The crucible of World War I

Both Soviet and American leaders proclaimed the novelty of their respective views of international politics during World War I and the postwar settlement. Indeed, historians have convincingly argued that the two ideologies emerged in direct competition with each other. Both Wilson and Lenin wrote obituaries for an international system divided into imperial blocs, centered in European nation-states, and maintained through secret and self-interested diplomacy. They promoted, respectively, liberal and radical transformations of the international system, seeking to overthrow the one in place since the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Consistent with their messianic ideologies, both Wilson and Lenin prematurely declared victory over the old order. Russia’s new leaders declared their revolution the first step in a global surge, and immediately began operating with a new form of international relations. Lev Trotskii quipped, upon being named the Bolsheviks’ first people’s commissar for foreign affairs, that his duties should merely be to "issue a few revolutionary proclamations to the peoples of the world and then shut up shop."19 Soviet foreign policy rejected traditional diplomatic relations and would be oriented to the world’s workers, not its statesmen. The Third (Communist) International, or Comintern (1919-43), institutionalized this approach, working for revolution in the developed nations of Western Europe and North America. Wilson, meanwhile, sought a reconfiguration of the international system along messianic liberal lines: "liberalism is the only thing that can save civilization."20 Enumerating his Fourteen Points in January 1918, Wilson invoked the "common interest of mankind" to demand "mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity" for all states as well as the expansion of free trade.21 These guarantees - and the Fourteen Points in general - aimed to find a middle ground between Right (nationalism/imperialism) and Left (Bolshevism) by promoting a liberal internationalism.

While neither Wilson nor Lenin succeeded in eradicating the old diplomacy rooted in imperialism and nationalism, they presented powerful ideological challenges to the old order - and to each other. True to Trotskii’s dictum, Lenin wrote not to the American president but to American workers, expressing his misguided confidence that they would rise against the bourgeoisie.

Until they did so, he wrote, Russian revolutionaries were in a "besieged fortress, waiting for other detachments of the world socialist revolution to come to our relief."22 The Soviets hoped these detachments would arrive in 1919, as revolutionary insurrections sprang up in Bavaria, Vienna, and Budapest. The wait, however, would be long indeed; by year’s end, the revolutionary tide in the West had subsided, leaving Russia’s Bolshevik regime global in principle but isolated in practice.

In 1921, the Comintern belatedly acknowledged that the 1917 revolution had not led to the overthrow of world capitalism, and concluded that different tactics were in order. Revolutionaries, it declared, must turn their energies to supporting Soviet Russia, which alone was carrying the socialist banner. The imminence of the revolution was a particular problem for American Communists; as the most advanced capitalist economy, the United States should theoretically have been closest to revolution. Lenin acknowledged the complexity, though, in his letters to American workers: a socialist revolution in the United States was not imminent, and thus socialism and capitalism would coexist for a time. The many defeats for American labor and radicalism in the 1920s made the a priori logic of an imminent revolution seem even less suitable. American Communists debated the "American exception" from Marx’s laws of revolution. The Comintern’s American Commission adjudicated the dispute; its head, Stalin, criticized those Americans who ignored the fact that the principal features of capitalism were identical in all countries. Marx’s laws of revolution allowed no "American exception."

In the decade after the Bolshevik Revolution, then, the implications of Soviet ideology became clear: aspiring to world revolution, it sought to unite progressive forces in the developed world under its control. Since the USSR was the beacon of revolution, the long-term goal of world revolution came with a short-term goal of building up the USSR. Anything that strengthened the bastion of world revolution, therefore, would advance world revolution.

American leaders, meanwhile, saw the Russian Revolution as a threat to liberty. The strands of American liberalism - formal liberty, gradually attained; popular sovereignty; racial hierarchy; and market-based individualism - shaped American responses to Russian events. Understanding Bolshevik power as mob rule, American leaders decried Bolshevism alternately as a catalyst of murder and repression and as an inevitable descent into anarchy. President Wilson saw Russians as guided by irrational impulses rather than detached rationality; as with his encomiums to the founding fathers, popular sovereignty was orderly. Thus, Wilson’s praise of Russia was tinged with condescension; his famous war address in April 1917 praised Russians’ "natural instinct" for democracy - not their rational hopes for it.23 Wilson and his administration spent more time, however, describing baser Russian instincts, ones that revealed Russia’s political immaturity and danger to the advance of liberal democratic civilization. From the point of view of American policymakers, then, the Russian Revolution had two problems: it was Russian and it was a revolution.

Wilson also saw the Russian problem in a broader ideological context, in which the Bolsheviks were interfering with human progress. "Bolshevism is a mistake," he told one interlocutor, "and it must be resisted as all mistakes are resisted. If let alone it will destroy itself. It cannot survive because it is wrong."24 He also opposed Allied intervention in Soviet Russia - though only months later he reluctantly approved American actions against Bolshevik rule. Wilson convinced himself that only American military aid and troop deployments in Russia would keep history on the proper path. The United States, then, fought Soviet Russia in the name of ordered liberty, national sovereignty, and gradual progress.

Wilson’s messianic liberalism appeared not only in the White House but also among some of its sharpest critics in the 1910s. A circle of writers and diplomats led by Progressives were such firm believers in historical progress that they could imagine only a bright future for Russia, in spite of all the available evidence. Bolshevism, in this analysis, was a necessary phase before the inevitable normalization ofthe country. No evidence to the contrary could shake American liberals’ conviction that Russia would soon conform to the American model.25