Military Intervention and Socialist Internationalism

Abstract

Soviet military action in Afghanistan has once again served to underline the need for socialists to clarify their positions on the issue of military intervention by the USSR and other Communist states in other countries including of course intervention against other Communist states. Before the USSR's intervention in Afghanistan, there was Vietnam's intervention in Kampuchea and its overthrow of the Pol Pot regime; and there was also China's intervention in Vietnam. Before that, there was Cuba's intervention in Angola and also in Ethiopia. Other instances from the less recent past readily come to mind-for instance Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in Hungary in 1956; and so on back to the overthrow by the Red Army of the Menshevik regime in Georgia in 1921 and its abortive march on Warsaw in 1920.