Library:On the shortcomings of party work and measures to eliminate Trotskyist and other double-dealers/Capitalist Encirclement

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What are these facts which our Party comrades forgot, or which they simply did not notice?

They forgot that Soviet power has conquered only one-sixth of the world, that five-sixths of the world is in the possession of capitalist powers. They forgot that the Soviet Union is in the conditions of capitalist encirclement. It is an accepted thing to talk loosely about capitalist encirclement, but people do not want to ponder upon what sort of a thing this capitalist encirclement is.

Capitalist encirclement -- that is no empty phrase; that is a very real and unpleasant feature. Capitalist encirclement means that here is one country, the Soviet Union, which has established the socialist order on its own territory and besides this there are many countries, bourgeois countries, which continue to carry on a capitalist mode of life and which surround the Soviet Union, waiting for an opportunity to attack it, break it, or at any rate to undermine its power and weaken it.

Our comrades forgot this fundamental fact. But it is that precisely which determines the basis of relations between the capitalist encirclement and the Soviet Union.

Take for example the bourgeois states. Simple-minded people may think that extremely good relations reign between them, as between states of the same type. But only simpleminded people can think so. In reality the relations between them are far from being those of good neighbors. It has been proved as plainly as two and two make four that the bourgeois states shower their spies, wreckers, diversionists and sometimes murderers on each other, behind their frontiers; give them instructions to worm themselves into the factories and institutions of these states, to create their own network there and "in case of necessity" to smash them from the rear so as to weaken them and undermine their power. Such is the case at the present time.

Such, too, has been the case in the past. Take for example the countries of Europe at the time of Napoleon the First. France at that time was swarming with spies and diversionists from the camp of the Russians, Germans, Austrians and English. And, at the same time, England, the German states, Austria, and Russia had behind their lines no fewer spies and diversionists from the French camp. Agents of Great Britain twice made attempts on the life of Napoleon, and several times roused the peasants of the Vendee in France against the government of Napoleon. And what was Napoleon's government? A bourgeois government which had strangled the French Revolution and retained only those results of the revolution which were profitable to the big bourgeoisie. Needless to say, Napoleon's government did not remain indebted to its neighbors. It also undertook its own diversional measures. Such was the case in the past, 130 years ago. Such is the case now, 130 years after Napoleon the First. France and England at the present day are swarming with German spies and diversionists and on the other hand, Anglo-French spies and diversionists in turn are at work in Germany. America is swarming with Japanese spies and diversionists, and Japan with American.

Such is the law of relations between bourgeois states.

The question must be put: why should the bourgeois countries be gentler and more neighborly to the Soviet socialist government than they are to bourgeois states or their own type? Why should they send fewer spies; wreckers, diversionists and murderers behind the frontiers of the Soviet Union than they send behind the frontiers of bourgeois countries which are akin to them? Where did you get this from? Will it not be truer, from the point of view of Marxism, to suppose that the bourgeois states must be sending twice or three times as many wreckers, spies, diversionists and murderers behind the lines of the Soviet Union than behind those of any bourgeois state?

Is it not clear that as long as capitalist encirclement exists there will be wreckers, spies, diversionists and murderers in our country sent behind our lines by the agents of foreign slates?

Our Party comrades forgot about all this, and having forgotten were caught unawares.

This is why the spying and diversive work of the Trotskyite agents of the Japanese and German secret police was completely unexpected by some of our comrades.