“Peace will be preserved and strengthened if the people /

take the cause of peace into their own hands and defend it to the end”

Joseph Stalin, 1952

*

The “struggle for peace” has always been a cornerstone of Soviet foreign policy. Indeed, the Soviet Union itself rose out of the ashes of World War I under the banner of “Peace to the People! Power to the Soviets!” Probably from the very first, Bolshevik ideologists were aware of how powerful a weapon for them the universal craving for peace would be—how gullible and irrational people could be whenever they were offered the slightest temptation to believe that peace was at hand.

Only a year before the Bolsheviks raised their banner, the most terrible prospect for any Russian would have been to see an enemy burning down his villages and defiling his churches. Yet once blinded by the slogan, “A just peace without annexations or tribute,” he was to rush from the front lines, along with hundreds of thousands of his fellow soldiers, sweeping away the last remnants of the Russian national State.

He did not want to know that his desertion had done no more than simply prolong the war for another year, not only condemning thousands more to death on the Western front, but ending in that very German occupation of the Ukraine and Russia he had so much dreaded just a year ago.

For the moment the only thing that mattered was peace — right now, and at any price.

*

[for the full text, see below]

[ii] “The Peace Movement and the USSR” (1982)

========================