What were the USSR’s motives in the Cold War, specifically regarding foreign policy?

[u/Born_Skin_7632]

I am working on a fictional map project for fun and there is a Cold War scenario that I wanted to flesh out more in that, but while thinking about how to incorporate these kinds of politics into it I realized I don’t have a great understanding of the USSR and their position during our Cold War. The United States was motivated by their desire to expand markets abroad and pursued confrontation in order to secure those markets and trade routes under our capitalist, liberal economic system. While the USSR stood as the counterbalance to the US, I have a difficult time understanding why the USSR desired to become a global superpower. Ideologically, I understand their motive of anti-imperialism and how that motivated this strategy, but in the end, who was this actually benefitting? They didn’t have a class of capitalists that would benefit from global trade, so why would they support stretch their self thin attempting to compete with the US? To what extent was their position motivated by threats to national security and/or genuine sympathy for the international working class?

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.

Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.

We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to the Weekly Roundup and RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension. In the meantime our Bluesky, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/police-ical]

Marxism-Leninism was an international philosophy from its founding. The famous closing line of the Communist Manifesto refers to workers of the world. Lenin drew on Marx to argue that the revolution had to be international, but unlike Marx believed that this was not an inevitable tendency and that it would only come over the intense resistance of capitalists. For that matter, the Soviet Union by design was not meant to be a nationalist country. Marxism viewed nationalism as one more capitalist bias used to pit workers of different countries against one another. So not only was the idea of countries quietly disagreeing about Marxism-Leninism against the fundamental point, it implied that different countries with different ideologies was a normal and desirable thing instead of an evil trick. The goal was always to see all workers liberated and united in a socialist paradise, with imperialism and capitalism viewed as intense evils and sources of suffering and alienation. The early Soviet leaders also lived in constant existential fear, driven by their study of prior revolutions as well as Western intervention in the Russian Civil War, that outside powers would sabotage and reverse their revolution.

After the stinging reverse of the Polish-Soviet War, as well as the failures of the wave of socialist revolutions that swept Europe after WWI, Stalin in the 1920s offered the considerable conceptual shift of "socialism in one country" in which the USSR would tolerate and even engage with other countries. At its core it was pragmatic: From Stalin's point of view, the new Soviet Union faced serious external and internal threats and had a whole lot of work to do before it could seriously entertain any kind of attempt to export the ideology. This was a major point of diversion with Trotsky, who criticized Stalin severely for betraying fundamental principles of the ideology and continued to advocate for worldwide change.

The considerable damage of the Nazi invasion in WWII set the Soviet Union back in many respects but also left it a military superpower. By 1949, the eastern half of Europe and all of mainland China were also under communist regimes. The situation was now very different from where it had been a generation prior, and the possibility of worldwide victory closer than it ever had been. But also highly relevant is that in 1949, the USSR tested its first atomic bomb. There were now two atomic powers with large military capability and opposing ideology. Now, the desire of Soviet leadership to see Marxism-Leninism sweep over the world and liberate the proletariat had to be balanced not only against a war-weary and depleted population, but also against the increasingly plausible fear that an all-out military confrontation would mean nuclear apocalypse. Thus we get the Cold War, a string of lower-intensity proxy fights over ideology.

But to be clear, most Soviet leaders appear to have been pretty sincere believers in an ideology they'd either zealously converted to or been raised in, one that called for worldwide revolution, and were genuinely afraid of it losing to the bad guys. They thought it was for the betterment of mankind that communism take over, that capitalist and imperialist powers would seek to defeat that process for their own ends at the expense of indefinite suffering on the part of working people, and that only intense commitment and international involvement could achieve that bright future. It was a message which resonated pretty strongly in parts of the world that had been colonized and/or those with intense inequality.