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With the automatic blossoming of revolution assured by "science," and with the deeds of a ruthless party similarly justified, Stalin can turn to the concrete issue: world strategy. The details of his ideas are necessarily secret. But, Historicus shows convincingly, the central plan is use of the Soviet Union as a base for revolution in every country in the world.
Says Stalin: "The goal is to consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat in one country, using it as a base for the overthrow of imperialism in all countries. Revolution spreads beyond the limits of one country; the epoch of world revolution has begun."
Eyewash for the West
How should the Soviet Union be used as a base? Stalin is even plainer. In one of his basic doctrinal writings, which has been republished in millions of copies, in many languages, right up to the present, he says: ". . . The development of world revolution will be the more rapid and thorough, the more effective the aid rendered by the first Socialist country [Russia] to the workers . . . of all other countries. In what should this aid be expressed? . . . The 'victorious proletariat' of the one country [here he quotes Lenin] . . . after organizing its own Socialist production, should stand up . . . against the remaining, capitalist world, attracting to itself the oppressed classes of other countries, raising revolts in those countries against the capitalists, [and] in the event of necessity coming out even with armed force [the Red Army] against the exploiting classes and their governments.' "
Against this, Stalin's interviews with Roy Howard (1936) and Harold King of Reuters (1943), purporting to disavow world revolutionary aims, can only appear as eyewash, and that is just how Historicus explains them. The interviews, he says, "do not really contradict the strategic aim of world revolution because they refer to a temporary tactic."
Historicus emphasizes that Stalin, in applying his abstract theory, is ever ready to engage in flexible tactics. He does not hold, like a narrow doctrinaire, that the objective preconditions of revolution are a fixed quantity. Rather, these preconditions are "interdependent variables which are to be manipulated to satisfy just one equation."
The equation, as Historicus frames it, is: "Revolution occurs where the Communist command concentrates superiority of forces at a point on the Capitalist front where the bourgeoisie can be isolated and overwhelmed. In other words, 'revolutionary crises' do not have to be waited for; they can to some extent be organized."
"Terrible Collisions"
Stalin's grand, flexible strategy is, Historicus says, to make Russia a base to support two movements—the proletariat of the West and the anti-imperialist movements for national liberation in the East—merging them into [Stalin's phrase] "a single world front against the world front of imperialism."