Soviet leaders gave lots of weapons and other useful things to states and movements that they wanted to win to the Soviet sphere of influence. If decisions as to whether to spend resources abroad like that had been put to votes of all Soviet citizens, though, would they have voted for them? Since such votes were never taken, one never knows, but I suspect that Soviet leaders were more willing to commit resources to international socialism than common Soviet citizens were and that those cosmopolitan Russian elites who compared themselves to their Western counterparts and deplored their relative poverty were probably the first to complain of official Soviet internationalism.
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Because of Stalinism, the common people of Russia remained more nationalist than internationalist, more czarist than socialist. A lot of this had to do with obvious repression and censorship on the part of the bureaucracy and of course, the lack of any concrete content to the official form of proletarian/peasant democracy, the Soviets (councils). Thus, the traditional social psychological power dynamic of looking up to the "little father" in Moscow was never seriously undermined, indeed, it was promoted via the cult of personality. Of course, acting in their own national interests, the leadership/rulers in the USSR (and other Stalinist States) did give lots of material assistance to the burgeoning anti-Western colonial movements of the world, especially in the post-WWII era and I would agree, most people within the USSR would probably have not spent their hard won wealth that way, if such aid had been put, in any serious way, to a national referendum, any more than the
majority of working people in the nationalist USA would, if they had been presented with referendums on "foreign aid".
Best,
Mike B)
Read "Penguins in Bondage": http://happystiletto.blogspot.com/
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