WITH the entry of thousands of Soviet troops into Afghanistan, bourgeois commentators — notably those who justified the French interventions in Chad and Zaire, and the South African invasion of Angolanow shedding tears for the plight of the Afghan people. The object oi the exercise is to portray the Russians as an untamed power hell-bent on reyolution by Nothing could be further from the truth.
There is a basic difference between Soviet foreign policy and that of the United States and other imperialist powers. different modes of production which exist in these countries.
The Western powers are determined to use all available means to preserve societies resting on the private ownership of the means production. They realise that seeking to resolve their own economic and political differences through direct military conflict (as in 1914 and 1939) risks weakening their common front against the working class. But the struggle for markets within the imperialist world continues apace, combined number of neo-colonial states for the cheap production of manufactured goods.
The soviet Union 1s not an impenalist power in this Leninist sense. The expansionist dynamics of imperialist removed leaders and Soviet different.
'expansionist" conquest.
soviets.
This relates to the Caste of caste. oi a years exploitation were gains of April revolution of 1978. Afghans read newspaper Truth of the April Revolution 1978.
the expropriation capitalists after the 1917 October revolution -a gain which has never been reversed. It is not the dictates of private capital which determine foreign policy but something The ravages of the imperialist-sponsored civil war which followed the October revolution drained the energies of the small working class and crippled the democratic institutions of political power it had established: the system of This allowed a bureaucratic championed by, Stalin to seize the reins of political power in the USSR.
In place of the policy of defence forward by. Lenin and Trotsky, States and his working co-thinkers substituted the idea of socialism in one country, The interests of working people throughout the world were henceforth to be subordinated to defence of the Soviet Union . as the basis for the rule of this bureaucratic Thus Soviet foreign policy for the last fifty has been determined priority: the preservation of national security within the framework status quo. Its overall hallmark is caution and Conscals. Any developinchl this framework very Nazi-Soviet waste down: the replaced it of interests. its essentials. international class struggle which jeopardises has to be avoided necessary, stamped out.
Hence the periodic adjustments in the Stalin era which were necessary to bring Soviet policy into line with the changing status quo. 1930s, Stalin inaugurated the Popular Fronts to defend the bourgeois powers against Nazism From 1939 to 1941 he made a few changes and accepted Hitlerite rule in Germany via the pact. Finally, through agreements at Yalta and Potsdam, Communist with the theory of 'spheres influence', by which the Soviet Union agreed to prevent social upheavals in Italy and France in return for the West's accentance of Stalinis * hegemony over Eastern Europe.
Soviet foreign policy has not altered since in Andrei Gromyko, Stalinist diplomat and Foreign Minister, wrote in Pravda on 28 June 1968 (two months before the invasion of Prague): 'Our foreign policy is Said.
Ambitions thus motivated or, that exist in Yemen, Ethiopia In the religious rebels backed by the the HILCIeSLS he closed installed Karmal in power.
and of WARACIO. and bureaucratic bully: could a veteran forefront of the historic stage'.
now Brezhnev's comprising a third of the world - limits the • ability of imperialism to rule at will and creates a situation of permanent confrontation. In turn this means that when social classes and political groups at their head seek to free themselves from domination by capital, the soviet Union 1s often forced to provide military and economic The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan is neither by imperialist ambitions' nor by a decision to transform the country into an Outer Mongolia. Its aim is to institute a government not dissimilar to those Angola, Mozambique, South The Russians were clearly worried that the excesses of Hafizullah Amin were handing the country on a platter to the West, Such a regime, they believed, would threaten Soviet hence lncy moved In one of his last writings Lenin displayed extraordinary foresight. He expressed concern at the consequences which the policies of the - the Great Russian chauvinist have among those hundreds of millions of the peoples of Asia who will in the near future move to the Stalin's treatment of China and Iran, and entry into Afghanistan, indicate that the price paid will be a high one.
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Tass supplied this photograph from Kabul on Saturday with the following caption: "Afghan people resolutely support the measures of the new leadership in Afghanistan aimed at defending