Russia and left-wing parties, occasional partners

(story to be published in tomorrow’s issue, March 16)

As communism was imported from Soviet Russia into Eastern Europe after the end of World War II, even after the formal end to the “cold war,” left-wing parties in this region of the world were still considered Moscow’s “transmission belts” here. Without questioning the importance of personal affinities that bond together some of the leftist party leaders in Eastern Europe to Moscow, regardless of the political colour of the regime there, it must be pointed out that in Russian foreign policy, left-wing parties have not always been the closest partners to the Kremlin leaders. This is not a newly discovered “axiom” of Soviet or Russian foreign policy, but this statement can be backed with a sum-up of some of the key moments in international relations in the 20th century that have placed Russia and leftist parties on conflict positions or have led to the establishment of bizarre partnerships between the Kremlin and right-wing radicals. For the Balkan region, the most relevant instance is the pragmatic partnership between Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and Soviet Russia. A stated anticommunist, the able Ataturk managed to find a common language with Lenin’s Bolsheviks, as long as collaboration between the two young states, isolated externally and in a deep structural crisis, was a strong argument for the establishment of a joint front of interests and security along the mutual border. Another example is the famous Soviet-Yugoslavian conflict that began in the early 1948. The Yugoslavian Communist Party was the only one that met the communist ideological standards set by Stalin during the second world war – through the partisans, communists took control of the country long before the hostilities had ended. Consistent in their attempts to make Yugoslavia “a Soviet Balkans Union,” Tito’s communists were unable to keep an exemplary contact with Kremlin for too long, and shortly the YCP became a fervent defender of Yugoslavian national interests. Yugoslavians’ plans to become the second headmaster in the Balkans came in contradiction with Soviet plans to establish in Eastern Europe a vast network of vassal states. As during the Soviet-Chinese conflict, the ideology, albeit internationalist and proletarian, arrived at a stark contradiction with countries’ strategic interests, adding a lot of pressure to their disputes. Political and territorial differences were no longer perceived as natural disputes resulted from the intrinsic nature of political regimes and as a “betrayal” committed by an infamous character, hence their strict personalisation. Along with these classical examples of conflicts between countries led by similar political regimes, on the same side of the barricade in the “cold war,” there were other “conflicting couples.” Early USSR history records a number of conflicts that have pitted against each other countries ruled by left-wing political regimes, but with diametrically opposed foreign policy goals. Another concrete case is that of the military conflict between Georgia and Soviet Russia in the early ’20s, when Socialist revolutionaries in Tbilisi had radically different opinions on the “path to socialism” and the young country’s alliance policy. Lacking a consistent ideological justification, capable of undermining the political and social support of the Georgian government, the Bolsheviks eventually chose the most radical method to bring the former province back into the confines of the new federal republic, to occupy the country with military force and destroy the national political elite. Once again, doctrinal affinities were outshaded by strategic interests devoid of ideological flavour. The history of contemporary international relations records cases of “fruitful” collaboration between nationalist right-wing parties and the Soviet Union. The strategic alliance between the USSR and Germany on the eve of World War II is perhaps the best argument. Although in statements, the two parties had opposite principles, their expansionist and imperial policies made their interests converge. After all, regardless of their ideological colour, Berlin and Moscow shared the same political spirit, violent and discretionary, which made Ribbentrop note in his private diary that when he signed the non-aggression Pact in Moscow, he felt as if he was among party peers. As to the existing relations between leftist parties and Moscow, even if social-democratic parties in Central and south-east Europe have recruited most of their members from the former communist elite, structural changes in these countries make the interests of the new political elite related rather to the West than to Moscow. Left-wing parties in this region have changed political orientation under the pressure of translation from bi-polarity to uni-polarity, but it is also the result of the communist elite’s perfect adaptation to the new conditions of the struggle for resources. In other words, the vitality and efficiency of left-wing parties in Central and south-east Europe depends now on how they relate to the western resources, which are distributed preferentially, according to parties’ compliance to ideological standards imposed by the West. Those who finance dictate the rules of the game, which rules out personal and intimate options of a country’s new leaders, and makes them not count as players. Another argument to the idea that the foreign policy options of a country the size and importance of Romania cannot be decided by any party or person, even the President, is the situation in Poland and Russia today. Although led by a socialist President who in the early ’80s negotiated with the “Solidarity” on behalf of the Polish Communist Party, Poland is today a NATO member and its policy toward Russia has rather aggressive accents that rather remind of Joseph Pilsudski’s dictatorship than of Wladyslaw Gomulka or Wojtech Jaruzelski. The situation is similar in the post-Soviet area, where countries like Ukraine and Georgia, although led by politicians who were formerly in the Soviet hierarchy, come out on the western stage with foreign policy strategies different from Moscow’s or in clear contrast with them. Differences between Russia and Ukraine over the division of the Black Sea Military Fleet or those between Russia and Georgia on the use of oil and natural gas in Northern Caucasus – in both cases substantial sources of revenues – have ruled out one of the factors Moscow had counted on in the economy of its own political decision making, the shared Soviet heritage of the two camps. In view of the above, there is no question of a perfect superposition between the nature of a party’s doctrinal options and a country’s foreign policy interests. Today’s international environment, added to factors such as the nature of domestic policy, the geographic position and the immediate circumstances, make a country’s foreign policy not necessarily dependent on a domestic ideological framework for admission to some international directions or currents.