By Steve Sailer
03/01/2014
My theory of what I don’t like about Russia has always focused upon the observation that, lacking natural military defenses such as the English Channel or the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Muscovites have always sought security in gigantism, with the bad consequences that so often go along with imperialism.
But, it’s worth pointing out, the neoconservative movement that has had so much influence over post-Cold War American foreign policy, with its own gigantist-imperialist tendencies, traces its origins back to a 1920s debate in Moscow over whether or not the Soviet Union was big enough for the survival of the reigning ideology. Stalin cautiously argued that the Soviet Union was adequate in size for "socialism in one country" to work for now. But the original neoconservatives' first icon, Trotsky, argued that only permanent global ideological revolution was adequate.
In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky added an appendix denouncing Stalin’s policy of "Socialism in One Country:"
The reactionary tendencies of autarchy are a defense reflex of senile capitalism to the task with which history confronts it, that of freeing its economy from the fetters of private property and the national state, and organizing it in a planned manner throughout the Earth.
In Lenin’s Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People — presented by the Soviet of People’s Commissars for the approval of the Constituent Assembly during its brief hours of life — the “fundamental task” of the new regime was thus defined: “The establishment of a socialist organization of society and the victory of socialism in all countries.” The international character of the revolution was thus written into the basic document of the new regime. No one at that time would have dared present the problem otherwise!
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