ment. The government they founded derives from a violent act perpetrated by a tiny minority. Furthermore, this power seizure was carried out under false pretenses. The coup d'etat of October 1917 was accomplished not on behalf of the Bolshevik party but on behalf of the Soviets a fact which survives today mainly in the name "Soviet Union." The Soviets were representative bodies of soldiers, workers, and peasants which, for all their structural looseness and lack of regular procedure, did in a fashion express the will of the pople. But although the Bolsheviks claimed to overthrow the Provisional Government in order to transfer power to these Soviets, in reality they used them from the beginning as a facade behind which to consolidate their own authority, and the transfer was never accomplished. And, finally, the Soviet government has never dared to seek a mandate from its population. The one and only post-1917 election in which the Bolsheviks ran in competition with other parties the election for the Constituent Assembly held in the winter of 1917-1918-gave them a quarter of the national vote, whereupon they ordered the assembly dissolved. No elections giving the voter a choice even from among Communist candidates have been held since that disagreeable experience. Now it is sometimes said by friends of the Soviet Union abroad that one must not apply to its government standards of democracy derived from the West. And, indeed, it is perfectly possible to exercise authority without recourse to the Western idea of popular sovereignty or by twisting it out of all semblance as Hitler had done when he claimed that the will of eighty million Germans fused and became one with his own. But as a matter of record, the Soviet government makes no such claim on its own behalf: its constitution and legal system claim to rest on democratic principles indistinguishable from our own, and hence it cannot escape being judged by them. A government which came to power by force in the name of slogans which it did not and had no intention of honoring, and which has never dared to seek popular sanction, such a government cannot be said to be democratic no matter how broadly the term is defined. And herein lies its tragedy and insoluble inner contradiction. The yawning gap between constitutional promise and political reality stares in the eye of all but the most obtuse or cynical of Soviet citizens.

Legitimacy of some kind is essential to every political authority to justify the right of some men to order others about. The Soviet government is no exception. Unable to obtain a popular mandate, it seeks to obtain it in a variety of other ways, of which nationalism is the handiest. By appearing as the protector of Russian national interests from internal and external enemies, the regime can identify itself with the people. But to be able to do so, it must have enemies; and it conjures them up as the need arises. The atmosphere of a crisis is essential to the Soviet elite and can be counted on to remain an instrument of Soviet policy as long as the present elite remains in power. In the 1930's and 1940's it was often said that Soviet behavior is motivated by fear. This is correct as far as it goes: only the fear is not of other peoples but of its own, and for that reason it is incapable of being allayed by concessions. Fear breeds insecurity which in turn expresses itself, in nations as in individuals, in aggressive behavior. (And it may be noted parenthetically that the one time the Soviet

Union confronted a genuine menace rather than one of its own making, namely Nazi Germany, it reacted by appeasing; its most determined reactions have always been reserved for imaginary enemies.)

3. Class Interests of the Soviet Elite

All elites have vested interests, or they would not be elites. But as a rule, the disparity between the interests of the elite and of the rest of the citizenry is wider in poor countries than in rich ones, and the dread of losing status is proportionately more acute. And Russia is still a desperately poor country, with a standard of living below that of some countries in the preindustrial stage of development. The bulk of the wealth created by Soviet industry since the inauguration of the first Five-Year-Plan in 1928 has gone into armaments and those branches of the economy of greatest direct benefit to the military. Agriculture has been ruined to pay for this most up-to-date military machine; and consumer industry has been forced to operate on a shoestring. This situation has not significantly changed since the death of Stalin, periodic promises of a vast outpouring of consumer goods notwithstanding-(for example, Khrushchev's confident boast that by 1970 the Soviet Union would exceed the United States in the production of meat and milk). The Soviet citizen today is poor not only in comparison with his counterpart in other European countries, but also in comparison with his own grandfather. In terms of essentials-food, clothing, and housing-the Soviet population as a whole is worse off than it was before the Revolution and in the 1920's. If one considers such intangibles as access to information and the right to travel as elements of the standard of living-as they should be then, the Soviet citizenry is positively destitute.

This cannot be said of the Soviet elite which enjoys a fairly decent standard of life. The closer a member of this group stands to the inner sancta of the bureaucratic-military-police establishment, the readier his access to the country's very limited store of goods and services, to the sources of objective information, to a passport authorizing travel abroad. No wonder therefore that the Soviet elite vigorously protects its privileged position and the political system which makes it possible; that it dreads democracy which would inevitably sweep away its status and force it to share the indescribably drab life of the ordinary Soviet citizenry; that it supports the regime in its nationalism and crisis-mongering.

4. The Colonial Experience

The Moscow state, that is, the ancestor of the Imperial and Soviet states, emerged on the fringe of Asia. In order to create a national state, its founders had not only to impose their authority on rival Russian principalities, but also to repel, subdue, and integrate the Turco-Mongol and Finnic populations with which they were surrounded. As a consequence, in Russia, the process of nation-building took place concurrently with that of empire-building, rather than before. The two processes, so distinct in the history of western states, in the case of Russia cannot be readily separated either chronologically or geographically. In the second half of the 16th century Moscow already administered a sizable colonial population of Tatars and Finns. To these were added in the 17th century the natives of Siberia

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and the Cossacks, in the 18th the nomads of Central Asia, the Crimean Tatars, the Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Poles, Jews, and Baltic peoples, and in the 19th, the Caucasians and Musims of Turkestan.

As a result of these acquisitions, the Moscow government acquired early a great deal of expertise in handling foreigners; but this expertise it gained from administering subject peoples, western and Oriental, not from dealing on equal terms with other sovereign states. The Office of Ambassadors in Moscow knew less, comparatively speaking, about foreigners than did the various administrative offices charged with responsibility for administering immense territories inhabited by peoples of different races and religions. In some measure this also held true of the Imperial government and of the Soviet government; for techniques of administration tend to survive change of elites.

The implications are not far to seek. A country whose governing apparatus has learned how to deal with foreign peoples from what are essentially colonial practices is not predisposed to think in terms of a stable international community or of balance of power. Its natural instincts are to exert the maximum use of force, and to regard absorption as the only dependable way of settling relations with other states, especially those located along its own borders. There is little need here for theory, because the options are narrow, and concern tactics rather than objectives or strategy.

To anyone acquainted with the rich literature on the international relations of the Western powers it must come as a surprise to learn that there is no definitive or even comprehensive history of Russian foreign relations. The literature on the theory of Russian foreign policy is so meager that it may be said not to exist. That Russians have felt no need to compile the record of their external relations or to investigate its principles is in itself a significant fact, illustrative of their general attitude toward the outside world.

These four factors impel the elite which rules Soviet Russia to conduct a dynamic and inherently aggressive foreign policy, very different from that pursued by such predominantly commercial countries as the United States, whose principal aim is international stability. If the Soviet elite were not inhibited by other factors, which it is helpless to change, the Soviet Union very likely would conduct a policy of reckless external expansion such as Germany and Japan had pursued in the 1930's. But fortunately, such inhibiting factors do exist, and these must be taken into account to provide a rounded picture of Soviet foreign policy.

The most important of these is the spirit and mood of the ordinary people: not only the people of Great Russian stock but also those belonging to the numerous ethnic minorities inhabiting the Soviet Union.

The Russian people have no tradition of glorifying war, perhaps because they never had a feudal culture in the proper sense of the word. Its great medieval epic celebrates not the victory of Russian arms but their defeat. Neither in the folklore nor in the proverbs of Russia is there much trace of militarism. The common people have always viewed war as a desperate act to defend one's home; and Russian troops, so effective on their home soil, have never shown much skill on foreign campaigns. This general attitude deserves comment even in

the case of a country which allows its citizenry no say in governmental affairs, because in the long run the quality of the human material has considerable bearing on a government's freedom of action.

Even more significant, however, is the fact that the people of the Soviet Union are utterly exhausted. The country had been mobilized in 1914 and except for brief respites has not been allowed since then to return to normal life. Having dropped out of the international war in 1917, Russia suffered for the next three years an even more devastating civil war followed by several years of epidemic and famine. It barely recovered from these disasters during the New Economic Policy era, when in 1928 it was reharnessed into state service to carry out the most ambitious program of industrialization ever attempted by a nation.

To make this program economically feasible, a whole counter-revolution was inaugurated in the countryside, in the course of which the government confiscated, in the face of the peasantry's desperate resistance, its land, livestock and implements. This tragedy was not even over when the regime launched a political massacre of actual, potential, or imaginary opponents of nightmarish dimensions. And then came World War II. The losses in human lives which the population of the Soviet Union has suffered between 1914-1945 exceed those of any other people in modern times except European Jewry. They can be estimated at two million casualties in World War I, 14 million during the Civil War and the famine, ten million during collectivization, 10 million during the purges and 20 million during World War II, for a total of 56 million human lives lost. The demographic pyramid of the Soviet population bears a visible scar from these stupendous losses showing a deep indentation in the age group between 35 and 70, especially on the male side.

After such exertions and bloodletting the inhabitants of the Soviet Union are simply incapable of being mobilized once again for any sustained national effort. Their fatigue is so profound that neither exhortations nor alarms can shake them from it. They require three things of which they have been deprived for the past half a century: peace, privacy, and prosperity, probably in this order. With a population in this state it is just not possible to launch ambitious drives of external expansion.

Consideration must also be given to the fact that approximately onehalf of the population of the Soviet Union consists of peoples who are not of Russian nationality. This colonial population brought under Russian sovereignty by imperial and Soviet conquest, not only shares the exhaustion of the Russians proper, but experiences a sense of national frustration as well. Neither blandishments nor persecution have had much effect on the patriotic spirit among the ethnic minorities. They constitute a volatile and unreliable element.

Thus a kind of dilemma arises before the Soviet elite: one of the principal factors inducing it to maintain an aggressive posture, namely lack of confidence in its popular support and the need for crisis, also forces it to act cautiously. The Soviet government cannot risk a protracted war because such a war always makes the government dependent on its population. All the important concessions which the Imperial government had made before the revolution were the consequence of long wars: the Crimean War, which compelled it to free the serfs and institute local self-government; the Japanese War,

which forced it to grant a constitution; and World War I, which caused it to abdicate. These historic lessons have not been lost on the Soviet government and in large measure account for the prudence which it has always shown in the face of firm resistance by other powers.

The same factor explains the haste with which the Soviet elite exploits any opportunity abroad where serious opposition seems unlikely. Guided more by the prospect of success than by any consideration of "national interest," Russian expansion follows no discernible pattern. The whole concept of "national interest" in the sense in which the term is used in the West, is altogether alien to the Russian mind. Most writings on the subject come from the pens of foreigners who seek to locate behind Russian foreign policy patterns of a kind they are familiar with in their own countries. In Russian literature, prerevolutionary and Soviet, hardly anything is said on the matter. As for Communist theory, it too provides no guidelines for the conduct of a rational foreign policy insofar as the whole assumption of Communism is that the forces of "progress" and of "reaction" are split along class lines, not national ones.

By and large, Russian expansion tends to focus on targets of opportunity. Historians have long noted what may be called the "pendulum" effect in nineteenth century Russian expansion, meaning rapid shifts from one area to another in response to encountered resistance. Thus, frustrated by its defeat in the Crimean War from subjugating the Ottoman Empire, the Imperial government promptly sent its forces into Central Asia which it conquered in a series of rapid expeditions. But as soon as the British, alarmed for the security of India, threatened to stop Russian advances in that region, St. Petersburg shifted its attention to the Far East. Defeated in Korea and Manchuria by Japan, it returned to the Balkans.

Such pendular swings can also be detected in Soviet foreign policy: For instance, the shift in 1948 from expansion in Europe where it was halted by determined U.S. resistance, to East Asia. This evidence suggests that Russian expansion is motivated less by needs than by opportunities, less by what its elite wants than by what it can get. For this reason it is impossible to determine control over which areas would satisfy the Soviet government and induce it to assume a cooperative international stance. Russia has all the territory and all the resources it needs; its external security is assured by its military power and by vast buffer zones separating it from potential enemies. If it nevertheless keeps on expanding it is precisely because its expansion is in large measure determined by internal rather than external factors, above all, by the tragic relationship of the government to its people. Developments which have occurred in military technology since the end of World War II, and particularly the emergence of a strategy based on rocketry and nuclear weapons, have significantly affected the situation.

In some respects, the changes in warfare have had a positive effect on world peace. Scientific and technological warfare requires a large scientific and technical intelligentsia, whose outlook is bound to be very different from that of the traditional class of field or staff officers. That which has been learned of this intelligentsia through personal contacts