THE INVASION of Afghanistan by Soviet troops has raised once again the issue of whether there is ever any justification for the Red Army to intervene in the internal affairs of another country. The issue is not new.
It arose in 1920 when the Red Army marched on Warsaw. Up till then it had been, as Deutscher puts it, 'a canon of Marxist politics that revolution cannot and must not be carried on the points of bayonets into foreign countries'. Trotsky resolutely opposed the Polish venture; Lenin, who had hoped that the advance of the Red Army would act as a catalyst for the Polish workers, subsequently admitted his error (Klara Zetkin: Reminiscence of Lenin). For the same reasons, Trotsky opposed the Red Army's invasion of Menshevik-ruled Georgia in 1921, though Georgia was even more of a hot bed of imperialist intrigues than Afghanistan today, where, effectively, Moscow has been the dominating influence since 1968.
To come a little nearer to the present day — in his interview with a correspondence of the St Louis Post Dispatch (March 1940)
Trotsky was asked if he, as former head of the Red Armies, felt it necessary for the Soviets to move into the Baltic States, Finland and Poland, the better to defend themselves against aggression. The question concluded, 'Do you believe that a socialist state is justified in extending socialism to a neighbouring state by force of arms?' Trotsky replied:
' ...The defence of an isolated workers' state depends much more on the support of the labouring masses all over the world than on two or three strategic points...that does not exclude the right and duty to give military aid from without to peoples rebelling against oppression. For example, in 1919 we naturally had the right to help (the Hungarian revolution) by military means ... Unfortunately we were too weak ...
'The invasion (of the Baltic States etc) is seen by the populations not as an act of liberation but as an act of violence and thereby facilitates the mobilisation of world opinion against the USSR by the imperialist powers...' (Writings 1939-40).
There is no evidence of a mass popular uprising in Afghanistan which called for revolutionary intervention of the Red Army. Trotsky's strictures on the Soviet invasions of Poland, the Baltic States and Finland can be cogently applied to the current situation, a situation even more complicated by the existence of not one isolated workers' state but several, which may find themselves on opposite sides of the battle-lines.
We must not and cannot give any support to the imperialist campaign against the USSR. Trotsky, quite correctly, while opposing the march into Georgia in 1921, nevertheless subsequently staunchly countered the imperialist and social-democratic campaign for the restoration of Menshevik rule and the withdrawal of Soviet armed forces. Similarly, he never demanded the withdrawal of the Soviet armies from the Baltic states and Poland in 1940.
We, in our turn, while condemning the policies which sent the Red Army into Afghanistan to bolster up a bureaucratic satellite regime, do not join the chorus of imperialist jackals who call for their withdrawal as this would create a power vacuum which would be quickly filled by imperialism.
We must demand that the Soviet troops respect the rights of the people of Afghanistan to determine their own future, which must include the right of the Afghanistan people to demand the withdrawal of foreign troops from their territory. We must give every support to any movement toward the establishment of organs of popular control, even where this will meet — as it will — the violent opposition of the occupying Red armies.
CHARLIE VAN GELDEREN, London NW10