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In this respect the Soviet Union's challenge to the West and the Communist challenge to capitalism and democratic socialism are one and the same. Lenin, Stalin and their successors have set out to alter the world in Marx's name but in the Soviet Union's national interests. Their objective has been not just to proselytize on behalf of their ideology but to enhance the prestige and influence—the security, as they would define it—of their own country. To this end, their ideology has helped greatly, since Marxism provides internationalist trappings in which to camouflage the profoundly nationalistic, often chauvinistic and xenophobic, orientation of the ethnic Russians who have, over the years, dominated the leadership of a vast empire that encompasses numerous nationalities, cultures and languages.
"The Soviet Union is more Russian than the Soviets themselves want to admit," says Columbia University Scholar Seweryn Bialer, director of its Research Institute on International Change. But by talking about historical trends and the class principle, the Soviets have been able to downplay the Russianness of their ambitions, notably the ambition to build up buffer states around them and keep their enemies at bay.
Breaking Eggs Around the World
Since Marx's death in 1883, self-avowed followers of his teaching have been on the march all over the world. But in practically no case did history follow Marx's battle plan. As in Russia, the critical events leading up to virtually every Communist takeover have been at least as much external as indigenous; they have involved war between nations rather than true revolution, occupation by invading armies rather than demonstrations by strikers in the streets. Or they have involved decisive military and political assistance by the Soviets (or their surrogates) to leftist rebels, which by definition transforms an internal conflict into an international one.
Lenin's original master stroke was not so much to set up a model for a state as it was to establish a recipe for seizing power. To paraphrase a proverb he was fond of quoting, Lenin's accomplishment was in the way he broke the eggs more than in the way he made the omelet. During World War I, he was able to take advantage of international disorder, to fill a power vacuum, and to keep it filled by force of arms. That is what Soviet Communism, in its inroads abroad, has been doing ever since.
In solidifying the Soviet reign over Eastern Europe, Stalin seized an opportunity created not by home-grown revolutions and class struggles but by the collapse of the Third Reich and by the shortsightedness of his allies in the war against Hitler, notably the Americans. By default, they had conceded Eastern Europe to the Soviets as a postwar sphere of influence, and thus to open-ended military occupation. That continuing occupation is the root cause of the crisis in Poland. When Khrushchev sent his tanks into Budapest in 1956, it was revealing that he called the uprising there a mutiny. Only later did he refer to it as a counterrevolution. He was right the first time.
The largest gains of Communism in Asia have followed the Soviet pattern. The Communists of China benefited largely from the ineptitude and disarray of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist regime, much as Lenin's revolutionaries benefited