Workers World, Vol. 19, No. 39
October 10 – To hear the way the Maoists tell it, “superpower diplomacy” in the Middle East between the USSR and the U.S. began with Khrushchev. The latter, according to them, rose to power on the basis of a bourgeois counter-revolution which restored capitalism in the USSR and thereby converted the revolutionary socialist Soviet diplomacy into social-imperialist diplomacy. This, according to their latest accounts, is far more dangerous than the older imperialism of the U.S. and its allies.
This is, however, a gross distortion of historical fact. It is false both on the basis of history as well as current developments.
At no time has it been more important, especially in light of the joint U.S.-Soviet statement on the Middle East, to see the evolution of Soviet diplomacy in true historical perspective than it is now, devoid of imperialist slander as well as the false polemics of the Maoist pretenders to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy.
It is precisely in the Middle East that a good part of the origin of so-called super-power diplomacy began, not, however, with Khrushchev but with Stalin. His policy in relation to the Middle East should first of all be viewed in the context of the years immediately following the end of the Second World War and the political and diplomatic problems that the USSR faced vis-à-vis the U.S., whose economic, industrial, and military power had grown enormously as a result of the crushing of both fascist Japan and Germany and the disintegration of the old imperialist empires of Holland, Belgium, France, and above all Britain.
The Soviet Union’s entry into Middle East diplomacy immediately following the Second World War was symbolized by its recognition of Israel, a distasteful fact which Maoists in particular rarely mention and never explain. Viewing it in the context of contemporary world politics, it seems utterly inexplicable. How was it possible for the USSR as a workers’ state and under Stalin’s leadership to commit this gross violation of the rights of self-determination of the Palestinian people? It is highly questionable whether the Israeli state would ever have gained credence in world public opinion as anything but an artificial entity set up by Western imperialism, most of all by the U.S., had it not been for the recognition accorded it by the USSR.
Yet it was the delegation of the USSR, unquestionably under the direction of Stalin, that not only voted for but urged the recognition of the state of Israel in the U.N. It did so not only in direct violation of the Leninist principle of the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, but also against the long tradition of the entire socialist movement in pre-revolutionary Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as in the Social Democracy of pre-war Germany.
Not only the Bolsheviks in the pre-revolutionary period opposed Zionism, but the Mensheviks did so as well. This was also true in Eastern Europe and it embraced both left and right currents among the Social Democrats in Germany. There was never any serious sentiment for, or inclination towards, Zionism on the part of the section of the Jewish population that adhered to the socialist and communist movement. And this was so even up to the end of the Second World War. All who survived the Nazi terror gravitated in the direction of the mass CPs in France, Italy, and particularly in Eastern Europe, where many rose to prominent positions in the CPs and in the mass organizations, as well as holding important governmental posts.
Stalin’s motivation for recognizing Israel cannot be explained on the basis, as some bourgeois analysts claim, of it being an effort to rid himself of the Jewish population and to encourage them to leave for Israel. The basis for the Soviet recognition of Israel cannot be explained either on the basis of sympathy or antipathy to the Jewish population, or to the Palestinians and the Arab world in general.
The real basis for the recognition of the Israeli puppet state was that, as Soviet diplomacy viewed the situation in the context of the 1947-48 international situation, recognition of Israel, which was heavily pushed by the U.S., might afford an opportunity at accommodation with the U.S. The British empire was disintegrating and had been getting ready to evacuate Palestine, making ready to hand over its so-called mandate to the UN with the understanding that the legacy would be inherited by the U.S.
In part, of course, Stalin’s motivation was also an effort to see if the Israeli state would play some “neutral” role and provide the USSR with a friendly state in that part of the world, once it became viable. This was of course a major miscalculation and howling blunder which was born out of Stalin’s pragmatic, opportunist policies. Nothing was gained in the way of power politics and accommodation with the U.S., and at home it fanned the flames of Jewish nationalism which Stalin soon had to use forceful measures to suppress.
The important point, however, in relation to the current joint U.S.-Soviet attempt at accommodation in the Middle East, is that Stalin’s policy, however opportunistically it was conceived, was basically a defensive effort to ward off U.S. imperialism by appeasing it in some seemingly small measure, thus laying the basis for normalizing relations between the two states, which had already become severely strained.
This was not to be. The Second World War had brought out the extremely aggressive character of U.S. imperialism and its expansionist orientation. The USSR had lost 20 million people and a great deal of its material and technical equipment had been destroyed. The U.S., on the other hand, had gained tremendously not only by the defeat inflicted upon the Axis powers but also by the near economic and industrial ruin of the Western powers.
During the same year, 1947-48, Yugoslav-Soviet relations had become extremely strained and were moving toward a breaking point, although it was kept secret. Stalin feared that once the split, which was mostly his own doing, took place, the Yugoslavs would move towards the imperialist camp, tending to weaken the entire East European structure.
Another aspect of the situation was unquestionably the developing Chinese Revolution. The handwriting was already on the wall that the Chinese Red Army would in little time drive Chiang Kai-shek into the sea. This would not only create a furor in the U.S. imperialist establishment, but once the People’s Liberation Army drove the Chiang Kai-shek clique out, a Sino-Soviet treaty would be inevitable. This would further bring down the wrath of the imperialist establishment upon the USSR and tremendously heat up the anti-communist crusade against the USSR which was already very much in progress in the U.S.
For all of these reasons Stalin’s strange entry into the politics of the Middle East can be explained, but under no circumstances justified. The short-sighted policy boomeranged. The cold war broke out in real fury and became a hot war with the naked aggression by the U.S. against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Nowhere in Maoist literature is there ever any explanation of Stalin’s unprincipled foray into Middle Eastern politics with the recognition of Israel. Of course, it is often said that “Stalin made mistakes, some of a principled character.” But there is no detailed explanation as to what these mistakes were, why they were made, or what were the driving forces behind them. The materialist interpretation of history stops right there, never to be resumed.
Was it “social-imperialist” policy? Was it just maliciousness on the part of Stalin? (Or rather capriciousness, as Lenin characterized Stalin’s personal traits in his final testament?)
No. The basic fallacy lay in an abandonment (in return for some illusory immediate gains) of the long-range, principled revolutionary goal of fighting for the oppressed people with political and material support, and with arms in hand where possible; of above all vigorously encouraging the prosecution of the revolutionary class struggle of the workers and pursuing it to the end.
This does not mean that one engages in wild military or other adventures. It (the prosecution of the revolutionary class struggle) sometimes requires merely avoiding doing what is reprehensible from the viewpoint of the socialist interests of the international proletariat and the oppressed people. And the recognition of Israel was one of those things to be avoided. Once having done it, it is hard to undo.
By not saying anything at all regarding this major miscalculation on the part of Stalin – that is, the legitimacy accorded to the artificial puppet regime of Israel – the Maoists and their supporters give a field day to the bourgeoisie which assiduously pursues its own imperialist version of the events: namely, that Stalin’s venture into Middle East politics was actuated by imperialist designs and was in reality an extension of the Tsarist diplomacy in the conditions following the Second World War.
What the Maoists have done is to give credence to this theory by merely adding the world “social” before the word “imperialism” in order to falsely and artificially divide the policy of Stalin from that of his successors. Historical fact, however, in the long run will prevail. For Khrushchev’s policy in the Middle East, as well as that of Brezhnev, has deepened Stalin’s policy but has introduced no qualitative change in the diplomacy of the USSR, nor is that diplomacy an expression of a fundamental transformation in the class character of the USSR.
Khrushchev entered the arena in the Middle East in a truly blustering way, but it was also almost heroic and the irony of it was that for a period of time it was wholly progressive. Nothing did so much to redeem the tarnished image of the USSR as a progressive social formation and a champion of the oppressed people as did Khrushchev’s threat in 1956 against the British-French-Israeli aggression against Egypt. The threat to use rockets and missiles against the imperialist conspiracy concocted by the British, French, and Israelis might have been a bluff, but it certainly was a tremendous factor in staying the hand of the imperialist aggressors.
Of course, the revolutionary ferment which arose among the Egyptian masses and elsewhere in the Arab world as a result of the aggression was fundamental. But how can anyone doubt that this threat of military retaliation by the Soviet government was a wholly healthy antidote to the French, British, and Israeli conspiracy to overturn the Nasser government and seize the Suez Canal again, which President Nasser had courageously nationalized?
Khrushchev’s motivation was not based upon imperialist politics. The surrounding circumstances historically were such that the Soviet government was under siege by the counter-revolutionary rebellions in Hungary and Poland and wanted to divert public attention from what the bourgeoisie was trying desperately to turn into a full-scale counter-revolution. (China didn’t oppose Soviet intervention in Hungary at that time; rather they cheered it on.)
Whether the French-British-Israeli conspiracy was timed to coincide with these events in Eastern Europe because they believed the Soviet government could not give its attention to the Middle East, remains for historians to unravel. But the fact of the matter is that the imperialist aggression was stopped and that again, as with Stalin in 1947-48, Khrushchev was also motivated by the possibility of utilizing the French-British-Israeli conspiracy to further an accommodation with the U.S. For Washington also opposed the anti-Egyptian aggression, but not for the same reasons as the Soviet government.
There could, however, be no doubt at all that superficially speaking it conveyed the impression of a super-power condominium to halt the British, French and Israelis from going further than they did. The French and British imperialists had to reduce their ambitions to regain their lost status in the Middle East. It also, from a diplomatic point of view, enlarged the role of the USSR.
What was reactionary in the course of Khrushchev’s policy in the Middle East, which in this respect also was a continuation of Stalin’s, was that it negated the revolutionary working class and peasant forces in the anti-imperialist struggle. It wholly subordinated the class independence of older as well as new and even embryonic Marxist-Leninist organizations to the needs of contemporaneous Soviet diplomacy.
Therein lay the crux of the problem. As workers’ states, as progressive social formations, the USSR (as well as other socialist states) needs to carry on state-to-state business with the capitalist powers. But in the course of doing so, they must abide by the revolutionary needs and aspirations of the workers and the oppressed people in those states. All too frequently they fail to do that and hence destroy the very basis for socialist internationalism, namely, the need of the working class and the oppressed masses to fight against the ruling classes in both the metropolitan imperialist countries and in the less developed and dependent countries.
In reality, how much of a change has there been in the Brezhnev diplomacy in the Middle East from that of Khrushchev or of Stalin?
The USSR has potentially become an enormous factor in the Middle East because it is in a position, as it has demonstrated in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, to provide the weapons necessary to ward off imperialist aggression. This is wholly progressive.
During the October 1973 war, when Nixon ordered a nuclear alert of all U.S. forces, the Soviet Union actually went to the brink of nuclear war to prevent the destruction of the Egyptian army. Thus, twice in the course of a decade – that is, during the Cuban missile crisis and the October Middle East war, the USSR risked nuclear war on behalf of the oppressed nations. Who else can match this?
What is reactionary in their policy is not that the USSR has sought to secure the lush super-profits which the giant oil monopolies of the U.S., Britain, France, or Holland reap from the sweat and blood of the Arab workers. No proof at all exists to substantiate any such allegation, which has been peddled by the Maoists for a considerable number of years, and by the bourgeoisie practically since the day of the October Revolution.
What is truly regressive, from the point of view of revolutionary socialist diplomacy, is that in both the Khrushchev and Brezhnev period, the Soviet leaders have extended and deepened their line of gutting the class struggle in these countries, painting up the regimes as socialist or even near-revolutionary, when in fact the possessing classes there are really compradore bourgeoisies. Putting a label on them of socialist or near-revolutionary has served to confuse the masses and has been self-defeating to the USSR as a workers’ state.
The experience with India (and Pakistan, where China followed a similar disastrous line), the political counter-revolution which followed in the wake of Nasser’s death in Egypt, the second “Black September” that Assad visited upon the Palestinians (Jordan was the first), and the Numiery regime’s bloodbath in Sudan against communists and progressives similar to that of Suharto in Indonesia, all fully serve to illustrate the regressive effects in Soviet policy.
The Soviet Union is a contradictory social phenomenon. It issued from a great proletarian revolution; the progressive social structure, fundamentally based and anchored in the workers and peasants and the socialized economy, has subsequently been further developed. But as a result of the legacy of backwardness, dating back to the Tsarist days, it has also developed a bureaucratic apparatus which has steadily grown in strength and magnitude.
The superstructure of the USSR, unquestionably superior to any in the imperialist countries, is regressive in relation to the social structure. This manifests itself in acute social contradictions at home and a zigzag, conservative foreign policy abroad whose principle feature is to seek accommodation with imperialism.
This may be possible, at intervals; principled agreements with imperialism that do not infringe upon the rights of oppressed people and the international working class are desirable and inevitable. But given the inherent nature of imperialism and its congenital tendency toward naked aggression, counter-revolutionary coups and imperialist wars are inevitable.
Last updated: 11 May 2026