The Russian Invasion of Finland (1939)

From the December 1939 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx Condemns Stalin's Policy of Conquest

The Russian excuse for invading Finland is that military considerations necessitate frontier revision. Marx, writing in 1870, had something to say about such claims when put forward by Germany towards France.

The passage below is quoted in “Karl Marx,” by I. Berlin (Home University Library, 1939. P.223).

  “If limits are to be fixed by military interests there will be no end of claims, because every military line is necessarily faulty and may be improved by annexing some more outlying territory: they can never be fixed fairly or finally because they always must be improved by the conqueror or the conquered, and consequently carry within them the seeds of fresh wars. History will measure its retribution, not by the extent of square miles conquered from France, but by the intensity of the crime of reviving, in the second half of the 19th century, the policy of conquest ” (italics Marx’s)