Soviet Imperialism

Toffler, The Third Wave

The U.S.S.R. and other socialist nations portrayed themselves as anti-imperialist friends of the colonial peoples of the world. In 1916, a year before he took power, Lenin had written a slashing attack on the capitalist nations for their colonial policies. His Imperialism became one of the most influential books of the century and still shapes the thinking of hundreds of millions around the world.

But Lenin saw imperialism as a purely capitalist phenomenon. Capitalist nations, he insisted, oppressed and colonized other nations not out of choice but out of necessity. A dubious iron law, put forward by Marx, held that profits in capitalist economies showed a general, irresistible tendency to decline over time. Because of this, Lenin held, capitalist nations in their final stage were driven to seek "super-profits" abroad to compensate for diminishing* profits at home. Only socialism, he argued, would free colonial peoples from their oppression and misery, because socialism had no built-in dynamic requiring their economic exploitation.

What Lenin overlooked is that many of the same imperatives that drove capitalist industrial nations operated in socialist industrial nations as well. They, too, were part of the world money system. They, too, based their economies on the divorce of production from consumption. They, too, needed a market (albeit not necessarily a profit-oriented market) to reconnect producer and consumer. They, too, needed raw materials from abroad to feed their industrial machines. And for these reasons they, too, needed an integrated world economic system through which to obtain their necessities and sell their products abroad.

Indeed Lenin, at the very same time he attacked imperialism, spoke of socialism's aim "not only to bring the nations closer together but to integrate them." As the Soviet analyst M. Senin has written in Socialist Integration, Lenin by 1920 "regarded the drawing together of nations as an objective process which ... will finally and ultimately lead to the creation of a single world economy, regulated by ... a common plan." This, if anything, was the ultimate industrial vision.

Externally, socialist industrial nations were driven by the same resource needs as capitalist nations. They, too, needed cotton, coffee, nickel, sugar, wheat, and other goods to feed their fast-multiplying factories and their urban populations. The Soviet Union had (and still has) enormous reserves of natural resources. It has manganese, lead, zinc, coal, phosphates, and gold. But so had the United States, and that stopped neither nation from seeking to buy from others at the cheapest possible price...

Socialist managers and economists, exactly like their capitalist counterparts, thus calculated the cost of producing their own raw materials as against the cost of purchasing them. They faced a straight "make or buy" decision of the kind capitalist corporations confront every day. And it soon became apparent that buying certain raw materials on the world market would be cheaper than trying to produce them at home.

Once this decision was made, sharp Soviet purchasing agents fanned out into the world market and bought at prices previously set at artificially low levels by imperialist traders. Soviet trucks rolled on rubber bought at prices that were probably determined ab initio by British merchants in Malaya. Worse, in recent years the Soviets (who maintain troops there) paid Guinea six dollars per ton for bauxite when the Americans were paying twenty-three dollars. India has protested that the Russians overcharge them 30 percent on imports and pay 30 percent too little for Indian exports. Iran and Afghanistan received subnormal prices from the Soviets for natural gas. Thus the Soviet Union, like its capitalist adversaries, benefited at the expense of the colonies. To have done otherwise would have been to slow its own industrialization process.

The Soviet Union was also driven toward imperialist policies by strategic considerations. Faced with the military might of Nazi Germany, the Soviets first colonized the Baltic states and made war on Finland. After World War II, with troops and the threat of invasion, they helped install or maintain "friendly" regimes throughout most of Eastern Europe. These countries, more industrially advanced than the U.S.S.R. itself, were intermittently milked by the Soviets, justifying their description as colonies or "satellites."