The Peace Movement and the Soviet Union [antikvár]

Peace will be preserved and strengthened if thepeople take the cause of peace into their ownhands and defend it to the end.Joseph Stalin, 1952The "struggle for peace" has alwaysbeen a cornerstone of Soviet foreignpolicy. Indeed, the Soviet Union itself rose out ofthe ashes of World War I under the banner of"Peace to the People! Power to the Soviets!" Prob-ably from the very first, Bolshevik ideologists wereaware of how powerful a weapon for them theuniversal craving for peace would behow gulli-ble and irrational people could be whenever theywere offered the slightest temptation to believethat peace was at hand.Only a year before the Bolsheviks raised theirbanner, the most terrible prospect for any Russianwould have been to see an enemy burning downhis villages and defiling his churches. Yet onceblinded by the slogan, "A just peace without an-nexations or tribute," he was to rush from thefront lines, along with hundreds of thousands ofhis fellow soldiers, sweeping away the last rem-nants of the Russian national state. He did notwant to know that his desertion had done no morethan simply prolong the war for another year, notonly condemning thousands more to death on theWestern front, but ending in that very Germanoccupation of the Ukraine and Russia he had somuch dreaded just a year ago. For the momentthe only thing that mattered was peaceright now,and at any price.Hardly anyone taking part in the stampedeback home in 1917 knew the first thing about theideology of Communismexcept possibly for acouple of simple slogans and this one incendiaryword: Peace. In a country of 70 million there were