Written: Unknown, by F. Rostein
First Published: March 12, 1924
Source: The Living Age, April-June, 1924.
Translated: Unknown
Transcription/Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Soviet History Archive 2005. This work is completely free.
AUGUST BEBEL, the great parliamentarian leader of the Second International, used to say on various occasions: ‘Every time our bourgeois opponents begin to praise me, I immediately ask myself if I have not committed some blunder.’ August Bebel came from the working class, and the proletarian instinct of political cleanliness was very strong in him. This same instinct inspires similar reflections in some of our comrades at the sight of the ‘recognitions’ of our workman-peasant State, coming from all ends of the bourgeois world. Whence such sudden love? Have we committed some blunder? Are we actually being transformed into a State which is acceptable to the capitalistic world? And finally, what good will all this bourgeois tinsel do our revolutionary State?
We ought to be very glad that such views are expressed. They reflect a healthy class-feeling which in itself is a guaranty against our transformation. As a matter of fact, however, they have very little foundation and are based to a very large extent on a misunderstanding. Almost from the very beginning our Soviet Government has made efforts to achieve recognition, and during 1918 and still more 1919 we made numerous offers to bourgeois Governments to conclude peace and negotiate the restoration of normal relations between us and the other nations. On numerous occasions our offers were accompanied by expressions of our willingness to make considerable concessions.
It will be very difficult indeed to find proof of our transformation in the fact that in 1924 we achieved without any concessions on our part what we had longed for all these long and difficult years, and what the bourgeois States have consistently refused us with the haughty mien of the victors. On the contrary, if any transformation has taken place it has not been on our side; since we gave nothing for recognition and continue to emphasize our revolutionary origin and to insist upon the preservation of our revolutionary conquests. Rather is it on the side of the bourgeois Governments, who have dreamed so long of our overthrow, who have tortured us with countless pains of the blockade, who have sent against us whole armies, who have equipped and armed against us the White hosts of numberless generals and admirals, who isolated us from the world, who solemnly denounced us as murderers with whom they would never deign to shake hands, and who, even at the time when our existence could no longer be in doubt and when our absence from the world economic intercourse began to be felt more and more acutely everywhere, still could not for a long time make up their minds to make peace with us, but have been carefully and cautiously and surreptitiously entering into de facto relations with us.
It is quite clear that they, rather than we, have been transformed and that it is for us, rather than for them, to celebrate a victory as a result of the recognition. For the second time we have conquered the bourgeois world. In the first instance, with arms in our hands we beat off their violent intervention in our internal affairs; and in the second instance, now, they have been compelled to recognize their defeat and to make peace with us on infinitely more favorable terms as far as we are concerned than those which we ourselves offered them and which they had refused.
In the light of this absolutely apparent victory for our side there is something of futility in the second question as to what good all this is going to do us. As if the final and formal acknowledgment on the part of an opponent that he has lost the game, and that he recedes from his former thoughts and actions, is not sufficient good for the winner. As if the circumstance that the bourgeois world has acknowledged its impotence in the face of our revolution and is compelled now to accord us the same treatment as has been accorded hitherto only to the ‘respectable’ Governments recognizing the sacred foundations of capitalistic property, of the bourgeois electoral right, of the bourgeois ‘freedom’ of the press, of the Church, of judicial ‘conscience,’ and of all the other fraudulent institutions built up by the exploiters — as if this very circumstance does not constitute an enormous advantage for our State and for our cause.
Even from the point of view of purely material interests our victory must sooner or later find expression in very tangible advantages, since our concentration on constructive economic and cultural work will no longer be interrupted by such episodes as Curzon’s sudden ultimatum hurled at us in May of last year; since all he arguments about the legality of our legislation concerning the nationalization of industry will be buried forever and no courts of law or oil syndicates will be able to interfere with our foreign trade; since the foreign capitalists, confident now of the stability of our international position, will more willingly accept our terms and will not introduce into their calculations the so-called coefficient risk.
Even in the domain of politics the material advantages of our recognition will be very considerable. In our negotiations with foreign Governments we shall be able to deal not with second-rate officials and with trade representatives, endowed with very limited prerogatives, but with plenipotentiaries and cabinet ministers. In other words, we shall be placed on a footing, o£ complete political equality with the other States and will be able to negotiate with them on the basis of equal authoritativeness. Whoever knows the difference between dealing with the owner of an enterprise and with. his clerks will realize the significance of this advantage, no matter how formal it may appear on the surface.
But above all other direct advantages connected with the act of our recognition by the bourgeois States is the enormous increase of our international importance. A huge country with a population of 130 millions, with inexhaustible natural resources, Russia even in the period of the Empire, when she was universally known for her internal weakness and was therefore often spoken of as ‘a colossus with feet of clay,’ nevertheless played an important international role and had great influence in world politics. Our Soviet State, our Union of Soviet Republics that has risen upon the ruins of Czaristic Russia and is welded together in a way in which few composite States in modern history have been, is bound to play an even more decisive role in international relations.
There is no doubt that the realization of this inevitable development has been one of the most important factors that has compelled the bourgeois Governments to recognize the Soviet State, which they hate so much — at the very moment when Europe is again splitting into two camps and when the position of the Soviet State with regard to one or the other of the camps cannot be a matter of indifference for either of them. This means that in the future we shall be able to utilize more fully in the interests of the working classes of our Union and of the whole world the antagonisms existing among the imperialistic Powers than we had been able to do in the past, although even then we had some success. It also means that, entering now as a fullfledged nation upon the arena of international diplomacy, we shall be able more effectively than before to oppose our policy of a struggle against imperialism, of disarmament, of true self-determination of nationalities, of real liberation of oppressed nationalities from foreign exploitation, to the hypocritical, rapacious, and at best halfway policies of the capitalistic Powers.
There was a time when we entered bourgeois parliaments merely in order to oppose our programme to the programme and actions of bourgeois Governments and bourgeois parties. We did not believe in the possibility of a revolution through parliamentary action, but we did believe in the possibility of utilizing the parliament for the purpose of unmasking our class opponents and of educating and organizing the working masses. The international arena upon which we are now entering as a universally recognized Power is not unlike the bourgeois parliaments of former days. Into this arena we shall cast our gauntlet, we shall struggle for the satisfaction of our demands, we shall compel our opponents to lower their visors and to show their true faces, and then the peoples of the world will see which political and social order is their friend and which is their enemy.
At Genoa and at Lausanne we had occasion to cross swords with the international policy of the imperialistic Powers. The impression which this encounter produced upon the working masses has not been in favor of our opponents. We may expect deeper and larger effects of this sort in the future when our participation in international relations and in the solution of international problems will be infinitely more effective as a result of the fact that we shall appear not merely as a great, but as a recognized, Power. Then, and only then, will the real significance of the apparently merely formal and unimportant ‘recognition de jure’ become entirely evident.