Tuesday, May 26, 2020

50 Years Ago: Stalin's Capitalist Foreign 
Policy (1991)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have had Hitler sending birthday greetings to Stalin. Stalin being photographed in a friendly party with Ribbcntrop. Molotov all smiles with General Goering, now comes Stalin and Matsuoka, the Japanese Foreign Minister, who was in Moscow late in April. Here is the story from the Evening Standard of what is reported to have occurred when Stalin saw Matsuoka off on the train:
  According to Mr. Hasegawa. the two statesmen were then apparently overcome with emotion and embraced one another to the amazement of the foreign diplomatic representatives present. (Evening Standard, April 28th. 1941.)
It sounds too touching to be true, but no doubt “dialectically considered", as the Communists would say, it is a further piece of Socialist propaganda designed to clarify the ideas of the world’s workers and show them which of the representatives of capitalism are their true friends.

Those who still imagine that the Russian Government's foreign policy is governed by internationalism should note the following, reproduced from the Bolshevik journal Pravda:
  The foreign policy of the USSR is guided exclusively by the interests of the USSR, exclusively by the interests of the peoples of the USSR. This policy dictates to the USSR the desire to develop as widely as possible trade and economic relations with those of its neighbours who correctly appraise the importance of these connections with the USSR for their own interests. The Soviet-German Treaty and Agreements of 1941 confirm with perfect clarity the absolute truth of this proposition. (Reproduced in the Anglo-Russia News Bulletin. January 18th. 1941.)
[From the Socialist Standard, May 1941.]

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