TomDispatch [1] / By Tom Engelhardt [2]

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It stretched from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, from the middle of Europe to the Kurile Islands in the Pacific, from Siberia to Central Asia.  Its nuclear arsenal held 45,000 warheads [4], and its military had five million [5] troops under arms.  There had been nothing like it in Eurasia since the Mongols conquered China, took parts of Central Asia and the Iranian plateau, and rode into the Middle East, looting Baghdad.  Yet when the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, by far the poorer, weaker imperial power disappeared.

And then there was one.  There had never been such a moment: a single nation astride the globe without a competitor in sight.  There wasn’t even a name for such a state (or state of mind).  “Superpower” had already been used when there were two of them.  “Hyperpower” was tried briefly but didn’t stick.  “Sole superpower” stood in for a while but didn’t satisfy.  “Great Power,” once the zenith of appellations, was by then a lesser phrase, left over from the centuries when various European nations and Japan were expanding their empires.  Some started speaking about a “unipolar” world in which all roads led… well, to Washington.

To this day, we’ve never quite taken in that moment when Soviet imperial rot unexpectedly — above all [6], to Washington — became imperial crash-and-burn.  Left standing, the Cold War’s victor seemed, then, like an empire of everything under the sun.  It was as if humanity had always been traveling toward this spot.  It seemed like the end of the line.

The Last Empire?

After the rise and fall of the Assyrians and the Romans, the Persians, the Chinese, the Mongols, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the English, the Germans, and the Japanese, some process seemed over.  The United States was dominant in a previously unimaginable way — except in Hollywood films where villains cackled about their evil plans to dominate the world.

As a start, the U.S. was an empire of global capital.  With the fall of Soviet-style communism (and the transformation of a communist regime in China into a crew of authoritarian “capitalist roaders”), there was no other model for how to do anything, economically speaking.  There was Washington’s way — and that of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (both controlled by Washington) — or there was the highway, and the Soviet Union had already made it all too clear where that led: to obsolescence and ruin.

In addition, the U.S. had unprecedented military power.  By the time the Soviet Union began to totter, America’s leaders had for nearly a decade been consciously using “the arms race” to spend its opponent into an early grave.  And here was the curious thing after centuries of arms races: when there was no one left to race, the U.S. continued an arms race of one.

In the years that followed, it would outpace [7] all other countries or combinations of countries in military spending by staggering amounts.  It housed the world’s most powerful weapons makers [8], was technologically light years ahead of any other state, and was continuing to develop future weaponry [9] for 2020, 2040, 2060, even as it established a near monopoly [10] on the global arms trade (and so, control over who would be well-armed and who wouldn’t).

It had an empire of bases [11] abroad, more than 1,000 [12] of them spanning the globe, also an unprecedented phenomenon.  And it was culturally dominant, again in a way that made comparisons with other moments ludicrous.  Like American weapons makers producing things that went boom in the night for an international audience, Hollywood’s action and fantasy films took the world by storm.  From those movies to the golden arches, the swoosh, and the personal computer, there was no other culture that could come close to claiming such a global cachet.

The key non-U.S. economic powerhouses of the moment — Europe and Japan — maintained militaries dependent on Washington, had U.S. bases littering their territories, and continued to nestle under Washington’s “nuclear umbrella.”  No wonder that, in the U.S., the post-Soviet moment was soon proclaimed “the end of history [13],” and the victory of “liberal democracy” or “freedom” was celebrated as if there really were no tomorrow, except more of what today had to offer.

No wonder that, in the new century, neocons and supporting pundits [14] would begin to claim that the British and Roman empires had been second-raters by comparison.  No wonder that key figures in and around the George W. Bush administration dreamed[15] of establishing a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East and possibly over the globe itself (as well as a Pax Republicana at home).  They imagined that they might actually prevent [16] another competitor or bloc of competitors from arising to challenge American power. Ever.

No wonder they had remarkably few hesitations about launching their incomparably powerful military on wars of choice in the Greater Middle East.  What could possibly go wrong?  What could stand in the way of the greatest power history had ever seen?

Assessing the Imperial Moment, Twenty-First-Century-Style

Almost a quarter of a century after the Soviet Union disappeared, what’s remarkable is how much — and how little — has changed.

On the how-much front: Washington’s dreams of military glory ran aground with remarkable speed in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Then, in 2007, the transcendent empire of capital came close to imploding as well, as a unipolar financial disaster spread across the planet.  It led people to begin to wonder whether the globe’s greatest power might not, in fact, be too big to fail, and we were suddenly — so everyone said — plunged into a “multipolar world.”

Meanwhile, the Greater Middle East descended into protest, rebellion, civil war, and chaos without a Pax Americana in sight, as a Washington-controlled Cold War system in the region shuddered without (yet) collapsing.  The ability of Washington to impose its will on the planet looked ever more like the wildest of fantasies, while every sign, including the hemorrhaging [17] of national treasure into losing trillion-dollar wars [18], reflected not ascendancy but possible decline.

And yet, in the how-little category: the Europeans and Japanese remained nestled under that American “umbrella,” their territories still filled with U.S. bases.  In the Euro Zone, governments continued to cut back [19] on their investments in both NATO and their own militaries.  Russia remained a country with a sizeable nuclear arsenal and a reduced but still large military.  Yet it showed no signs of “superpower” pretensions.  Other regional powers challenged unipolarity [20] economically — Turkey and Brazil, to name two — but not militarily, and none showed an urge either singly or in blocs to compete in an imperial sense with the U.S.

Washington’s enemies in the world remained remarkably modest-sized [21] (though blown to enormous proportions in the American media echo-chamber).  They included a couple of rickety regional powers (Iran and North Korea), a minority insurgency or two, and relatively small groups of Islamist “terrorists.”  Otherwise, as one gauge of power on the planet, no more than a handful [22] of other countries had even a handful of military bases [12] outside their territory.

Under the circumstances, nothing could have been stranger than this: in its moment of total ascendancy, the Earth’s sole superpower with a military of staggering destructive potential and technological sophistication couldn’t win a war against minimally armed guerillas.  Even more strikingly, despite having no serious opponents anywhere, it seemed not on the rise but on the decline, its infrastructure rotting out [23], its populace economically depressed, its wealth ever more unequally divided [24], its Congress seemingly beyond repair, while the great sucking sound that could be heard was money and power heading toward[25] the national security state.  Sooner or later, all empires fall, but this moment was proving curious indeed.

And then, of course, there was China.  On the planet that humanity has inhabited these last several thousand years, can there be any question that China would have been the obvious pick to challenge, sooner or later, the dominion of the reigning great power of the moment?  Estimates are that it will surpass [26] the U.S. as the globe’s number one economy by perhaps 2030.

Right now, the Obama administration seems to be working on just that assumption.  With its well-publicized “pivot” [27] (or “rebalancing”) to Asia, it has been moving to “contain” what it fears might be the next great power.  However, while the Chinese are indeed expanding their military [28] and challenging [29] their neighbors in the waters of the Pacific, there is no sign that the country’s leadership is ready to embark on anything like a global challenge to the U.S., nor that it could do so in any conceivable future.  Its domestic problems, from pollution [30] to unrest [31], remain staggering enough that it’s hard to imagine a China not absorbed with domestic issues through 2030 and beyond.

And Then There Was One (Planet)

Militarily, culturally, and even to some extent economically, the U.S. remains surprisingly alone on planet Earth in imperial terms, even if little has worked out as planned in Washington.  The story of the years since the Soviet Union fell may prove to be a tale of how American domination and decline went hand-in-hand, with the decline part of the equation being strikingly self-generated.

And yet here’s a genuine, even confounding, possibility: that moment of “unipolarity” in the 1990s may really have been the end point of history as human beings had known it for millennia — the history, that is, of the rise and fall of empires.  Could the United States actually be the last empire?  Is it possible that there will be no successor because something has profoundly changed in the realm of empire building?  One thing is increasingly clear: whatever the state of imperial America, something significantly more crucial to the fate of humanity (and of empires) is in decline.  I’m talking, of course, about the planet itself.

The present capitalist model (the only one available) for a rising power, whether China, India, or Brazil, is also a model for planetary decline, possibly of a precipitous nature.  The very definition of success — more middle-class consumers, more car owners, more shoppers, which means more energy used, more fossil fuels burned, more greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere — is also, as it never would have been before, the definition of failure.  The greater the “success,” the more intense the droughts [32], the stronger the storms, the more extreme [33] theweather [34], the higher the rise in sea levels [35], the hotter [36] the temperatures, the greater the chaos [37] in low-lying or tropical lands, the more profound the failure.  The question is: Will this put an end to the previous patterns of history, including the until-now-predictable rise of the next great power, the next empire?  On a devolving planet, is it even possible to imagine the next stage in imperial gigantism?

Every factor that would normally lead toward “greatness” now also leads toward global decline.  This process — which couldn’t be more unfair to countries having their industrial and consumer revolutions late — gives a new meaning to the phrase “disaster capitalism [38].”

Take the Chinese, whose leaders, on leaving the Maoist model behind, did the most natural thing in the world at the time: they patterned their future economy on the United States — on, that is, success as it was then defined.  Despite both traditional and revolutionary communal traditions, for instance, they decided that to be a power in the world, you needed to make the car (which meant the individual driver) a pillar of any future state-capitalist China.  If it worked for the U.S., it would work for them, and in the short run, it worked like a dream, a capitalist miracle — and China rose.

It was, however, also a formula for massive pollution [39], environmental degradation, and the pouring of ever more fossil fuels into the atmosphere in record amounts [40].  And it’s not just China.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about that country’s ravenous energy use, including its possible future “carbon bombs [41],” or the potential for American decline to be halted by new extreme methods of producing energy (fracking [42], tar-sands extraction [43], deep-water drilling).  Such methods, however much they hurt local environments, might indeed turn [44] the U.S. into a “new Saudi Arabia [45].”  Yet that, in turn, would only contribute further to the degradation of the planet, to decline on an ever-larger scale.

What if, in the twenty-first century, going up means declining?  What if the unipolar moment turns out to be a planetary moment in which previously distinct imperial events — the rise and fall of empires — fuse into a single disastrous system?

What if the story of our times is this: And then there was one planet, and it was going down.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project [46] and author of The United States of Fear [47] as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture [48], runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com [1]. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 [49].

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook [50] or Tumblr [51]. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare. [52]

Copyright 2013 Tom Engelhardt 

By Clara Weiss 

Navalny

On April 17, the trial began in Russia of the blogger Alexei Navalny, who is charged with embezzlement. Navalny is one of the best-known critics of President Vladimir Putin. He was a spokesman for the protest movement that accused the Kremlin of falsifying the results of the presidential election in March 2012.

The accusations against Navalny appear to be fabrications. Legal experts have repeatedly questioned the indictment. The key witness for the charge, Kirovles director Vyacheslav Opalev, is entangled in contradictions in his statements to the court.

It would not be the first time that the Kremlin has used fabricated legal proceedings and prison terms to deal with political opposition. Along with Navalny, a further 12 leading members of the protest movement currently find themselves in the dock.

However, the campaign being led by the Western media in support of Navalny is deeply dishonest. The blogger does not speak for the broad mass of the Russian population who live in bitter poverty. According to polls, he would only receive 1 percent of the vote in a presidential election.

Navalny represents a section of the Russian ruling elite that is dissatisfied with the division of wealth at the top of society. They accuse Putin and his closest allies of having arbitrary control over the economy, while they strive to develop closer ties with international finance capital. Navalny is no democrat and is a liberal only on economic issues. He defends right-wing political positions and has repeatedly collaborated with fascists. Navalny was born into a family of the privileged Soviet middle class that was close to the bureaucracy in 1976 near Moscow. Both his parents were party members; his mother was an economics expert, while his father was an officer in the Red Army. His parents built up a company during the period of capitalist restoration in the 1990s—while workers were plunged into poverty and barbaric social conditions.

Alexei bought shares when he was still a student at the elite Moscow State University and took part in the stock market boom of the 1990s. Since 2001, he has worked full-time as a stockbroker after training as a lawyer.

In 1999, Navalny joined the liberal Yabloko party, which had actively supported the restoration of capitalism, and quickly rose into the leadership. He became friends with the daughter of Yegor Gaidar, the leading economic theorist of “shock therapy,” and collaborated with her politically.

In 2005, Navalny took part for the first time in the Russian March, an annual demonstration of neo-Nazis. He was consequently expelled from Yabloko. In an interview at the time, he described the separation between democrats and nationalists as “artificial” and a “pseudo-ideological conflict.”

Navalny repeatedly took part in the neo-Nazi march until 2011, supporting chauvinist slogans such as “Russia for the Russians!” and “Stop feeding the Caucasus!”

He began his anti-corruption campaign in 2007. He bought into large state corporations, including the gas giant Gazprom and the oil company Rosneft, and several state banks. Through his blog, he disclosed information to the public that he had received as a shareholder. The leading Russian business newspaper Vedomosti subsequently named him “Person of the Year 2009.”

In 2010, Navalny was a scholar at the elite Yale University in the US and took part in its “world fellows’ programme” aimed at “creating a global network of emerging leaders.”

In April 2011, when according to polls, only 4 percent of the Russian population actually knew who Navalny was, the American magazine The New Yorker published a 12-page profile on him.

In the autumn of the same year, shortly before the outbreak of the anti-Kremlin protest movement, he once again took part in the Russian March. In the protest movement, which was supported by the Russian liberals, the extreme right and the pseudo-left, Navalny functioned as a link between the liberal wing and the far right.

The New York Times published a tribute to Navalny on April 21 of this year, written by former executive editor Bill Keller. Keller hailed Navalny as a “potential political leader,” who was “young (36), thoughtful, politically astute, crowd-pleasing and apparently unafraid.”

Navalny played down the nature of the fascist groups with whom he collaborated, saying they used “a mild dose of nationalist sloganeering.” Keller praised this as a “shrewd” manoeuvre, which had “dismayed some of his liberal friends,” but served to shield him from Putin’s favourite critique of opposition figures as “Western stooges.” Above all, it helped him “broaden his appeal beyond the young, social-media-savvy cubicle workers who are his base.”

The elite in the US, for whom the New York Times speaks, clearly view Navalny as a potential ally with whom they can secure a better foothold in Russia. His nationalist phrases are no problem for them. They correctly understand that these are directed against the interests of the Russian working class and not against American imperialism.

By Robert Parry

Source: Consortium News

John Yoo, former legal adviser in George W. Bush’s Justice Department.

The U.S. government views itself as the global arbiter of human rights, righteously throwing stones at other nations for their misbehavior and most recently imposing sanctions on a group of Russians accused of human rights crimes. That move prompted a tit-for-tat response from Moscow, barring 18 current and former U.S. officials from entering Russia.

The predictable response from the U.S. news media to the Russian retaliation was to liken it to the Cold War days when the United States would catch a Soviet spy and Moscow would retaliate by grabbing an American and arranging a swap.

But several of the Americans targeted by Moscow this time were clearly guilty of human rights crimes. John Yoo and David Addington were former legal advisers to Criminal-at-Large George W. Bush and [accomplice] Vice President Dick Cheney, respectively. The two lawyers were famous for inventing new excuses for torture. Two other Americans on Moscow’s list — Major General Geoffrey D. Miller and Rear Admiral Jeffrey Harbeson — commanded the extralegal detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.In particular, Yoo and Addington stand out as smug apologists for torture who twisted law and logic to justify waterboarding, painful stress positions, forced nudity, sleep deprivation and other techniques that have been historically defined as torture. In a society that truly respected human rights, they would have been held accountable — along with other practitioners of the “dark side” — but instead have been allowed to walk free and carry on their professional lives almost as if nothing had happened.

The Russians were polite enough only to include on the list these mid-level torture advocates and enablers (as well as some prosecutors who have led legal cases against Russian nationals). They left off the list many culpable former senior officials, such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, CIA Director George Tenet, Cheney and Bush. Obviously, the Russian government didn’t want an escalation.

It’s also undeniably true that Moscow does not come to the human rights issue with clean hands. But neither does the United States, a country that for generations has taken pride in its role as the supposed beacon of human rights, the rule of law, and democratic principles.

Acting as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunals after World War II, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson famously denied that punishing the Nazi leaders as war criminals was simply victor’s justice. He insisted that the same principles would apply to the nations sitting in judgment, including the United States and the Soviet Union. However, that has turned out not to be the case.

The real principles of today’s international law could be described as dragging petty warlords from Africa or Eastern Europe off to The Hague for prosecution by the International Criminal Court, while letting leaders of the Big Powers — with far more blood on their hands — off the hook. Jackson’s “universal principles” of human rights now only apply to the relatively weak.

A History of Double Standards

Of course, one could argue that double and triple standards have always been the way of the world. What often seems to really matter is who has the most powerful friends, the best P.R. team, and the greatest number of “news” organizations in their pocket. Plus, lots of cognitive dissonance helps, too.

For instance, you must forget the role of the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, the Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt and other mainstream media stars in rallying the American people to get behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003 — when the same pundits now fold their arms in disgust at some other nation’s violation of international law.

It’s also handy if you can forget much of American history. You can fondly recall the stirring words about liberty from the Founding Fathers, but it’s best to forget that many owned African-Americans as slaves and that their lust for territorial expansion led them and their descendants to wage a cruel genocide against Native Americans.

There also were the repeated military interventions in Latin America and the brutal counterinsurgency campaign in the Philippines (which applied some of the same tactics that the U.S. military had perfected in crushing uprisings by Native Americans). Then, there were the militarily unnecessary atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the mass slaughters in Indochina in the 1960s and 1970s; and the “death squad” operations in South and Central America in the 1970s and 1980s.

One can trace a direct correlation from American sayings like “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” in the 19th Century to “kill them all and let God sort them out” in the 20 th  Century. And U.S. respect for human rights hasn’t improved much in the new century with George W. Bush’s “war on terror” and his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and with Barack Obama’s extrajudicial killings by drone attacks.

So, when the United States strides from its glass house to hurl stones at Russians over repression in Chechnya, it’s not at all surprising that the Russians would return the volley by singling out some of the Americans clearly implicated in war crimes under George W. Bush. The only real question is why did the Russians stop with a handful of apparatchiks? Probably they didn’t want to escalate this exchange of Big Power hypocrisies.

The hard truth is that if the United States had a functioning criminal justice system for the powerful — not just for run-of-the-mill offenders — former Vice President Cheney and ex-President Bush would have convicted themselves with their own public comments defending their use of torture.

For instance, in February 2010, on ABC’s “This Week,” Cheney pronounced himself “a big supporter of waterboarding,” a near-drowning technique that has been regarded as torture back to the Spanish Inquisition and that has long been treated by U.S. authorities as a serious war crime, such as when Japanese commanders were prosecuted for using it on American prisoners during World War II.

Cheney was unrepentant about his support for the technique. He answered with an emphatic “yes” when asked if he had opposed the Bush administration’s decision to suspend the use of waterboarding. He added that waterboarding should still be “on the table” today.

Admitting the Sham

But Cheney went further. Speaking with a sense of legal impunity, he casually negated a key line of defense that senior Bush officials had hidden behind for years — that the brutal interrogations were okayed by independent Justice Department legal experts who gave the administration a legitimate reason to believe the actions were within the law.

However, in the interview, Cheney acknowledged that the White House had told the Justice Department lawyers what legal opinions to render. In other words, the opinions amounted to ordered-up lawyering to permit the administration to do whatever it wanted.

In responding to a question about why he had so harshly attacked President Obama’s counterterrorism policies, Cheney explained that he was concerned about the new administration prosecuting some CIA operatives who had handled the interrogations and “disbarring lawyers with the Justice Department who had helped us put those policies together. … I thought it was important for some senior person in the administration to stand up and defend those people who’d done what we asked them to do.”

Cheney’s comment about the Justice lawyers who had “done what we asked them to do” was an apparent reference to John Yoo and his boss, Jay Bybee, at the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), a powerful Justice Department agency that advises the President on the limits of his power.

In 2002, Yoo — while working closely with White House officials — drafted legal memos that permitted waterboarding and other brutal techniques by narrowly defining torture. He also authored legal opinions that asserted virtual dictatorial powers for a President during war, even one as vaguely defined as the “war on terror.” Yoo’s key memos were then signed by Bybee.

In 2003, after Yoo left to be a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and Bybee was elevated to a federal appeals court judgeship in San Francisco, their successors withdrew the memos because of the sloppy scholarship. However, in 2005, President George W. Bush appointed a new acting chief of the OLC, Steven Bradbury, who restored many of the Yoo-Bybee opinions.

In the years that followed, Bush administration officials repeatedly cited the Yoo-Bybee-Bradbury legal guidance when insisting that the “enhanced interrogation” of “war on terror” detainees — as well as prisoners from the Iraq and Afghan wars — did not cross the line into torture.

In essence, the Bush-Cheney defense was that the OLC lawyers offered honest opinions and that everyone from the President and Vice President, who approved use of the interrogation techniques, down to the CIA interrogators, who conducted the torture, operated in good faith.

If, however, that narrative is indeed false — if the lawyers had colluded with the policymakers to create legal excuses for criminal acts — then the Bush-Cheney defense would collapse. Rather than diligent lawyers providing professional advice, the picture would be of Mob consiglieres counseling crime bosses how to skirt the law.

Hand in Glove

Though Bush administration defenders have long denied that the legal opinions were cooked, the evidence has long supported the conspiratorial interpretation. For instance, in his 2006 book War by Other Means, Yoo himself described his involvement in frequent White House meetings regarding what “other means” should receive a legal stamp of approval. Yoo wrote:

wrote in an e-mail, “there goes my judo match with Putin.”

Perhaps the ultimate measure of America’s current standing as a promoter of human rights is that it’s difficult to judge which government is the bigger hypocrite: the one in Moscow or the one in Washington.

Submitters Website: http://www.consortiumnews.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It’s also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth.’

BY STEPHEN GOWANS, What’s Left

Khrushchev’s revisionism refers to claims by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that:

•    Socialism can be brought about by peaceful, constitutional means within capitalist democracies.
•    Socialist and capitalist countries can coexist peacefully.

Was he right? Did he really believe these claims?

Socialism, if it is understood as a publicly owned, planned economy, has yet to be brought about through peaceful, constitutional means within capitalist democracies, or elsewhere, and it is difficult to imagine conditions under which it ever could be. In order for socialism to be achieved at the ballot box, the wealthy and powerful who dominate the state, including its police, security, and military apparatus, would have to stand idly by as their private productive property—the basis of their wealth and privileges—was denied them and brought under public control. This is unrealistic. We cannot imagine slave owners peacefully standing by, as their slaves set themselves free, nor feudal lords peacefully accepting their serfs’ expropriation of their estates. Unless we believe that capital-owners are somehow unique, we should not imagine that they would be any less likely than other ruling classes to use the repressive apparatus of the state to preserve their privileges and beat back challenges from a subordinate class that seeks to abolish private productive property.

Did Khrushchev really believe what he was saying? Perhaps. But his arguments may have had less to do with what is true, and more to do with what suited the interests of the Soviet Union at the time (and some might also say what Soviet leaders believed was best for advancing the interests of the international working class given the formidable obstacles in its path.)

The USSR desperately needed space to develop its economy, free from the continual threat of military aggression from the United States and its NATO allies. For his part, Stalin had dissuaded communists in France and Italy from making insurrectionary bids for power at the end of WWII, when communism’s reputation was strong and war-torn Europe leaned toward socialism. He also refused aid to the Greek communists in their guerrilla struggle against British occupation. These efforts to put the brakes on communist advance in the West were taken in order to maintain friendly relations with the USSR’s wartime allies and also because Soviet-supported revolutions in France and Italy would likely have been crushed by the Americans and British, who would have then turned their guns on the Soviet Union. Stalin’s understanding was that a quid-pro-quo had been worked out with his wartime allies. He would not interfere in Western Europe and in return, they would allow him to establish friendly “buffer” states in Eastern Europe as a safeguard against another invasion of the USSR from the west. Likewise, Stalin exercised extreme caution in helping Kim Il Sung in the Korean civil war for fear of being drawn into war with the United States. The Soviet Union could ill-afford a war with the Americans, and Stalin therefore refused to support revolutionary movements in his allies’ sphere of influence and acted with caution in supporting revolutionary movements elsewhere. There is a considerable continuity in Stalin’s efforts to keep the hostility of capitalist powers at bay, and Khrushchev’s call for peaceful coexistence.

Since it was Khrushchev who proposed peaceful co-existence, he had to offer an incentive to interest the Americans. The incentive was the idea of a peaceful transition to socialism—in effect, a promise that communist parties in advanced industrialized countries would work within the rules of capitalist democracies, and renounce violent, extra-constitutional bids for power. To put it another way, they would surrender any possibility of being a threat. This was very much like the bargain Stalin tried to strike with his wartime allies. Refrain from interfering in my sphere and I will refrain from interfering in yours.

While it irked some communists in the West, peaceful transition was a concession of little significance. Most communist parties, most of all those in North America, Western Europe and Japan, were not in a position to make violent, extra-constitutional bids for power. Therefore, if the Americans took the bait, Khrushchev would get space to continue to build socialism for the small price of giving up revolution in the advanced countries, which was not on the radar anyway.

Was this a betrayal of the working class outside the Soviet sphere? It depends on what you think the chances of revolution were in the advanced, industrialized countries. After the failure of a revolution to come off in Germany following the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Russia—a revolution Lenin and his followers had fervently hoped for and expected, even depended on—the Soviets were never again sanguine about the prospects of the working class in the West overthrowing its capitalist masters. Therefore, beginning with Stalin, the Soviet Union redefined the idea of internationalism to recognize this depressing reality. Moscow would refrain from vigorously supporting working class struggles in the West, first because the pay-off was likely to be slim to non-existent, and second because the costs were too high, namely the risk that Germany, Britain and France, and later the United States, would retaliate and threaten the USSR’s very existence.

Instead, the Soviets turned their gaze to seemingly more promising and safer horizons, one on their periphery and the other in the national liberation movements. They would expand socialism gradually, by drawing more and more of these countries and movements into their orbit. Meanwhile, the appeal of socialism in the industrialized countries would be heightened by creating within the Soviet Union a living, breathing, example of socialism. If the Soviet Union could overtake the United States economically, and produce a society of plenty with a growing array of publicly provided goods and services delivered according to need, workers in the West might be galvanized to overthrow the capitalist class, which stood in the way of their achieving the same. However, the only way that this could be brought about would be to set the US-USSR relationship on a footing of peaceful co-existence and economic, rather than military, competition, allowing Moscow to divert capital and manpower from the military to the civilian economy so that it could advance toward a society of plenty.

Khrushchev’s revisionism, then, can be seen as a clever detour around hazards that blocked the Soviet Union’s path toward building a stronger socialism, and eventually, socialism on a global scale. Clever as it was, it had a fatal flaw: it was too successful. Peaceful co-existence and detente gave the Soviets space to do two things:

•    Beat the United States into space.
•    Produce economic growth so rapid that the United States believed it would be overtaken economically.

Alarmed, the Americans resolved to deny the Soviet Union the space it needed to continue along this path. Eventually, Washington used an arms race to severely retard growth in the Soviet economy, and force the USSR into submission.

To sum up: There is no substance to the idea that capitalism can be abolished within capitalist institutions while capitalists stand by idly and allow their property to be expropriated. Nor is it reasonable to suppose that capitalist powers are prepared to co-exist peacefully with socialist ones on a permanent basis. They may do so for a time, if the costs of war are too high, but they will be forever driven to capture the economic space socialist countries deny them. All the same, Khrushchev’s peaceful co-existence proposal was less a statement of fact and more a proposal for a modus vivendi—you let us be, and we will let you be. The merits of the proposal can be evaluated on the grounds of whether it achieved what it was supposed to achieve. It did, for a time, reduce tensions between the two powers, but failed inasmuch as the United States eventually abandoned detente. Still, we need to ask whether the alternative—allowing tensions to escalate and trying to foment revolutions in the West—would have worked out better. This seems unlikely. While the Soviet military was formidable, the economy of the USSR was still smaller than that of the United States and was therefore incapable of supporting Soviet participation in the Cold War indefinitely. Eventually the Cold War took a heavy toll on the Soviet economy. Moreover, workers in the West showed no strong inclination to overthrow their capitalist masters.

We should be clear, too, that Khrushchev represented no discontinuity with Stalin. Stalin too was interested in a live-and-let-live foreign policy if it contained tensions and allowed the USSR breathing room to grow stronger. There were, then, good reasons why the Soviet Union should have worked for detente, and Moscow’s demanding that communist parties in advanced industrialized countries adopt a non-revolutionary politics for non-revolutionary times was hardly a high price to pay.

A final point. The problem with the idea of “non-revolutionary politics for non-revolutionary times” is that revolutionary times can creep up unannounced, creating missed opportunities for parties that are contingently practicing non-revolutionary politics, or have institutionalized them. The trick, obviously, is to avoid either of the following errors:

•    Practicing non-revolutionary politics in revolutionary times.
•    Practicing revolutionary politics in non-revolutionary times.

Of the two, the first, of course, is the gravest error. It could be said that Khrushchev’s revisionism guaranteed that if any error were to be made, it would be this one.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Srephen Gowans is a Canadian activist and political analyst.  He is the founding editor of What’s Left.