22e: Conclusions

1. Everybody was out to get the Bolsheviks
The White Russians, Green Russians, Poles, Germans, Finns, Ukrainians, Austrians, Japanese, Britons, and even Americans all tried to knock of the Bolsheviks. The Americans even exported people suspected of being Bolshevik sympathizers. The Bolshevik state survived because it had internal lines of communications and because it could deal with the attacks one after another. Had there been any coordination of attacks, chances are that the Bolsheviks would not have hung on - recall that Russia is lacking in natural defences, and the Soviets had nowhere near enough men to defend every front in depth. This piling up on the Bolshevik state was never forgotten and had a tremendous effect on how Soviet leaders conducted foreign affairs: trust no one and carry a big stick.

2. Resistance never completely petered out
The Whites, who had no real program anyway, eventually packed up and left. Although the USSR expended great effort in fighting what it saw as the White emigre threat, the major threat to Soviet regime was internal. Although Stalin would whip up conspiracies of Trotskyists and foreign spies out of thin air, anti-Soviet resistance tended to be nationalist in form. For example, Ukraine was always in danger of going out of control, as well as Caucasian regions such as Chechnya. The standard techniques of repression were employed, but Stalin was also not above practicing "ethnic cleansing" - entire nations would be packed onto unheaded boxcars and dumped off in the middle of nowhere just because they made Stalin nervous. When the German invaders came in 1941, many so-called Soviet people welcomed them with open arms. They couldn't believe that anyone could be as evil and brutal as Joseph Stalin. Sadly, they were wrong.

3. Forget about principle!
Lenin and his minions found out that inventing a government out of scratch was not very easy. The new Soviet government veered between "War Communism," which consisted basically of grabbing whatever was not tied down, and the "New Economic Policy," which was really just gussied-up capitalism, or Capitalism Lite. Moreover, the Soviet Union needed Western help in rebuilding its heavy industry. But the most friendly country they dealt with in the years between the World Wars was Weimar Germany. In return for German help with their military technology, the Soviets allowed Germans to train troops, test new weapons, and engage in wargames - all on Russian soil and all specifically forbidden by the treaty of Versailles.

4. Workers of the World, Unite... or Not!
The world revolution preached by Marx turned out to be a bust. German revolution failed, and so did the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. As early as the middle 1920s, the Soviets were trying to meddle in China, with disastrous results. Strangely, the Soviet brain trust in China was just as interested in winning over the Nationalist commander Chiang Kai-Shek as they were in supporting the devoted Communist Mao Zedong. The same thing happened during the Spanish Civil War, in which Franco's fascists fought a loose Republican confederation of Socialists, Anarchists, and Communists:. the Soviets were more interested in stamping out Spanish Trotskyists than fighting Spanish fascists When Stalin signed the famous 1939 non-aggression pact with Germany, he even handed over to Hitler many German communists who had fled to the USSR for safety.