Intervention is a form of class struggle

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Some political terms already have a double meaning and do not reflect the definition that was originally laid down. There is a tendency to replace the word according to the realities of the day. Misinterpretation or misapplication distorts the meaning of historical events. And at the same time, restoring a purely historical meaning, the historical material is more easily perceived, the touches and nuances of events become available.

This article reveals the historical meaning and historical facts that open up the light on the origin of the word - "intervention".

Historical sketch.

The history of intervention in recent times opens with the war of the European coalition against the French bourgeois revolution of the late 18th century. This intervention was being prepared from the very first days of the revolution, by the fled French princes and representatives of the highest French nobility, who turned to the European monarchs for help in returning the throne.

The contradictions between the "great powers" of Europe prevented at first their joint action against revolutionary France. Russia fought with Turkey and Sweden, which enjoyed the support of England and Prussia. By the beginning of the revolution, serious disagreements between Russia, Prussia and Austria on the Polish question had not yet been resolved (the first partition of Poland took place in 1772, the second in 1793, the third in 1795).

Finally, England hesitated to intervene, in the expectation that the revolution would weaken France, its old commercial rival. Therefore, in the first years of the French Revolution (1789-1791), the intervention directed against France was expressed not in open hostilities, but in helping the French emigrants with money and weapons. The Swedish ambassador in Paris launched active actions in the preparation of a counterrevolutionary coup in cooperation with the court of Louis XVI. On the initiative of the papal see, a European conference was convened in the castle of Pilnitz, Archbishop of Mainz, at which the Pilnitz Declaration was adopted.

The Pilnitz Declaration, signed by Leopold II and Frederick William II, threatened to intervene in France to restore royal absolutism. In April 1792, the war of counter-revolutionary Europe began, first in the person of Austria, against revolutionary France. By 1793, the first coalition was formed, which included Austria, Prussia, Russia, England, Spain, Holland, Sardinia, Naples and the German principalities.

The coalition sought to suppress the bourgeois revolution and restore the old, feudal-absolutist order in France. The commander-in-chief of the allied Austro-Prussian troops, the Duke of Brunswick, openly declared this in his manifesto of July 25, 1792. The counterrevolutionary uprisings in the south and 3. France received active support from the interventionists.

Russia did not take a direct part in the hostilities of the first coalition on land: Catherine II was absorbed by the second partition of Poland (1793), where she, relying on the Targovitskaya Confederation organized by her agents - part of the magnates (large landowners-feudal lords) (against the ideas of revolutionary France), in advance in 1792 undertook an armed intervention in order to change the regime, unfavorable for her predatory plans, established by the constitution of May 3, 1791, and sought to prepare the partition of Poland.

She strove to use the favorable international environment for her, in which the forces of her rivals in the joint plunder of Poland were diverted by the struggle with France. But, despite her desire to take advantage of the difficulties of her allies, Catherine II was one of the main inspirers of the intervention against the French Revolution.

She was the first of the European monarchs to recognize the Count of Provence (brother of the executed King Louis XVI) as regent of France, and sent her squadron to English waters to participate in the hunger blockade of France. She helped the French emigrants in every way, influenced them in organizing counter-revolutionary uprisings by them, planned the landing of a military landing in Normandy and was preparing to lead the coalition.

Immeasurably more important than private contradictions on the Polish question was the fact that the partition of Wormwood sealed the alliance of the three largest counter-revolutionary countries of feudal Europe - Russia, Prussia and Austria - simultaneously against revolutionary France and against the Poles, who "From the day of their enslavement … they acted in a revolutionary way" (Marx and Engels, Soch., Vol. VI, p. 383). And what significance the revolutionary spirit of the Poles had for the fate of the French Revolution was shown by the uprising of Kosciuszko, "In 1794, when the French Revolution struggles to resist the forces of the coalition, the glorious Polish uprising liberates it." (Marx and Engels, Works, vol. XV, p. 548).

England became the main organizer of the campaigns of the European powers against the French Revolution, striving to destroy France's trade competition in European and non-European markets, to seize the French colonies, to achieve the purification of Belgium by the French, to eliminate the threat from their side to Holland and to restore the old regime in France in order to put a limit on further dissemination "Revolutionary infection" in England itself, where the French Revolution helped strengthen the democratic movement and gave impetus to a number of revolutionary outbreaks. The British ruling classes brought forward in the person of William Pitt, the most prominent figure of all the enemies of revolutionary France. Britain's expenditures on the war against France, which lasted almost 22 years, amounted to 830 million pounds, of which 62.5 million went, mainly to subsidies to Britain's allies.

The second anti-French coalition, formed in December 1798 in England, Russia and Austria, was also openly interventionist. Suvorov, sent with troops to Italy against the French, restored the power of the former sovereigns (the Sardinian king, the dukes of Parma and Modena, etc.) in all the regions he occupied. The ultimate goal of the campaign was the invasion of France and the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty by Paul I. The British government, through the mouth of Pitt, openly declared that peace between England and France could be concluded only on condition of the restoration of the Bourbons.

Further coalitions, fighting against the hegemony of Napoleonic France on the continent of Europe (for England it was also a struggle with her main rival in the colonies and at sea), continued to strive for the restoration of the monarchy in France. In fact, the interventionist activity of counterrevolutionary Europe against the regime established by Napoleon did not stop even in those brief periods of peace, which interrupted the wars of that time.

“France was then teeming with spies and saboteurs from the camp of Russians, Germans, Austrians, British … Agents of England twice attempted the life of Napoleon and several times raised the Vendée peasants in France against Napoleon's government. And what was the Napoleonic government like? A bourgeois government that strangled the French revolution and preserved only those results of the revolution that were beneficial to the big bourgeoisie " (Stalin, "On the shortcomings of party work and measures to eliminate Trotskyist and other double-dealers."

In 1814 France was defeated, the troops of the sixth coalition (England, Russia, Austria, Prussia, etc.) entered Paris, the war ended with the overthrow of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons in the person of Louis XVIII. When in 1815 the majority of the French.of the people took the side of Napoleon, who returned to France and seized power again, the coalition of European monarchs again overthrew Napoleon (after his defeat at Waterloo) and again imposed the Bourbon dynasty on France, to protect which a 150-thousand occupation army was left on French territory.

On September 26, 1815, on the initiative of Emperor Alexander I and Austrian Minister Prince Metternich, the so-called "Holy Alliance" was concluded between Russia, Austria and Prussia, the members of the union pledged to help each other in the fight against the revolutionary movement, wherever it took place. The Holy Alliance, which was joined by many other monarchs of Europe, turned into an all-European union of feudal-monarchical states to fight the revolutionary movement.

The main method of this struggle was intervention. In 1821 Austrian troops suppress the bourgeois revolution in the Kingdoms of Naples and Sardinia, in 1823 French troops suppress the bourgeois revolution in Spain. Only the contradictions between the "great powers" thwarted the plans for the suppression of the "Holy Alliance", with the help of armed force, of the national uprising of the Greeks against the Sultan in 1821-29. and revolutions in the Spanish colonies of Central and South America.

The July Revolution of 1820, which gave impetus to national revolutions in Belgium and the Kingdom of Poland, as well as uprisings in a number of states of the German Confederation, in Switzerland and in Italy, gave rise to new plans for intervention against France in the name of restoring the Bourbon dynasty that had been overthrown in it. The initiative in this matter belonged to the Russian tsarism, which played a counter-revolutionary role in the international arena since the end of the 18th century, and from 1814 - 15. turned into "European gendarme ". Nicholas I entered into negotiations with the Prussian king and the Austrian emperor to organize an intervention against the revolutions in France and Belgium, and after the separation of Belgium from Holland, he began to directly prepare the intervention for this purpose, an army of 250 thousand people was to be concentrated in the Kingdom of Poland.

However, it was not possible to organize the intervention. European public opinion, especially in England, was strongly in favor of recognition of the revolution; the uprising of the Poles for a long time distracted the attention of Nicholas I from French and Belgian affairs; Austria was busy with events in Italy. In February 1831, uprisings broke out in the duchies of Parma and Modena and in the Pope's Romagna. Already in March, these uprisings were suppressed with the help of Austrian troops.

On October 15, 1833, a secret treaty was signed in Berlin between Austria, Prussia and Russia, renewing the main provisions of the treaty on the Holy Alliance and establishing that "Every independent sovereign has the right to call on any other sovereign for help in both internal turmoil and external danger threatening his country." At the same time, an agreement was concluded in Berlin (October 16, 1833) between Russia and Prussia on mutual assistance (up to assistance by troops) in the event of an uprising in parts of Poland belonging to both states. The Russian-Prussian convention of 1833 on the Polish question, to which Austria also joined, was applied in February 1846, when Russian and Austrian troops crushed the Polish Krakow uprising of 1846, after which the former free city was annexed to Austria.

An example of hidden intervention in these years is aid (money, weapons, etc.). the provision of the Austrian and French governments to the reactionary Catholic cantons of Switzerland, the so-called. Sonderbund (the Jesuit body for the protection of property rights of Catholicism in the cantons of Switzerland), at the end of 1847, during the civil war in that country.

The February Revolution of 1848, which led to the overthrow of the July Monarchy and the establishment of a bourgeois republic in France, again put the latter under the threat of intervention by Russian tsarism (order of mobilization on February 25, 1848). But the ensuing explosion of revolutions in other countries (including in Germany) forced Nicholas I to abandon the immediate implementation of his interventionist plans. Nevertheless, Nicholas Russia remained the main bulwark of European reaction, a force always ready to help other feudal-monarchical governments in their struggle against the revolutionary movement. Proceeding from this, Marx put forward in the Novaya Rhine Gazette his slogan of a revolutionary war with tsarist Russia. “From February 24, it was clear to us, - later wrote Engels - that the revolution has only one really terrible enemy - Russia, and that this enemy will be the more forced to intervene in the struggle, the more the revolution becomes pan-European (Marx and Engels, Works, vol. VI, p. 9).

Russia was especially active in opposing the revolution in Hungary. On April 28, 1849, Nicholas I announced his agreement to provide armed assistance to the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph in his struggle against the Hungarian revolutionaries. More than a hundred thousandth Russian army under the command of Field Marshal Paskevich entered Hungary; in addition, an army of 38 thousand people was moved to Transylvania. On August 13, the Hungarian revolutionary army surrendered to the Russian troops at Vilagos. The military intervention of Russia had a decisive influence on the outcome of the national liberation and revolutionary struggle of the Hungarian people in 1848-1949.

The triumph of the bourgeois counter-revolution in France after the defeat of the June uprising (1848) of the Parisian proletariat affected the fate of the revolutionary movement throughout Western Europe, accelerating its suppression. In Italy, the revolution was defeated by the military intervention of France, Austria and partly Spain. In April 1849, the French army, led by Oudinot, was sent by the president of the republic, Louis Napoleon, to suppress the Roman republic (this expedition was decided even when General E. Caveniak was at the head of the French government). The Roman expedition, which was a direct violation of the constitution of the French republic, gave rise to a clash between the president and the "party of order", on the one hand, and the democratic party, on the other; This clash ended in the complete defeat of democracy both in the House and on the street.

On July 3, 1849, Rome, attacked by French troops, fell (even earlier the Austrians occupied Bologna); in Rome, the secular power of the pope was restored, all the bourgeois-democratic gains of the revolution of 1848 were destroyed and the French garrison was left. On August 25, 1849, Venice, besieged by Austrian troops, fell, after which Austrian domination was restored in the entire Lombardo-Venetian kingdom.

By the middle of the 19th century. The general economic and technical backwardness of tsarist Russia in comparison with Western Europe, where economic development, with the victory of the bourgeoisie over the absolutist-feudal regime in a number of countries, made from the end of the 18th century was especially vividly revealed. huge gains. The decline in the international significance of tsarist Russia was especially vividly revealed after the Crimean War. Taking part in a number of subsequent interventions, Russia no longer occupied the same exceptional position in this respect as in the previous period.

In November 1867, the French troops, who had left Rome, returned there and blocked the path of the Italian revolutionaries, led by Garibaldi, who were striving to seize the "eternal city", which was to complete the national unification of the country. This new Roman expedition, organized by Napoleon III to please the clerics, ends with the defeat of the Garibaldians at Mentana and the re-abandonment of the French garrison in Rome.

The intervention of the governments of England and France in the civil war of 1861-65 was of a different nature. in the USA, between the advanced industrialized North and the reactionary, landlord - slave-owning South. Interested in hindering the industrial development of the United States, the bourgeois governments of England and France, connected with the landowners - the cotton growers of the South by bonds of solidarity and economic interests, sided with the southerners, helping them with money, the delivery of food and weapons, the construction and equipment of warships for them. The gunboat "Alabama" (see Alabama), outfitted in England to help the southerners, was especially "famous", for whose pirate activities England was forced in 1871 to pay US $ 15.5 million in compensation.

All this was done under the guise of "neutrality", which was proclaimed after the open military intervention in favor of the southerners, conceived by Napoleon III and Palmerston, turned out to be unrealizable, was thwarted by the "intervention of the class-conscious proletariat", which decisively opposed (especially in England) intervention in the benefit of the slave owners. "Not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance of the working class of England to their criminal madness, saved Western Europe from the adventure of a shameful crusade in order to perpetuate and spread slavery across the Atlantic Ocean." (Marx, Fav., Vol. II, 1935, p. 346). An attempt at mediation between the belligerents, undertaken by the French. government in 1863 in order to save the southerners from defeat, was resolutely rejected by the US government.

The interventions of the period of victory and the establishment of capitalism in the most advanced countries were mainly interventions directed against bourgeois and bourgeois-democratic revolutions. The first blow to capitalism from the side of the Paris Commune provoked, if not open, then at least a disguised intervention directed against the first proletarian revolution. The role of the interventionist (by agreement with the counter-revolutionary Versailles government) was played by Germany, whose bourgeois-Junker government, headed by Bismarck, feared the revolutionary influence of the Commune on the German proletariat.

In fact, Bismarck's interventionist policy against the Commune was expressed: in allowing the Versailles government to increase its army (contrary to the terms of the peace treaty) from 40 thousand to 80 thousand, and then to 130 thousand people; in the return from Germany of French prisoners of war who went to replenish the Versailles army; in organizing the blockade of revolutionary Paris; in the police harassment of the defeated Communards; in the passage of Versailles troops through the points occupied by German troops in the eastern and northeastern environs of Paris, from where the Communards, who believed in the "neutrality" declared by the German command, did not expect an attack, etc.

Bismarck, behind whom was the entire European reaction, especially tsarist Russia, offered the head of the French government Thiers and more direct military assistance of the Prussians against the "Parisian rebels", but Thiers did not dare to accept it, fearing the outrage of the broad masses of France. Nevertheless, the assistance rendered in 1871 by the Germans, the Junkers, to their enemy, the French bourgeoisie, played a significant role in suppressing the Commune, accelerating its downfall. The General Council of the First International, in a manifesto dated May 30, 1871, written by Marx, with great force exposed the deal of the French bourgeois counter-revolution with bourgeois Junker Germany against the proletariat and Bismarck's perfidious violation of his declared neutrality.

The Russian Revolution of 1905, which had a world-historical significance, which gave impetus to the revolutionary movement of the proletariat and the oppressed peasantry in the West and the East, prompted the governments of England and Germany to take steps to prepare, in one form or another, an intervention in favor of tsarism. The British government intended to send its ships to Russian ports under the false pretext of protecting British subjects. Wilhelm II made plans for restoration in May 1905 "Order" in Russia with the help of German military intervention and offered his services to Nicholas II. In November, under the pretext of the danger of transferring the revolutionary "Contagion" from Russian Poland to Prussian, the German government began to draw up its troops to the Russian border.

“The rulers of the European military powers,” Lenin wrote in October 1905, “are thinking of military aid to the tsar … The European counter-revolution is extending its hand to the Russian counter-revolution. Try it, try it, Citizen of Hohenzollern! We also have the European reserve of the Russian revolution. This reserve is the international socialist proletariat, international revolutionary social democracy (Lenin, Works, vol. VIII, p. 357).

All these plans for military intervention in 1905-06. was not destined to come true. On the other hand, tsarism received substantial financial assistance (843 million rubles) from French, British, Austrian and Dutch banks, which helped it crush the revolution. The Japanese war and the enormous scope of the 1905 revolution dealt a blow to the international prestige of tsarism, from which it was no longer destined to recover. Under these conditions, as well as as a result of the further intensification of the reactionary character of the Western European big bourgeoisie, tsarist Russia increasingly played in the future only a subordinate role. "Gendarme of Asia" (Lenin), "Watchdog of imperialism in the east of Europe", "the greatest reserve of Western imperialism", its "most faithful ally … in the division of Turkey, Persia, China" (Stalin, Questions of Leninism, p. 5).

In 1906 - 08. Russian tsarism openly opposed the bourgeois revolution in Persia. "The troops of the Russian tsar, shamefully defeated by the Japanese, are taking revenge, zealous in the service of the counter-revolution," wrote Lenin in August 1908. (Lazy, Soch., Vol. XII, p. 304). They stand behind the back of tsarism, Lenin pointed out, "All the major powers of Europe" who "mortally afraid of any expansion of democracy at home, as beneficial to the proletariat, help Russia to play the role of the Asian gendarme" (Lenin, ibid., P. 362).

The financial assistance of the imperialists, expressed in a loan, which was preparing the military dictatorship of Yuan Shih-Kai, played an essential role in the Chinese counter-revolution in 1913. On this occasion, Lenin wrote: “The new Chinese loan was concluded against the Chinese democracy … And if the Chinese people do not recognize the loan? … Oh, then 'the advanced Europe will scream about' civilization, 'order', 'culture' and 'fatherland'! Then it will move the guns and crush the republic of "backward" Asia in alliance with the adventurer, traitor and friend of reaction, Yuan Shih-kai! The entire commanding Europe, the entire European bourgeoisie together with all the forces of reaction and the Middle Ages in China " (Lenin, Soch., Vol. XVI, p. 396). The success of the Chinese counter-revolution, which it thus owed to international imperialism, led to the further enslavement of China.

Great October proletarian revolution, which opened "A new era, an era of proletarian revolutions in the countries of imperialism" (Stalin, Problems of Leninism, 10th ed., P. 204), and which turned the prison of the peoples - tsarist Russia - into the fatherland of the international proletariat, caused immense imperialism, unsurpassed in its grandeur, which ended in the defeat of the interventionists.

The outcome of the intervention organized in 1918 by German imperialism in alliance with the Russian White Guard to suppress the proletarian revolutions in Finland, Estonia and Latvia was different: they were drowned in blood, although this was "It cost Germany the decomposition of the army" (Lenin, Works, vol. XXIII, p. 197). The Soviet Republic in Hungary was also suppressed with the help of the interventionists in 1919. Here, the Entente powers acted as interventionists, organizing a hungry blockade of Soviet Hungary and moving against it Romanian and Czechoslovak troops. At the same time, the Social-Democrats the Austrian government allowed the formation of counterrevolutionary detachments on its territory, which then fought against the Hungarian Soviets.

August 2, 1919, after the defeat of the Hungarian Red Army on the river. Tisse, Romanian troops occupied Budapest and helped the Hungarian bourgeoisie create the White Guard government of Archduke Joseph of Habsburg. Romanian interventionists took an active part in organizing and carrying out white terror in Hungary, in mass arrests and executions of former Red Army soldiers and left Budapest only in mid-November, taking with them not only all military supplies, but even the equipment of the "factories".

An exceptionally vivid example of intervention is the brazen military intervention of the fascist states, which support the fascist revolt in Spain organized by them in 1936 by all means at their disposal. Italy and Germany brought their regular troops into the territory of the Spanish Republic. They shoot civilians, bombard cities (Guernica, Almeria, etc.) from the air and the sea, barbarously destroying them.

If the early examples of the use of intervention were carried out to suppress the revolutionary movements of the peoples, the aspirations of which were formulated in three words: "freedom, equality, brotherhood." In Spain, the rebellion also began with the arrival of the socialists in the government, among whom were the communists. The Minister of Agriculture announced the nationalization of the land, which was the impetus for the invasion of foreign troops.

"Intervention, - says Stalin - is not at all limited to the introduction of troops, and the introduction of troops does not at all constitute the main feature of the intervention. Under the present conditions of the revolutionary movement in the capitalist countries, when the direct entry of foreign troops can cause a series of protests and conflicts, the intervention has a more flexible character and a more disguised form. Under modern conditions, imperialism prefers to intervene by organizing a civil war within a dependent country, by financing counter-revolutionary forces against the revolution, by providing moral and financial support to its agents against the revolution. The imperialists were inclined to portray the struggle of Denikin and Kolchak, Yudenich and Wrangeli against the revolution in Russia as an exclusively internal struggle. But we all knew, and not only we, but the whole world knew that behind the backs of these counter-revolutionary Russian generals were the imperialists of England and America, France and Japan, without whose support a serious civil war in Russia would have been absolutely impossible … Intervention by someone else's hands this is now the root of imperialist intervention " (Stalin, On the Opposition, M.-L., 1928, pp. 425-420).

In practice, intervention is the favorite weapon of imperialism. This is a hidden form of class struggle, to prevent peoples from independently exercising power in their country. Apart from armed intervention as a war, international legal theory and practice of capitalist countries thereby mask armed violence against weak and semi-colonial countries that do not risk responding to the intervention by declaring war.

This is clearly seen in the modern events of recent years: Libya, Iraq, Syria. Back in 1933, at a conference on disarmament, when, despite the prohibition of war under the Kellogg Pact, the British delegation proposed to prohibit the "use of force" (and therefore intervention) only in Europe, and the Soviet proposal to extend this prohibition to non-European countries was rejected.