Interwar Politics

The futile attempt of the Western community to overthrow and undo Soviet Communism in Russia led to strain and anxious ties between the Soviet Union and the West. Before the end of the 1930s, diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the major Western countries hardly existed at any practical level. During this time, these major Western powers made full attempt to prevent the spread and dissemination of Communist ideas in the West. In this spirit, these powers also tried to isolate the Union by all means they could employ. It took as late as 1924 for the government in London to recognize the sovereign status of the Soviet Union. Washington waited till 1933. What was practically implicated in the absence of formal diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union was the sheer unavailability of any proper channels of communication. This led to ‘guesswork’ as a formal strategy of all parties because it was virtually impossible to know what the other is up to without any way to discuss and negotiate. This model of non-commination becomes particularly frightening when we learn that the United States and the Soviet Union both gain power without precedent; they both emerge as Super-Power giants by the end of the wars. One cannot undermine the part Stalin’s politics and policies have played to ameliorate this conflict in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of Stalin’s measures have even led to mass starvation and consequential deaths of many Soviet citizens. He was brutal to political opponents and took the strictest action against them. So much so that he was known for his vicious ‘purges’; of which it is estimated that about a million deaths are accounted for. The West took issue with these human right violations, but more importantly, these actions proved more and more that what we had in Communism was the antithesis of Western style democracy. During the second World War, the West did not bother much about the way Stalin did government, but as soon as the war alliance broke apart, things returned to surface. The West tried its level best to exclude the Soviets from the workings of International Politics after the first war. This paranoia was a mistake in retrospect, and the politics following the next war were more cautious, and yet, more fragile and stressful.

Propaganda and the Red Scare

The Soviets were all too active in propaganda, especially in the years of the 1920’s and 1930’s. This aspect was an addition to the silent war taking form between the East and the West during this time. The imagery of the West that was reproduced was one of a gluttonous, greed and money crazy society, seeking to pursue its narrow materialistic ambitions which culminate at global domination. This contributed the ideological apparatus of the communist state that was the Soviet Union. The ideological production was also crucial in the making of certain prejudiced and misled leaders, as much as citizens, of the Soviet political establishment who were simply ‘difficult to talk to’. In Western societies, the propaganda against the Soviets was of no less consequence. The Soviets were portrayed as irrational subjects, people you could simply ‘not talk to’, because all they were bent for was to make the whole world communist, and nothing short of it. This propaganda reached its peak in the United States with the anticommunist crusade that came as the ‘Red Scare’ in 1918-1921. In desperate campaigns of witch-hunting, so many civil right violations proceeded against Americans themselves.