Behind Closed Doors: The Secret History of the Cold War by Rear-Adm. Ellis M. Zacharias

Author:Rear-Adm. Ellis M. Zacharias [Zacharias, Rear-Adm. Ellis M.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Eschenburg Press
Published: 2017-07-31T04:00:00+00:00

17. THE MOBILIZATION OF THE COMINFORM

THE DEPLOYMENT of the marshals is a most significant move. It shows that the U.S.S.R. is now determined to back up its dynamic diplomacy with military force, if need be.

Under “ideal revolutionary” circumstances the Red Army is not allowed to intervene in what the Bolsheviks call direct struggle. It is not allowed to wage an old-fashioned war. Wars are to be kept pure in their imperialist character so that they may develop, according to plan and schedule, into civil wars. With the Red Army involved in one or another, this plan may go astray. An army, both within or without Russia, may even become the source and the force of civil war against the Bolsheviks of the U.S.S.R. Thus the Red Army is kept intact and deployed only as an auxiliary force of the world revolution.{264} It is the sword of Damocles that hangs by a thin thread over the heads of those the Kremlin has singled out for conquest or destruction. It stood behind Mr. Vishinsky when he went to Rumania to overthrow King Mihai’s government; it stood behind Mr. Pushkin, the NKVD diplomat, when he organized the coup d’état in Hungary; and it sends token forces—sometimes only a single Soviet marshal—into Poland when collaboration is found lagging. This is why in China, in Greece, in Vietnam, the leaders of the national liberation movements wonder at the strange aloofness of the Red Army general staff.

The major militant force of the world revolution is the Cominform. We have seen in the description of the various patterns how sections of the Communist International, namely the regional Communist parties of individual countries, and the apparatus of the Cominform, namely the full-time professional revolutionary organization, work throughout the world on the basis of central directives received from Moscow.

For a long time, international bolshevism was, so to say, a civilian force. It fought its battles in the streets and in the factories. Its weapons were mass terror, political murder, the general strike, and the armed insurrection. Its wars were called rebellions, uprisings, revolutions. It frowned upon organized armies and navies, unless it could infiltrate them, to bore from within, and to shatter them as bulwarks of the bourgeois state. Even in 1928, the Communist International proclaimed the injunction that “armies, which form a constituent part of the bourgeois state apparatus, must not be democratized but broken up.”{265} And Lange, in his Lenin School textbook for bolshevism’s fledgling agitators and activists, wrote: “An effective fight for the destruction of the armed forces of the enemy demands that it be waged not just from the outside but also from the inside.”{266}

But then suddenly international bolshevism found itself with a number of organized armies on its hands. There was, above all, the Red Army of the U.S.S.R.;{267} then all the armies of the satellites; the active partisans of Asia; the immense reserve forces of the Communist underground of World War II that fought its full-scale battles with tactical perfection. The Russian bosses

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.