The Southland Times TUESDAY, MARCH 14, 1939. Soviet Foreign Policy

Southland Times, Issue 23766, 14 March 1939, Page 6

The Southland Times TUESDAY, MARCH 14, 1939. Soviet Foreign Policy

IN recent months M. Stalin has made so few public speeches that more than usual attention will be given to his address at the eighteenth congress of the Bolshevist Party, from which extracts were printed yesterday. Removed from their context, and perhaps—in the process of translation —from their exact meanings, these extracts give only the faintest indications of the probable trend in Russian foreign policy. At the present time, when world affairs are in an almost fluid condition of change, this need not be surprising. But M. Stalin seems to have gone out of his way to cloak official reticence with provocative statements that are not likely to deceive anyone outside the frontiers of the Soviet Union. His seven points, which no doubt were received with enthusiasm by' the congress, include only one statement that might have any real bearing on foreign policy. To speak of “growing economic, political and cultural power”, the “political unity” of society, the friendship of the Soviet peoples, the Red Army and Navy and the “common sense of the Powers who wanted peace” as policy items in relation to other countries is a curiously complicated way of saying that Russia intends to mind her own business. Unfortunately the sixth point may be received abroad as a resounding contradiction of all the others. “Moral” support for the workers of (peace-loving countries sounds harmless enough, but the record of the Comintern’s subversive activities in the past may cause the announcement to be received with scepticism and distrust. There is bound to be speculation as to whether this sixth point is a hint that the Comintern (the Third International, source of communist propaganda) which in recent years has moved deeper into the background of Russian politics, is to have a revitalized phase under the direction or approval of M. Stalin. At first sight the prospect seems too much like a volte-face in Russian policy. The whole trend of Stalinism, as opposed to the idea of world revolution advocated by M. Trotsky, has been away from interference in foreign countries and towards the consolidation of a socialist State within the Soviet Union. It is widely believed, indeed, that the Red Army purges and the execution of the eight generals in June 1937, was the culminating point in the struggle against “Trotsky-fascism”, and that M. Stalin no longer has anything to fear from the old guard of the Revolution. In the circumstances it is difficult to believe that after establishing his nationalist policy the dictator should encourage a revived activity by the Third International. Yet it is plain that “Comintern membership in the capitalist countries” was discussed by the congress, and it is possible that the recent addition of Hungary to the anti-Comin-tern bloc, the ominous vacillations of Poland and the symptoms of Nazi interference in Slovakia have convinced M. Stalin that the technique of subversive activity may yet be needed in resisting the eastern march of fascism. Russian policy can be changed abruptly. The dictator has not hesitated to deviate sharply from his own party line in the past, and will do so again with equal chances of success in the future. It would be one of the major ironies of history (and at the same time a natural sequence of events) if the Anti-Comintern Pact, which has been used with notable success as an excuse for fascist aggression when the Comintern’s influence was obviously waning, became the cause of a new and active policy of world revolution in Moscow.