Lenin’s thoughts concerning Soviet foreign policy and internationalism: Great Marxism Dictionary (2018)

Lenin’s analysis and position on foreign policy of the Soviet Union and internationalism.

The status quo of the socialist revolution in Russia should be the basis when evaluating any decision of the Soviet power or Soviet Russia in respect to its international tasks.

Lenin argued that all the major activities of Soviet Russia’s foreign relations should be based on the basic principle of developing and consolidating the first foreign policy document promulgated by the Soviet state, i.e., the Decree on Peace, which was based on the following principles: opposition to the annexation of territories of foreign lands and incorporation of a small or weak nation into large or powerful state; respect for the sovereignty of other countries, national self-determination, equality and mutual benefit, and urged that the belligerent states should “start immediate negotiations for a just, democratic peace” without annexations (i.e., without the seizure of foreign lands, without the forcible incorporation of foreign nations) and without indemnities.”

Then, in the Appeal to the Moslems of Russia and the East, it was declared that the secret treaties signed by the Tsarist government on the seizure of Constantinople (İstanbul) and the partition of Turkey and Iran, and wresting from Turkey of Armenia as well as the secret treaties signed by the Tsarist government and the Provisional Government of the bourgeoisie with other capitalist countries are null and void; do not waste any time in throwing from your shoulders the age-long enslavers of our land. Do not permit them longer to rob you of your native homes. You yourselves must be the masters of your country; the independence and sovereignty of all nations, big and small, should be recognized and respected. Such program advocating genuinely sincere and relations of equal footing among all nations declared by Soviet Russia was the first step of world historical significance for the establishment of a new type of peaceful and democratic international relations.

Proletarian internationalism is the fundamental principle of the foreign policy of the socialist state. Lenin firmly advocated the right of all nations determining their own destiny and opposed not only all class oppression, but any form of national oppression; the unity to be advocated by the international emancipation struggle of the international proletariat should not only fight for the liberation of the nations and peoples of a particular country, but for the liberation of all the nations and peoples of the world. To uphold the principle of proletarian internationalism, we must strengthen the bonds and the unity among the proletarian political parties of all countries on the premise of mutual respect. Communists of each country should take into account the unique economic, political, cultural, national composition, and other characteristics of their own countries very consciously.

The unity the international tactic of the communist workers’ movement in each country does not require the ignorance of diversity, and Lenin argued that the relationships between national communist parties or socialist organizations of various countries should not be those of the superior and the subordinate, the leader and the led, but should be relationships among equals, as well as free, fraternal, liaison and cooperative. No matter how old, how experienced, how powerful and influential it is, no proletarian party has the privilege of being superior to other parties. True unity and union among parties can possible only in this way.

The first idea put forward by Lenin was the idea of peaceful coexistence. Draft Resolution on the Question of International Policy approved at the Eighth National Congress of the RCP(B) in December stated that the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic declared its will to live in peaceful coexistence with the peoples of all nations and to use all its strength for domestic socialist construction. Based on this scientific and objective analysis, Soviet Russia proposed and implemented a foreign policy of peaceful coexistence. In 1921, Soviet Russia first signed a trade agreement and established commercial relations with Great Britain, and then established diplomatic relations with Germany, Italy, Norway, Greece, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Japan and other countries. The realization of peaceful coexistence between countries with different socio-economic systems, the competition with capitalism and the closing of the gap with capitalist countries was a special kind of struggle, which can be called as a struggle of competition between two different paths, two different social forms and two different economies, namely between communism and capitalism.

Supporting the just struggle of the oppressed nations and peoples. In 1920 Lenin pointed out in his Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions that world political developments are of necessity concentrated on a single focus, namely the struggle of the world bourgeoisie targeting the Soviet Russian Republic, around which are inevitably grouped, on the one hand, the Soviet movements of the advanced workers in all countries, and, on the other, all the national liberation movements in the colonies and among the oppressed nationalities. The Soviet power must pursue the policy that will achieve the closest alliance, with Soviet Russia, of all the national and colonial liberation movements, and the form of this alliance should be determined by the degree of development of the communist movement in the proletariat of each country, or of the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement of the workers and peasants in backward countries or among backward nationalities, so that “an alliance with the revolutionaries of the advanced countries and with all the oppressed nations against all and any imperialists–this is the foreign policy of the proletariat”. He pointed out that the socialist revolution can only take place in an era when the civil wars of the proletariat of the advanced countries against their bourgeoisie is united with a series of democratic revolutionary movements set in motion by the underdeveloped, backward and oppressed nations, and that the world revolution could be won only if the proletariat of all countries united with the oppressed nations and supported each other. Therefore, Lenin always advocated the closest alliance of the conscious workers of the advanced countries with the workers, peasants and slaves of all the oppressed nations.

Lenin’s foreign policy was a model of a new type of peaceful foreign policy of the new socialist state, which is fundamentally different from the traditional policy of centuries pursued by the Tsarist Empire striving for world domination.