. In practice, therefore, socialism was mainly a national affair. The gulf between the necessary national starting point of the socialist movement and its international ideal was, to put it mildly, considerable. Though the international working class solidarity of the Communist Manifesto has been emptied of plausibility by the events of the last hundred years—not least of all by the abandonment in practice of internationalism in 1914 by the socialist movement—internationalism is a fetish to which even the right-wing socialist makes his obeisance.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , March 1959 , pp. 128 - 137
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1959

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Footnotes

*

A revised version of a paper read at the annual meeting of the Association, September, 1958, St. Louis, Mo. The author wishes to express his appreciation to the chairman of the panel, Thomas B. Larson of the Department of State, and to the discussants, Samuel L. Sharp, American University, George Lichtheim, Associate Editor of Commentary, and Charles D. Kenny, Michigan State University, for their observations.

References

1 Kommunist, January 1957, No. 1, editorial, p. 9 Google Scholar.

2 Borba, March 6, 1958, p. 1 Google Scholar.

3 Borkenau, Franz: Socialism, National or International (London, 1942), p. 1 Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., pp. 49–50.

5 Carr, E. H.: The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923 (London, 1950), Vol. 1, p. 418 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and, in general, “Note B. The Bolshevik Doctrine of Self-Determination,” pp. 410–428.

6 Lenin, , Sochineniya, Vol. 17, pp. 90 ff.Google Scholar, aa quoted in Schwarz, Solomon M.: The Jews in the Soviet Union (Syracuse University Press, 1951), p. 27 Google Scholar.

7 Thomas T. Hammond argues that the “theory of ‘socialism in a single country’ was, in effect, national communism.” “The Origins of National Communism,” The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 34 (Spring, 1958), p. 279 Google Scholar.

8 “The International Situation and the Defense of the USSR” (August 1, 1927), Works, Vol. 10, August–December 1927 (Moscow, 1954), pp. 53–54 Google Scholar.

9 Samuel L. Sharp some time ago suggested that Stalin, under conditions of increasing bipolarization of power after World War II, had extended the principle of “democratic centralism” into the field of international relations as the Soviet line of conduct toward Eastern Europe. The World Influence of Communism, Proceedings of the 28th Institute of the Norman Wait Harris Memorial Foundation, The University of Chicago, June 17–20, 1952 (1953), p. 99.

10 “Declaration of the Governments of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia,” For a Lasting Peace, For a People's Democracy!, June 3, 1955, p. 1 Google Scholar.

11 “Report of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the Twentieth Party Congress,” Supplement to New Times, No. 8, February 16, 1956, pp. 22–24.

12 The tentative and exploratory nature of Khrushchev's concession was reflected in the secret letter of September 3, 1956 from the Central Committee to all satellite parties warning them against the Yugoslav version of national roads to socialism and holding up the USSR as the only model to be emulated. The friction caused by this letter was later said to have been removed in talks between Khrushchev and Tito. Borba, editorial, October 12, 1956, p. 3.

13 See The Satellites in Eastern Europe, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May 1958, passim.

14 Pravda, November 22, 1957.

15 “The Draft Program of the Union of Communists of Yugoslavia,” Joint Translation Service, Belgrade, March 24, 1958 Google Scholar.

16 Mao's speech of February 27, 1957 is analyzed by Schwartz, Benjamin, “New Trends in Maoism?,” Problems of Communism, No. 4, Vol. VI, July–August, 1957, pp. 1–5 Google Scholar.

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