Workers World, Vol. 9, No. 6, March 17, 1967
Our epoch, which is already too well characterized by the monstrous use of open violence and secret diplomacy in international relations, is also characterized by the use of political cynicism to a degree unmatched by any other epoch.
For the more one tries to fathom the true character of the relations between Moscow and Washington the more one is struck by certain elements which our epoch has in common with that period known in history as the Renaissance.
For the Renaissance was not merely a cultural episode but was a historical transition period – a transition from one social system of class rule and oppression to another – from dying feudalism to the birth and development of bourgeois society.
The Renaissance gave birth not only to Leonardo and Galileo, but also to Thomas More and Machiavelli. The epoch which is known for its unprecedented outbursts of intellectual energy and boldness of thought is also the epoch which is characterized by disillusionment (Machiavelli) as well as great anticipation (Thomas More – in his “Utopia”).
As a transition period it was marked by a multitude of the most glaring social and political contradictions just like our own epoch. Their very acuteness attested to the existence of fundamental classes in combat – using any and all means at their disposal in the struggle for political power and dominion over society.
The prevalence during this period of plots, counter-plots, assassinations and conspiracy – made cynicism the characteristic feature of the politics of the Renaissance. It was not for nothing that Machiavelli had written “The Prince.” But Machiavelli, who spoke for the new and progressive class (the bourgeoisie), spoke especially for its reactionary power-politics rather than for its progressive humanistic aspects.
Our epoch too, is an epoch of transition – one that has the deepest and profoundest significance for the fate of all mankind. It is the transition from moribund capitalism to socialism. Unless this transition is made, humanity faces a throwback to barbarism.
Unhappily some of the forms of the struggle characteristic of the exploiting classes have been assumed by leaders who lay claim to represent the worldwide interests of socialism.
Take the conduct of the Soviet leaders in the case of Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter. Millions upon millions of people throughout the world, including those in the USSR, learned that she had left the Soviet Union. Whether this was a voluntary departure, a defection, or even an outright kidnapping, no one could confidently say. The only reports came from the capitalist press. What could motivate Svetlana Alliluyeva to flee the Soviet Union and seek a “haven” in the imperialist West? Millions looked to the Soviet leadership as the only source for a plausible explanation. After an inordinately long wait came this statement from Tass:
“In view of journalists’ inquiries, Tass confirms that Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, is not abroad.
“Late in 1966, she was issued an exit visa to go from the Soviet Union to India to bury the ashes of her husband, an Indian citizen who died in the USSR.
“How long Svetlana Alliluyeva will stay abroad is her private affair.” (New York Times, March 13, 1967)
Everything in the above statement reeks on Machiavellian cynicism, gross deceit and aristocratic contempt as well as fear of the masses. So Mlle. Alliluyeva’s presence in the West is a private affair! Even the most obtuse and dull-witted of our species would wince at this. For whatever else Mlle. Alliluyeva’s presence in the West is, it cannot under any circumstances be regarded as a private affair. It has admittedly been the subject of consultation at the highest level of government by India, the U.S., Italy, and Switzerland. Mlle. Alliluyeva is alleged to have had her trip from New Delhi arranged in the company of a CIA agent! Is this a private affair of a Soviet citizen?
The fact that the Soviet leaders had to take refuge in such an obviously threadbare subterfuge is enough to condemn them. And whom does it deceive? Machiavellian diplomacy had at least the merit of deceiving the enemy. Is Washington deceived by it? Or is it meant solely for the consumption of the masses?
The shame of it all is that the Tass statement is not a diplomatic communication to an imperialist government but a public declaration to the peoples of the world!
Svetlana Alliluyeva may in and of herself be unimportant but her sudden appearance in the arms of the West is enormously significant. For one thing, it makes a mockery of the official optimism which the Soviet leaders have been exuding regarding the internal situation in the USSR. Judging by the official pronouncement of the leaders, the foundations of socialism should be so firmly established – indeed the Soviet people are presumed to be already on the threshold of communism – that no one should need to seek haven, least of all in an imperialist country.
Even if we are deprived of the exact details or immediate circumstances motivating Mlle. Alliluyeva’s flight – by a curtain of silence that extends from Moscow to Washington – it is all too clear that the incident is a mere symptom of a far deeper cause.
The Svetlana Alliluyeva incident points to weakness and political instability in the governing summits of the USSR. The weakness and instability does not lie in the lack of material resources in the country, in the disproportion between the productive forces and the material needs of the people of the country, or in the existence of the old, expropriated bourgeoisie. Nor can it be attributed in the main to the dangerous encirclement of the Soviet Union by the imperialist as was the case before. The source for the weakness is elsewhere.
The weakness lies in the slow but sure evolution of a socially privileged, powerful layer of Soviet society, which, having been catered to and cultivated by various means and methods all these many years, now has become more consolidated, more sure of itself, more brazen and open – but nonetheless unstable and torn by acute inner contradictions.
It is this conglomerate, neo-bourgeois social stratum, which is the greatest danger to the social foundations of the October Revolution. It strikes out against the left and against the right. It seeks to safeguard itself against imperialism, while at the same time it collaborates with it by the most sordid deals and strikes against the revolutionary left.
The flight of Svetlana Alliluyeva brings to the surface yet another symptom of a deeply embedded disease which becomes all the more dangerous the more it is suppressed and driven underground. It is the so-called détente with the West, whose obverse side is collusion against the revolutionary liberation movements of the world and the People’s Republic of China.
The fact that the U.S. government through its kept press ostentatiously proclaimed that the CIA had arranged the flight cannot but confirm that the class antagonisms between U.S. imperialism and the Soviet Union, while temporarily suppressed on the surface, nevertheless exist and are at work.
The engineering of Alliluyeva’s flight by the U.S. from India through Italy and to Switzerland in the company of the CIA is living proof of this.
It was an act of hostility that no amount of “nice words” afterwards by the State Department could cover up. Even the most credulous among the Soviet leaders could not possibly mistake the significance of such an act. The fact that the Soviet government thereafter annulled the prison term of Buel Ray Wortham (a CIA agent) almost at the same time that Svetlana Alliluyeva was given asylum in Switzerland, rather than the U.S., is an indication of a deal to soften the blow to the prestige of the Soviet leadership.
The U.S. government is engaged in a long and tortuous maneuver in its relations with the USSR, but in a true Machiavellian spirit. Like no other administration since the birth of the Soviet Republic, the Johnson Administration is going out of its way to “make nice” to the Soviet leaders. No opportunity is let go in the relentless efforts of the U.S. government and its press to flatter the Soviet leaders and make them “look good,” all in the name of “peace.” Unhappily for the Soviet leaders, each time the Johnson Administration “makes nice” to them, it is in reality the kiss of death. For never were the Soviet leaders more in need of violent diatribes from the U.S. government and press to bolster their waning revolutionary prestige than now. More than anything else, the Soviet leaders need a coat of bright red paint to cover up their reactionary deeds.
Thus when the State Department announced that it had continued the suspension of the bombing of North Vietnam until after Premier Kosygin left London “out of respect for him,” this commendation from the Johnson Administration did more to under-cut the Soviet leaders among the revolutionary peoples than anything else. So while the U.S. government intimates that it didn’t grant asylum to Alliluyeva in the U.S., but made sure she got it from Switzerland so as not to embarrass the Soviet leaders, such solicitude from the Johnson Administration neither hides the criminal character of U.S. subversion and espionage nor does it help the revolutionary reputation of the Soviet revisionists.
If the Alliluyeva episode is to serve any useful lesson at all insofar as relations between the U.S. and USSR are concerned, it is to remind all and sundry that the deep social antagonisms between imperialism and the Soviet Republic exist in spite of all surface manifestations of friendship.
U.S. finance capital’s Machiavellian foreign policy of overt friendship and covert subversion toward the USSR has its immediate cause in the reckless adventurism in Vietnam. More than anything else the U.S. ruling monopolies for whose benefit the war is fought need to keep the split between the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union alive and deepening. Victory for them over the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people is unthinkable in the face of a unified socialist bloc. Even the more adventurist, madder section of the bourgeoisie, which is hopelessly tied to the illusion of victory, must constantly assure the American people that the split between China and the USSR is “deep” and “permanent” and therefore the danger to the fortunes of U.S. aggression “is not great.”
Imperialism, driven into a blind alley by its insatiable appetite for greater and greater conquest, is trapped on the Asian continent by its war of aggression against Vietnam. It has staked its fortune on the irremediability of the split between the two great socialist countries and the temporary ebb of the proletarian and liberation movements of the world.
In the longer view of history, the reigning oligarchies of finance capital will be proven wrong on both counts. Their calculations have their origins not in objective evaluations of historical trends but in the blinding prejudice born out of their lust for private property and super-profit.
Last updated: 11 May 2026