The long and winding road

trajectories to peace and socialism in contemporary Soviet ideology

Stephen Shenfield

pp. 203-224

in: Stephen K. White, Alex Pravda (eds), Ideology and Soviet politics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1988

Abstract

"Peace" and 'socialism" are the twin core values of Soviet ideology.¹ World socialism was for Lenin the absolute value, and efficacy in advancing it the yardstick of all policy. Among relative values, subsidiary to socialism, in the Bolshevik outlook, peace soon came to occupy first place. Following early disillusionment with the strategy of revolutionary war, it was established as axiomatic that avoiding involvement in large-scale war was essential to the security of the Soviet state and to the cause of which that state was the bastion. This goal motivated both the search for collective security in the 1930s and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939–41. The experience of the Nazi invasion, of course, confirmed its vital importance.