Workers World, Vol. 2 No. 11
Has the collapse of the Summit Conference revealed the elements of a possible shift in Soviet foreign policy? Is there a leadership struggle in the ruling circles of the Soviet CP based upon fundamental differences in foreign policy?
To properly answer this question in the context of the present international situation, we must first have recourse to the fundamental orientation of American imperialism. In any war crisis that the strategists of U.S. finance capital are preparing, they must first make certain that the onus for such a crisis is put squarely on the shoulders of the Soviet Union. If this was true in an earlier period, it is doubly true in the age of atom bombs and missiles.
Nevertheless, in their own self-interest, and as a result of the acute contradictions in their own camp, the American ruling class, or more precisely, sections of it, are obliged to reveal the true origin and nature of the war crisis in all its ugliness. Rarely has this ever been done with such extraordinary frankness and timeliness as it was done by Walter Lippman on that historic Monday – the day of the virtual collapse of the Summit Conference. In this now widely quoted article (Herald-Tribune, May 17th), Lippman stated:
“...when the plane was captured, Mr. Khrushchev opened the door to the President for a diplomatic exit from his quandary. He did not believe, said Mr. K., that Mr. Eisenhower was responsible for ordering the flight.
“Unfortunately, Mr. K. knew that Mr. Eisenhower must have authorized the general plan of the flights but he preferred to let the President say ... that he did not authorize this particular flight. ...Instead, Mr. Eisenhower replied that he WAS responsible, that such flights were necessary. ... This locked the door which Mr. Khrushchev had opened. It transformed the embarrassment of being caught in a spying operation into a direct challenge to the sovereignty of the Soviet Union.
“This avowal ... was a fatal mistake. For it made it impossible for Mr. Khrushchev to bypass the affair. Had he done that, he would have been in a position of acknowledging to the world, to the Soviet people, to his critics within the Soviet Union, and to his Communist allies, that he had surrendered to the United States the right to violate Soviet territory. NO STATESMAN CAN LIVE IN ANY COUNTRY AFTER MAKING SUCH AN ADMISSION.” (our emphasis)
It must be remembered that Mr. Lippman is not a journalist prone to using loose language. The last two sentences of his article quoted above were calculated to bring to the fore the full gravity of the situation. They were calculated to break through the thick fog of propaganda which presented the ominous significance of the U-2 invasion as “just another incident in the Cold War” instead of a dress rehearsal for a possible attack on the USSR!
It was not deep attachment to abstract truth, nor love of “peace” and “disarmament,” or any of the other shibboleths which are droned into the ears of the masses day in and day out, that obliged Lippman to write this. It was the self-interest of a section of the ruling class that motivated him to write this at the critical moment.
This section is oriented toward a détente (agreement) with the Soviet Union, based on the “containment” of China, the stifling of any new proletarian revolutions in Asia, Africa, or Latin America, and the “neutralization” of Berlin as the chief quid pro quo to Khrushchev if he “shows good faith” in executing his side of the agreement.
The singular importance of Lippman’s admission lies in the fact that it puts the onus of the war crisis squarely on the shoulders of the U.S. It makes crystal clear that the crisis was manufactured right here at home – not in the USSR. And as though to buttress his conclusion with empirical evidence, Lippman goes to unusual lengths to convince his readers by revealing that he had a private conversation with none other than Khrushchev’s “personal emissary, Mr. Zhukov ...” who informed him “that about March 15th, American policy had suddenly hardened against a negotiation about the status of West Berlin and that this was a reversal of the understanding given to Mr. Khrushchev by the President at Camp David.”
This makes doubly clear that the initiative for fomenting the crisis stems directly from Washington – and not Moscow. The general public has been led to believe that it was Khrushchev’s “threatening” speech on West Berlin in Baku on April 25 which began to boil up the crisis, whereas in reality it had merely been a reaction to Eisenhower’s reversal of the Camp David understanding regarding West Berlin.
All this is vitally significant for all class-conscious workers, socialists and communists, and particularly those who are interested in the internal evolution of the USSR and the directions of its foreign policy.
In this connection, it should be noted that it was Khrushchev “who opened the door to the President for a diplomatic exit,” as Lippman puts it. (Why the representative of a workers’ state should have to cover up for the President of the most predatory imperialist state, only the apologists for Khrushchev know.) Equally significant is the fact that Eisenhower was unable to avail himself of the “exit” provided by Khrushchev. And the explanation for this lies solely and exclusively in the overwhelming pressure of the military and their financial supporters and friends in the Wall Street community.
It is not without interest that during the entire period of the crisis, the stock market registered steady, consistent gains by all the war issues. The world-wide combat alert ordered by the Defense Secretary Gates, himself a Wall St. banker, was timed to coincide with the Summit Conference. Lippman’s admission that this “readiness exercise, though not the last stage before actual war, is one of the preliminary stages to it,” is not only a symptom of the war fever in the Pentagon, but an accurate measure of its preponderant influence on the actual direction of events in this period.
To create the impression, as Khrushchev does, that this trend could be reversed six or eight months later by a new President, is sheer deception of the masses.
Finally, it cannot be over-emphasized (as Lippman states) that Khrushchev was put “in the position of acknowledging that he had surrendered the right to violate Soviet territory,” a position so utterly full of risk and peril that “no statesman,” let alone the leader of the most powerful workers’ state in the world, “could live in any country after making it.”
In the light of this, it is apparent that whatever happened in the Soviet leadership following the U-2 invasion was a REACTION TO THE UNBRIDLED IMPERIALIST ADVENTURISM OF THE PENTAGON, and not the pursuit of an independently conceived new orientation in Soviet foreign policy.
However, it was only inevitable that once the U-2 was downed, and the State Department and Eisenhower not only admitted their responsibility, but also brazenly asserted that such flights would continue – that the struggle of political tendencies, groups and factions in the USSR, long kept under cover of the false façade of a mythical political and ideological monolithism, would become enhanced, stimulated, and sharpened.
It is not possible on the basis of the scanty information available in the Western press to accurately gauge the character of the current opposition. But its broad outlines are apparent. Its chief trait is resistance to Khrushchev’s overly conciliatory attitude toward Western imperialism.
It is not the kind of opposition that the bourgeoisie is likely to become lyrical about, as they did about the Hungarian and Polish opposition.
Class-conscious workers, socialists, and communists have nothing to fear from it. They should in fact welcome it. Contrary to the slanders in the capitalist press, it is not a “war faction,” a counterpart to the imperialist adventurers in the Pentagon. The howls of the kept press “of a reversion to Stalinism” whenever there is even a hint of new, militant initiative in Soviet foreign policy, are a tissue of lies – but they also contain some elements of truth.
This may be embarrassing to those self-styled Trotskyists who have long ago abandoned the teachings of the great revolutionary thinker. But Trotsky himself foresaw the possibility of a further shift to the right after the demise of Stalin.
The 20th Congress of the Soviet CP, which took place in the shadow of Stalin’s death, marked just such a shift to the right, although it was accompanied by the easing of the lot of the workers. We were the only political tendency that correctly took note of this development.
The subsequent victory of the Khrushchev-Mikoyan faction over the Molotov-Kaganovich group made the shift to the right more apparent, especially in the field of foreign policy. It must not be forgotten that the main charge against Molotov was that he was obstructing the “peaceful co-existence” policy of the Khrushchev group.
Khrushchev and Mikoyan inaugurated their reign with an open disavowal of the Leninist theory of the road to the proletarian revolution, and complemented it with a deepened and much more conciliatory attitude to imperialism, which Khrushchev has carried to an extreme with his summitry maneuvers.
History rarely, if ever, retraces its steps. And in the case of a reversion to the general practices of Stalin, it is quite impossible. The soil for it is no longer there. The principal circumstances that gave rise to Stalinism – the cultural and technological backwardness of Russia and the isolation of the new workers’ regime are no longer present – nor will they ever return.
When the bourgeoisie employs the world Stalinism as a derisive formula, they refer to those repressive features of Stalin’s regime by which he defended the gains of the revolution as against them.
When Trotsky referred to the repressive aspects of Stalin’s regime, he meant those features by which Stalin not only surrendered gains won by the revolution, but in the process, practically destroyed the entire leading cadre of the Bolshevik generation. The imperialists had no objection whatever to these aspects of Stalin’s rule.
The lumping of revolution and reaction under the umbrella of the same formula – as in the word Stalinism – is one of the elements in the mechanics of class deception employed time and again by the bourgeoisie.
It happens many times in history that a nascent, progressive and revolutionary movement, because of its clandestine character and weak beginnings, seeks old, authoritative and respected symbols or personalities in which to mask its revolutionary opposition. The early class struggles of the proletariat are replete with such examples.
The revolutionary authority of Trotsky has been too much vilified over too long a period and is too dangerous a symbol in the hands of a still weak and inarticulate opposition. Hence the possible appearance of such old figures as Molotov – or the elevation of such personalities as Suslov. But these are of purely transitory character. They can at most serve as old channels through which the new, proletarian spring waters will rush and overflow the bureaucratic banks that now hinder the socialist development of the USSR and inhibit the creative initiative and revolutionary energy of the masses.
“Truth crushed to earth shall rise again. ...” With it will rise the revolutionary authority of Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the great October.
Last updated: 11 May 2026