Visions of Future War

Abstract

The ideological foundation of the industrialisation programme was the Bolshevik belief in an inevitable confrontation between capitalism and socialism. The First World War ended with the Versailles peace settlement’s attempt to regulate the future conditions in Europe and the world. The League of Nations was created as a permanent forum to preclude new wars. Generally, in Western Europe hopes for permanent disarmament in the major states were raised during the 1920s, and conferences were organised to that effect. The Russian revolutions in 1917 were followed by the Civil War 1918–20, the 1920 Soviet-Polish war and, in 1921, the suppression of the Kronstadt mutiny and the peasant uprisings in Tambov province. After 1921, Soviet Russia also entered a period of peace. However, due to their Marxist formation, revolutionary experience and Bolshevik ideology, the new statesmen in the Soviet Union firmly believed that, sooner or later, another major war with capitalist states was inevitable. The dual, or contradictory, nature of Soviet international behaviour must be emphasised. On the one hand, the USSR lived as a bastion for promoting world revolution. In 1923, for example, active measures were taken to direct a German communist uprising.