Soviet Russia's self-image throughout its long life has been of a country encircled by predatory enemies poised to strike. Its domestic and export propaganda alike assumed imminent assault by "capitalist imperialism" and was designed to frustrate the plotted aggressions. The Kremlin has seen itself, with a Dostoyevskian touch, as the injured and insulted party, cornered and badgered by "warmongers" about to wreck its world-liberating mission.

       Yet from the end of its civil war period to date, the Soviet Union has been attacked only once, in June 1941, and that by another totalitarian nation in the midst of a war they had launched in partnership twenty-two months earlier. And on that occasion the "imperialist West," identified always as the obsessed enemy of the "socialist fatherland," rallied at once to its defense, unreservedly and without seeking any quid pro quo.

       In its every other involvement in war, directly or by proxy, Moscow has been the instigator and aggressor.While the civil war was still under way, in 1920, Lenin rejected the peace offered by Poland on favorable territorial terms. He chose instead to "break the crust of Polish resistance with the bayonets of the Red Army." The Soviet pursuing forces reached the outskirts of Warsaw, where they were decisively thrown back.

       Meanwhile independent governments had been set up in the largest non-Russian nations of the old Russian empire, the Ukraine and Georgia. They were officially recognized by the Kremlin, which negotiated diplomatic and consular relations with Georgia and a formal alliance with the Ukraine. (290)

       Then the Red Army proceeded to crush them both. Soon thereafter the new Moscow masters, through subversion backed by Soviet troops, imposed a communist regime on Outer Mongolia, where they did not have even the excuse of prior Russian possession.

       Thus the pattern of military dynamism was set early, and it has been followed consistently. As yet weak and in need of time to consolidate its rule, the Kremlin understandably agitated for peace, while using every opportunity that arose for aggrandizement by force or the threat of force.

       The Red Army invaded Manchuria and defeated China in 1928-1929. From 1925 to 1937 it negotiated a series of non-aggression pacts, each of them stage-managed to enhance its reputation as a peace-loving neighbor. In due time it swept them aside without notice or alibi.

       Without Soviet communist help, it should be remembered, Nazism probably would not have come to power in Germany, after which it was a Moscow-Berlin deal for dividing the spoils that touched off history's most devastating war. On the authority of a secret clause in the Moscow-Berlin pact of collaboration, Soviet Russia invaded Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Following the Allied victory, Soviet forces of occupation were converted into forces of permanent imperial domination throughout East-Central Europe.

       The Kremlin deliberately engaged in indirect aggression by provoking and supporting civil wars in northern Iran and in Greece in the immediate postwar years. In 1950, it instigated the war of aggression against South Korea, together with Red China (at that time still under Moscow influence), and later in that decade communist attempts to seize power in the Middle East. Then, by the secret installation of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba, it brought the world to the brink of its first nuclear showdown. Every Western defensive reaction to these forays—the Truman Doctrine, NATO, the Korean War, the Eisenhower Doctrine, President Kennedy's insistence on the removal of the missiles from Cuba—was damned by Moscow as offensive "war-mongering." (291)

       Coincident with such overt Soviet blows to peace, the USSR nurtured a climate of crowding dangers. Repeatedly it mounted "crises" in West Berlin. With scores of vetoes it virtually paralyzed the peace-keeping functions of the United Nations, refused to abide by U.N. decisions that did not suit Soviet purposes, and stymied nearly every hopeful effort for arms reduction and control of nuclear force, by the U.N. or in bilateral negotiations with the United States. Meanwhile its persistent bad faith in violating treaties and pledges sowed fears and suspicions that further deepened the climate of crisis and accelerated the arms race.

       "The simple fact," Professor Strausz-Hupe has written, "is that the Soviet conflict managers have either instigated or aggravated almost every international dispute which has gripped the postwar world." Through it all, however, Soviet communism and its foreign extensions have held fast to the legend that Soviet Russia is a peace-loving, law-abiding nation "threatened" by "bourgeois madmen." Rarely has the primacy of theory over fact been more strikingly demonstrated. No matter how often and anxiously the democratic powers pleaded for détente and a "world of diversity," the communists professed to see only a West "lusting" for war.

       The theory, basic to Marxism-Leninism, is that class war within nations and between nations is a permanent and irreconcilable condition. "World imperialism cannot live side by side with a victorious Soviet Union," said Lenin, and his successors and disciples without exception have played variations on that theme. Not once in these fifty years has a Soviet leader conceded the possibility of a permanent settlement short of total communist victory.

       From their doctrinal vantage-point, the major democratic nations, at times when their military superiority was overwhelming, should have made war on their sworn enemy. In failing to do so—worse, in aiding the survival and economic fortification of the Soviet state—they were behaving eccentrically, in stubborn defiance of Marxist-Leninist laws. (292)

       But the refusal of the other side to play the game as prescribed did not affect Soviet faith in their doctrine. Massive propaganda against the theoretical war-makers never ceased, along with prodigious worldwide "peace campaigns."

       The Bolsheviks did not originate the ploy of accusing the enemy of what you are yourself about to do—it is as old as history. But never has any nation used it so often and so effectively. While proudly proclaiming permanent war against the non-communist world and precluding compromise, the communists have posed as champions of peace beleaguered by ruthless enemies. In the light of then fifty-year record of aggressions and in the light of their force-oriented philosophy and program, only the blind can fail to see the pose as a cynical hoax. Peace, for communists, is not a humane objective but a slogan of expediency—a propaganda "ruse," to use Lenin's word.

       It is a measure of mankind's yearning for peace that millions at various times have fallen for the rawest Soviet trickery in its name. It did not occur to them that a regime which killed millions of its own citizens, engaged in kidnapping people in foreign countries, tried to starve West Berlin into submission, trained and equipped thousands of terrorists for operations all over the world—that such a regime could hardly be opposed to war on principle.

       In the lexicon of communists, of course, peace has nothing in common with idealistic or religious pacifism, which they have always ridiculed and despised. Their literature candidly describes peace as a continuation of war by other means, while gearing for the violent conflict to follow. They have employed the potentials of peace slogans for specific purposes of their own: to gain time or to terrify their own subjects with a specter of war; to mobilize sympathizers and innocents, including true pacifists, for "defense of the Soviet Union." Their slogans are never directed against war as such, but only against wars that might endanger the USSR. Indeed they always specify support for "just" wars, so-called wars of liberation—in fact, those conflicts provoked or approved by communists. (293)

• Road to Surrender

       Karl Marx taught that "war is the midwife of revolution"; that "the last word of social science on the eve of each general reconstruction of society will always remain: 'struggle or death, bloody war or nothingness.'"

       Lenin concurred. "Great historical questions can be solved only by violence," he declared.

       Mao Tse-tung has written: "Every communist must grasp that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. ... In fact, we can say that the whole world can be remolded only with a gun."

       No communist leader or theoretician, past or present, has questioned that conflict, violence, war are inherent in their ideology. On the contrary, "militancy" is a matter of revolutionary pride and honor. They think and plan in the vernacular of struggle: strategy and tactics, fronts, enemies, encirclements.

       This does not imply that they seek war on their own soil. Naturally the Soviet Union and its associates would like to achieve their "inevitable victory," One Communist World, with the least risk and at the smallest price to themselves. Hence they prefer proxy wars, civil wars, and best of all, capitulation to communism without resistance. To avoid the costs of direct confrontation with powerful adversaries and its potential of defeat—this is the whole content and meaning of their peace propaganda.

       Nikita Khrushchev, whose reign coincided with the recognition of his country as the second largest nuclear power, was explicit in this connection. An apocalyptic world war, though likely, was no longer inevitable, he announced. The capitalists now had a choice of nonviolent "transition to socialism." Whether violence will be necessary, he explained again and again, "depends on the resistance of the exploiters: if the ruling classes counter revolution with force and are unwilling to bow to the will of the people, the proletariat must break their resistance and start a resolute civil war." (294)

       But their ultimate defeat and submission being historically predetermined anyhow, the non-communist countries would be "mad" to turn down Moscow's "peaceable" offer to accept unconditional surrender. On a vast historical scale he was merely repeating the age-old challenge of highwaymen: "Money or your life!" He pointed to Czechoslovakia, with a straight face, as an apt example of the kind of peaceful surrender tie had in view.

       Actually there was nothing novel in the Khrushchevian proposal, hailed so happily by the West. Lenin, too, gladly accepted surrender without battle from non-Russian peoples too weak or disorganized to resist the Red Army. Stalin, too, preferred the "peaceful" capitulation by the - Baltic republics to the firm resistance he met in Finland. If Lenin and Stalin did not offer to the major nations the privilege of submission without fighting, it was only because the Soviet power position was still too weak. Unlike Khrushchev and his successors, armed with the ultimate weapon, they could not have hoped to obtain by threats more than the piecemeal concessions that they did exact.

       There has been no significant change in communist conflict theories, strategy, and goals. The only new element in the equation is nuclear power. The Kremlin can now hope to soften and intimidate a world demoralized by dread of nuclear annihilation and willing to pay a high price to evade the catastrophe.

       That hope is not as farfetched as it may seem at first blush. Thousands of men and women in the free world, with the nonagenarian Lord Bertrand Russell as their chief ideologist, have in fact already resigned themselves to peaceful surrender, under the rubric, "Better Red than Dead." They are exhorting the world to hand over its money—their freedom and independence—to the highwaymen in exchange for life. Fortunately they are still a small if noisy minority. But Soviet leaders have nothing to lose by continuing to dangle their invitation to surrender before the eyes of a disoriented humanity. At the least they can count on extorting concessions, accommodations, economic aid, more leeway for their legions of subversion around the world. (295)

       What Moscow has opened is a road to surrender. Astonishingly, it has been mistaken by a broad segment of world opinion, led by reputable statesmen, and Kremlinologists, as a road to peace. They have read their own hopes into communist double-talk about peaceful transitions to socialism, and especially into the renewed and refurbished Stalinist slogan, more than forty years old, of "peaceful coexistence." It is a propaganda gambit that is in truth, as the communists themselves have endlessly told us, a rededication to conquest and victory under the new conditions of a "balance of terror." But wishful thinking usually finds what it seeks; in this case, evidence of "mellowing" and "fundamental transformation."

• Peace Campaigns

       "Peace campaigns" have been standard weapons in the communist arsenal of political and psychological warfare. No sane comrade anywhere has taken them literally. To guard them against the marginal chance of such delusion, the Communist International at a Moscow Congress in 1928 spelled it out for the faithful: "The peace policy of the proletarian state certainly does not imply that the Soviet state has become reconciled with capitalism.... It is merely another, and under present conditions, a more advantageous, form of fighting capitalism."

       I have underlined the key words because they are pertinent to the present Kremlin policies. Thirty-three years later another world conclave of Communist parties in Moscow would say: "Peaceful coexistence ... is a form of class struggle between socialism and capitalism. In conditions of peaceful coexistence favorable opportunities are provided for the development of the class struggle in the capitalist countries and the national liberation movement of the peoples of the colonial and dependent countries."

       Moscow thus rates good marks for consistency. Always the objectives of its peace drives have been, not peace, but tactical advantage for its revolutionary wars. Always they have been couched in the bellicose language of "unmasking aggressors . . . delivering death-blows . . . crushing enemies. (296)

       Always they have been devices for unlimited hate-mongering against the putative enemies of peace at a given time: Western imperialists, fascist beasts, social fascists (Aesopian for liberals and non-communist socialists), the United States, and so on.

       Space permits no more than a summary panoramic view of the phenomenon. The Anti-Imperialist League of the mid-twenties evolved into the World Congress Against War in Amsterdam in 1932, which planted anti-war leagues, committees, congresses in nearly all countries, each of them with false-fronts of famous names behind which communists pulled the strings, wrote the manifestoes, and recruited innocents for purposes beyond their comprehension. Then Stalin made his deal with Hitler and all the movements were washed out.

       Deserted by the string-pullers, the millions in many countries who had for years been engaged in what they supposed was a crusade for peace were left bewildered and humiliated. But they had learned nothing from the debacle. A few years after the war they, or others like them, were ready for the next round of ardent self-deception, started by Stalin and continued by his heirs.

       There was the Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wroclaw, Poland, in 1948, the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace in New York a year later, then a World Peace Council presiding over an array of national peace organizations. The great enterprise, first called Peace Partisans and then the World Peace Movement, was climaxed by the Stockholm Appeal in 1950, and the clamorous ingathering of signatures to a petition for outlawing the atom bomb—the American quota was five million names. Whether 400 million did in fact sign, as the managers claimed, became an academic question. The whole gargantuan project faded away after Soviet Russia had stockpiled enough nuclear force to dispense with the anti-atom comedy.

       It was quite a show while it lasted. Those who refused to join the parade were castigated throughout the world as "war-mongers'* and "enemies of peace." They included "the old hangman Churchill" and that "Labourite cannibal" Prime Minister Attlee. (297) In Norway, where the appeal was headquartered, 109 writers, in rejecting Ilya Ehrenburg's invitation to sign, noted that he "did not find on his five-page letter a single space to mention at least once the word peace." The works of the British novelist J. B. Priestley and others who snubbed the Stockholm Appeal were proscribed in Russia.

       The appeal and its ancillary documents, those who bothered to read before signing would have seen, were crudely anti-American and pro-Soviet. The only palpable threat to the peace as the movement got started-was posed by the Soviet blockade of West Berlin. At the height of the campaign, in June 1950, the communist aggression was unleashed in Korea. But common sense had no role in the hysterical worldwide denunciation of "American warmongers." The top-echelon American communist leader, Gus Hall, was crying out against "murderous aggression by the profit-greedy, war-mad Wall Street monopolists."

       The premise was that Americans were hell-bent for war—but no one explained why the United States, since it still had a virtual monopoly of the atom bomb, hadn't already attacked. Nor did anyone explain, though the question was pressed by critics, why the appeal was limited to the bomb, with nary a word about reducing or outlawing armies—the largest of which happened to be the Red Army. The absolute Moscow control of what was the largest "peace" crusade in history was confirmed by the instant expulsion of Yugoslavia from the World Peace Movement as soon as Stalin excommunicated Tito.

       In the United States the sham peace movement was a conspicuous feature of the 1930's, remembered as the Red Decade. It took the form, around 1933, of a League Against War and Fascism, directed primarily against the United States itself. Stalin was then neck-deep in trouble, his tormented land beset by famine and all-embracing discontents; the Nazis were gaining strength in Germany; Japan was massing its forces on the Soviet-Manchurian frontiers. According to his Marxist logic this was the time when "Western imperialists" would attack him. (298) By the simple device of labeling them "fascists," he planned to channel Western anti-fascist feelings against the great democracies.

       Although the communist initiative and control was quite open, the word "peace" worked its magic. Thousands of individuals and scores of organizations—political, religious, social, trade union, cultural—quickly made common cause with the known communist fronts in the sprawling league. Conventional pacifist groups joined up. Eventually even some Young Democrats and Young Republicans, through association with the American Youth Congress, entered this Red catchall. The ten-point program of the league was geared to cripple American defense efforts, propagandize against preparedness, sabotage war industries, and infiltrate the armed forces.

       But in a few years Stalin decided that the "main danger" was not from the democracies after all. The anti-communist Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis had come into being. In 1934, the USSR joined what it had long castigated as the "imperialist" League of Nations, and the people's-front period took shape. In the United States, communism by 1936 was redefined as "Twentieth-Century Americanism." Accordingly the League Against War and Fascism was re-christened, more positively, as the League for Peace and Democracy.

       The members and affiliates may not have added up to seven and a half millions, as the league officials claimed; they came to several millions in any case. But they were consulted neither about the revised name nor the revised program—suddenly switched by 180 degrees. Now they assailed the West for its complacent moods, in the face of the rising fascist dangers and the United States in particular for neglecting military preparedness and failing to react with force to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and China. In the retrospect of history there is grim humor in the fact that one of the new slogans was "Hands off Poland!" "It will be necessary to clear away all remnants of the pacifist rubbish of opposing war by surrender to the war-makers!" Earl Browder, then the American party leader, thundered, and the pacifist outfits in his league applauded that sentiment. (299)

       The league, brightest star in the vast constellation of communist fronts, was at the peak of its activity and influence when the mortal blow descended. Within a few months after Moscow and Berlin announced their pact of friendship, the gigantic peace crusade was arbitrarily liquidated by decision of a few communist agents. The nest orgy of peace mongering for the Kremlin did not come until the late 1940's. But in America at least, it is pleasant to record, it never quite attained the dimensions of its Red Decade forebears.

       It is not an accident, as communists phrase such matters, that the overall effect of the assorted peace campaigns generated by Moscow through forty years has been to aggravate the fears and suspicions of their time. Far from relaxing tensions, they deepened distrust and hatred of the alleged enemies, while rallying support for the Soviet side. Under the spurious flags of peace, they have therefore promoted what amounted to mobilizations for war. (How genuine pacifists could go along with the bogus campaigns surpassed understanding, but go along many of them did.)

       In terms of their true, as distinct from professed objectives, the drives have been successful. Inside Soviet Russia, by spreading fear of imminent war, they served to explain and justify difficulties, intensified exploitation, and stepped-up terror. In the rest of the world they served to identify the concepts of communism and peace in the public mind, at the same time dividing opinion and undercutting national patriotism. (300)