ABSTRACT
The Soviet leadership, after the departure in 1922 of the Japanese, the last foreign troops on Soviet territory, was able to fashion and create Soviet society free from outside interference. The Allies had withdrawn. The Whites were defeated. Bolshevik armies had established control over the Caucasus region, central Asia and the whole of Siberia during 1920 and 1921. With the end of the civil war, and Russia’s own foreign war with Poland – fighting stopped in October 1920 – not only was Soviet revolutionary power established, but for two decades, until Hitler’s invasion of 1941, the expected concerted capitalist attack did not materialise. It never in fact materialised as the Soviet Union eventually fought Germany in alliance with capitalist Britain and the US. But the fear that the half-hearted Allied intervention immediately after the revolution was not the end but the precursor of an attempt by the capitalist world to liquidate the first communist state powerfully influenced the Soviet Union’s foreign relations.
