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Soviet Union [USSR] War as a Continuation of Politics
According to Marxist-Leninist theory, the essence of war is
political. Lenin adopted the dictum of the nineteenth-century
German strategist Carl von Clausewitz that war is a continuation of
politics by other, i.e., violent, means. In contrast to Clausewitz,
however, who understood politics as the relationship between
states, Lenin regarded politics as class struggle within states.
Lenin also believed that class struggle within states dictated the
kinds of preparation that these states made for war, the
declarations of wars between states, the conduct of wars between
states, and the outcome of wars.
Contemporary Marxist-Leninist interpretation of war derived
from Lenin's understanding of war as the outcome of class struggle.
According to this view, noncommunist states were ruled by classes
that were hostile to the "dictatorship of the proletariat"
established by the Soviet Union and other socialist states. In
particular, the Marxist-Leninist understanding of war attributed to
the United States, as the most powerful representative of
"imperialism" (the final stage of capitalism), the goal of altering
the course of world development by destroying communism (the final
stage of socialism). Marxism-Leninism assigned to the Soviet armed
forces the task of preventing the destruction of communism by
waging a defensive but victorious war with all modern weapons at
their disposal.
In the 1960s, before development of the concept of limited
nuclear war, Soviet strategists debated whether or not nuclear war
could be a rational tool of policy because the widespread
destruction it would cause could prevent it from promoting
socialism's final victory. Some Soviet leaders, notably Nikita S.
Khrushchev and the Soviet military theorists who shared his views,
maintained that, considering the extremes of nuclear violence,
nuclear war could not be a continuation of politics by means of
armed force
(see Soviet Union USSR - Evolution of Military Doctrine
, this ch.). In the
1970s, Leonid I. Brezhnev claimed that whoever started a nuclear
war would be committing suicide, and he asserted that the Soviet
Union would never be the first to use nuclear weapons. In the
1980s, Soviet civilian and military leaders adopted a similar
stance, repeatedly declaring that no victor could emerge in a
general nuclear war and that it would lead to the destruction of
humanity. These statements seemed to modify Lenin's dictum that war
is the continuation of politics.
By contrast, the official position on war, as communicated to
the military in consecutive editions of Marxism-Leninism on War
and the Army, one of the fundamental works of Soviet military
theory, has remained unchanged. The 1968 edition maintained that
all wars, "even a possible thermonuclear one," are and will be "a
continuation of politics by means of armed force." The most recent
edition available in 1989, Marxist-Leninist Teaching on War and
the Army, published in 1984, deemed a nuclear attack
reprehensible but regarded as "just and lawful" the use of nuclear
weapons either to respond to an enemy strike or to forestall an
impending nuclear strike by an adversary. According to this
edition, "nuclear missile war fully retains the general social
essence of war" and is "a continuation of politics by other,
violent means."
This apparent regarding of all weapons, no matter how
destructive, as "just and lawful" means for the defense of
socialism stemmed from Marxist-Leninist teaching on just and unjust
wars. According to this teaching, wars waged by the Soviet Union
and socialist states allied with it were a "continuation of the
politics of revolution" and led to a revolutionary transformation
of the world. Hence, in the Marxist-Leninist scale of values, all
wars fought by socialist armies were both just and revolutionary.
By contrast, all wars waged by "imperialists" were, by definition,
unjust. Marxist-Leninist theory also asserted that all wars fought
in defense of the socialist motherland were unconditionally just
and could be fought with all modern weapons, including nuclear
ones.
Data as of May 1989
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