1922 - Bukharin on "Red Intervention"
From N I Bukharin's report at the 4th Congress of the Comintern
18 November 1922
We want to establish clearly in our programme, that the proletarian state should be defended without fail not only by the proletariat of this country, but by proletarians of all countries. This is what distinguishes the way the question should be posed today from the way it was posed before the war.
Additionally, we should stipulate one more tactical question: the right to red intervention. This question is the touchstone for all communist parties. A hue and cry is going up everywhere about red militarism. We must establish in our programme that every proletarian state has the right to red intervention.
In the Communist Manifesto it says that the proletariat has a world to win, but this of course cannot be done with a shake of the little finger. Bayonets and rifles are also essential here. Yes, the spreading of the Red Army is the spreading of socialism, proletarian power, revolution. This is the basis for the right of red intervention, in those particular circumstances, where it purely technically facilitates the realisation of socialism.
[Source: IV Vsemirnyy kongress Kommunisticheskogo Internatsionala: Izbrannye doklady, rechi i rezolyutsii, pp. 195 - 196. Reproduced in E. M. Shagin, ed., Khrestomatiya po istorii SSSR, 1917 - 1945, Prosveshchenie, Moscow, 1991, pp. 252 - 253.]