216
JOHN STRACHEY
intentions; for no policy for the prevention of nuclear war can leave
them out of account. Moreover, Russia is now only one (though
still
much the stronger) of the communist powers. We must consider also
Chinese intentions. (Later on we must attempt a similar estimate
of American intentions, of the intentions of America's allies, and,
broadening out from that, of the intentions of the other considerable
nation-states of the world.)
It
will be noted that neither of the above schools of political
thought regard Russia as a normal nation-state. One regards her as
a much misunderstood angel of peace, the other as the devil incarnate.
In one sense our inquiry may then be stated in terms of the question:
to what extent, if at all, can present-day Russia be treated as a nation–
state of the familiar type? Let us first recall that the Soviet Govern–
ment, whatever it may now have become, was not established as the
government of a nation-state of any kind. On the contrary the estab–
lishment of The Union of Socialist Soviet Republics was intended to
put an end to the existence of Russia as a nation-state. What was to
be put in her place was a union of self-governing socialist republics,
to which any and every future socialist society might be expected to
adhere, irrespective of whether or not the capitalist or feudal nation–
states they had succeeded had formed a part of the Russian Empire.
formed a part of the Russian Empire.
Lenin, Trotsky and the other founding-fathers of Soviet Russia
were deeply in earnest in this conception. For good and
ill
they really
were internationalists. It is true that Lenin himself, in distinction
from many of his senior colleagues such as Trotsky and Stalin, was
'a deeply rooted Great Russian. (See his article on "The National
Pride of the Great Russians.") But even Lenin was unquestionably
a communist long before he was a Russian. This was not because he
denied or ignored the existence of nationalism, but because, as a
Marxist, he believed that, for the working class, national conflicts
were overshadowed by class conflicts. Trotsky wrote of him
(Pravda,
April 23rd, 1920): "Lenin's internationalism is by no means a form
of reconciliation of nationalism and internationalism in words, but a
form of international revolutionary action. The territory of the earth
inhabited by so called civilized man is looked upon as a coherent
.field of combat on which the separate peoples and classes wage
