Bolsheviks and the Creation of a New International Relations System

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in October 1917, they did not just overthrow a government. They challenged the entire grammar of how states had dealt with one another for centuries. Secret deals between great powers, the carving up of colonies, and wars fought for territory and profit had defined the old order. The new government under Vladimir Lenin proposed something radically different: a world built on peace, openness, the right of nations to decide their own future, and the dismantling of empire itself. This vision did not survive intact, but it permanently changed the language of international politics and gave hope to colonised peoples everywhere, including those struggling against British rule.

The old order the Bolsheviks rejected 🔗

To understand why the Bolshevik approach was so striking, you have to understand what it replaced. Before 1917, relations between major powers ran on a system of secret treaties, balance-of-power calculations, and imperial expansion. Powerful states made private agreements to divide territory and spheres of influence, often without the knowledge of their own citizens. The tangle of secret commitments among European powers was widely seen as one of the forces that dragged the continent into the First World War.

This was diplomacy as a closed club. Decisions affecting millions were made behind locked doors by a handful of monarchs, ministers, and generals. Colonial possessions were treated as bargaining chips. For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, this was not a system that needed minor reform. It was an expression of imperialism that needed to be exposed and replaced.

The Decree on Peace: a new opening move 🔗

The first major act of the new Soviet government in foreign affairs was the Decree on Peace. Written by Lenin, it was passed by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 8 November 1917, just one day after the Bolsheviks took power. The timing matters. Foreign policy was not an afterthought for the new regime; it was placed at the very centre of the revolution.

The decree called on all warring nations and their governments to begin immediate negotiations for a just and democratic peace. Crucially, it defined what a “just” peace meant: a peace without annexations and without indemnities. In plain terms, no nation should be forced to surrender territory, and no defeated nation should be crushed with punishing financial demands. This was a direct rejection of the way previous wars had ended, where the victors simply took what they wanted.

Renouncing secret treaties 🔗

Perhaps the boldest part of the new approach was the decision to abolish secret diplomacy altogether. The Bolsheviks did not just promise to stop making secret deals. They went into the imperial archives and published the secret treaties signed by the Tsarist government, exposing them for the entire world to read.

This was an extraordinary act. It revealed exactly how the old powers had planned to divide territory among themselves after the war. By publishing these documents, the Bolsheviks were making a point that went beyond embarrassing their rivals. They were arguing that diplomacy should be conducted openly, in full view of ordinary people, because secrecy itself was a tool of exploitation. Transparency was meant to build trust between nations and remove one of the hidden engines of war.

The right of nations to self-determination 🔗

At the heart of the Bolshevik vision was the principle of self-determination: the idea that every nation and people has the right to decide its own political future, including the right to separate and form an independent state. This was not a vague slogan invented in 1917. Lenin had developed it in detail in his writings between 1914 and 1916, building on the Marxist argument that workers in an oppressor nation had a duty to support the independence of oppressed nations.

Once in power, the Bolsheviks tried to put this principle into practice. In January 1918, Lenin drafted the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People, which declared that the new Soviet state would rest on a free union of free nations. The government recognised the independence of Finland and withdrew Russian troops from Persia, signalling that the old empire’s grip was being deliberately loosened.

Why this mattered for colonised peoples 🔗

Self-determination was the bridge between Bolshevik foreign policy and the global struggle against colonialism. If every nation had the right to govern itself, then colonial empires had no legitimate basis. The principle pointed directly at the British, French, and other empires that ruled vast populations across Asia and Africa.

Lenin connected this firmly to anti-imperialism. He argued that the fight against national oppression in the colonies and the fight against capitalism in Europe were two parts of the same struggle. At the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920, debates on the national and colonial questions drew directly on the situation in India and other large Asian nations oppressed by Britain. For people living under colonial rule, here was a major power openly declaring that empire was illegitimate.

Equal treaties with neighbouring countries 🔗

The Bolsheviks did not stop at words. In 1921, having survived civil war and foreign intervention, Soviet Russia began signing a series of treaties with its southern neighbours that were genuinely different from the agreements of the imperial era. These were treaties of friendship built on equality rather than domination.

The most striking example is the Russo-Persian Treaty of Friendship of February 1921, often described as the first equitable treaty Persia had ever received. Under its terms, the Soviet government cancelled the unequal agreements imposed by the Tsarist regime, gave up the loans and concessions that Tsarist Russia had extracted, and granted Persia equal shipping rights in the Caspian Sea. The treaty was, in several respects, more favourable to Tehran than to Moscow.

A wider pattern of recognition 🔗

Persia was not an isolated case. Within weeks, Soviet Russia signed similar treaties of friendship with Afghanistan and Turkey in 1921. The Russo-Afghan treaty called for the unconditional recognition of the independence of both countries and of oppressed Oriental nationalities, a phrase that pointedly challenged British dominance in the region.

It is worth being honest about the mixed motives here. The new Soviet state was diplomatically isolated and needed allies. By reaching agreements with Turkey, Afghanistan, and Persia, the Bolsheviks broke out of isolation, gained international recognition, and strengthened their position in negotiations with European powers. Self-interest and principle ran together. Yet the form these treaties took, based on the renunciation of old privileges and the recognition of equal sovereignty, was real and it set a contrast with the unequal treaties that had defined the imperial age.

The gap between vision and reality 🔗

A balanced account has to acknowledge that the Bolshevik vision was tested hard, and it bent. The clearest example is the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk through which Russia finally exited the First World War. The Decree on Peace had called for a peace without annexations, yet to leave the war, the exhausted Soviet government was forced to accept a punitive separate peace with Germany that stripped away enormous territory.

The Decree on Peace had also assumed that working people across Europe would rise up and force their own governments to negotiate. No general European uprising materialised. The idealistic call for peace by people’s assemblies across the continent went unanswered, and the Soviet state had to operate in a world still dominated by hostile great powers. The principle of self-determination was also applied selectively, especially as the new state worked to hold its own territory together.

These contradictions do not erase the significance of what the Bolsheviks attempted. They show instead that introducing new principles into international relations is far harder than declaring them. The ideas survived even where the immediate practice fell short.

The ripple effect on the freedom struggle 🔗

For colonised peoples, the symbolic power of 1917 was immense. The revolution proved that a determined and organised movement could overthrow a powerful empire. News of it reached the subcontinent quickly, even though it arrived largely through hostile Western-controlled news networks that hoped to discourage interest. The strategy backfired. Curiosity about Lenin and the revolution spread, and within a few years numerous publications discussing the revolution appeared in Indian languages.

The revolution offered both inspiration and a framework. Indian thinkers and revolutionaries such as M.N. Roy, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Subhas Chandra Bose engaged seriously with socialist and communist ideas. Roy went on to help establish the Communist Party of India in 1925 and interacted directly with Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin. The argument that imperialism and capitalism were linked gave anti-colonial leaders a sharper analysis of why they were being ruled and exploited.

Scholars have argued that the events of 1917 played a genuine part in the eventual unravelling of the colonial system. Those living under colonial rule viewed the revolution as a hopeful sign for their own struggles. The Bolshevik insistence that all nations had the right to self-determination handed anti-colonial movements a powerful argument that they used for decades.

A lasting shift in the language of diplomacy 🔗

Even after the Soviet state compromised its founding ideals, the concepts the Bolsheviks pushed into mainstream debate did not disappear. Open diplomacy, self-determination, peace without annexations, and the equality of nations became part of the standard vocabulary of twentieth-century international relations. Some of these ideas were absorbed even by rivals; the principle of self-determination, for instance, was taken up in various forms across the postwar settlement.

The deeper legacy is that the Bolsheviks forced a question that the old order had avoided: who is international politics actually for? Their answer, that it should serve ordinary people and oppressed nations rather than empires and elites, was never fully realised. But once the question was asked so loudly, it could not be unasked. The structures of imperialism that had seemed permanent began to look negotiable, and colonised peoples around the world took note.

What do you think? Was the Bolshevik vision of open, equal, anti-colonial diplomacy a genuine break from the past, or were the 1921 treaties of friendship simply a clever survival strategy dressed in the language of principle? And how much of today’s international order, with its emphasis on sovereignty and self-determination, can be traced back to the ideas first pushed into the global conversation in 1917?

References

1. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/decree-on-peace/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_on_Peace
3. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/11/08/cen2-n08.html
4. https://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/decree-on-peace-1917/
5. https://liberationschool.org/lenin-and-the-right-of-nations-to-self-determination/
6. https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/the-internationalist-lenin-self-determination-and-anti-colonialism
7. https://www.redstarpublishers.org/leninnatcolq.pdf
8. https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/russia-ii-iranian-soviet-relations-1917-1991/
9. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-journal-of-international-law/article/abs/soviet-security-treaties/A60203A2E6320F6D7252E31D3B7BB759
10. https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1921-2/trade-pacts-with-the-west/
11. https://newsocialist.org.uk/a-hundred-years-of/
12. https://poverty.com.pk/index.php/Journal/article/view/1091
13. https://www.hud.ac.uk/news/2017/december/indiasrevolutioninspiredbybolsheviks/