Western governments presented a full list of demands aimed at solving in their favour the litigation over debt repudiation and expropriations decreed by the Soviet government. Those demands were presented in Genoa on 15 April 1922, five days into the conference, in a document entitled “London Experts’ Report on the Russian issue.” [1]
Diplomatic manoeuvers around Russian debt repudiation
7 October 2017, byFor five weeks in April and May 1922, a summit conference was held. Britain’s prime minister, Lloyd George, played a central role in it, as did Louis Barthou, the minister of the French president Raymond Poincaré.
The main aim of the meeting was to persuade Soviet Russia [2] both to acknowledge the debts it had repudiated in 1918 and to cease calling for a global revolution.
Russian loans never die
7 October 2017, byEven though Russian bonds were repudiated by the Soviet government in February 1918, they were still traded right up until the 1990s.
French government policy and that of other governments was directly related to this life after death.
The Soviet counter-attack: the Treaty of Rapallo, 1922
7 October 2017, byThe London report presented in the previous chapter was such a deliberate provocation on the part of Western powers that the Soviet delegation immediately got in touch with the German delegation, which Paris and London had somehow prevented from fully attending the Genoa Conference. France and Britain were hoping that they could coax the Soviet Russians into accepting the conditions mentioned above or, at least some of them, to strengthen their position when negotiating with Germany afterwards. The Russian issue clearly was a priority.
The French press in the pay of the Tsar
6 October 2017, byWith the overthrow of Tsarism in February 1917 and the seizing of power by the Bolsheviks and their Socialist Revolutionary allies in October, numerous previously confidential documents were made public (see further on). This allowed Boris Souvarine, a Franco-Russian communist activist to consult Russian imperial archives. He discovered a vast organisation of complicity with the French press that pre-dated the First World War, aimed at promoting Tsarist bond issues to French investors. This affair, in which influential people were corrupted and became accomplices, was denounced by the communist daily L’Humanité in a series of daily articles entitled ’The abominable venality of the French press’ that appeared over a period of several months during 1923 and 1924.
The Russian Revolution, Peoples’ Right to Self-determination, and Debt Repudiation
6 October 2017, byThe Versailles Treaty was eventually signed on 28 June 1919 without Soviet Russia being involved. Even so, this treaty cancelled the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Under Article 116 of the Versailles Treaty, Russia could claim compensation from Germany;yet, consistent with its demand for peace without any annexation or any claim for compensation, it did not do so. What mattered most to Soviet Russia was that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk should be cancelled and the territories that Germany had annexed in March 1918 be given back to the peoples to whom they had belonged (the Baltic, Polish, Ukrainian and Russian peoples), in accordance with the principle of peoples’ right to self-determination upheld by the new Soviet government.
The Russian Revolution, Debt Repudiation, War and Peace
6 October 2017, byIn early January 1918, the Soviet government suspended payment on foreign debt, and in early February 1918 it decreed that all Tsarist debts were repudiated as were those contracted to continue the war by the provisional government between February and November 1917. At the same time, it decided that all assets of foreign capitalists in Russia would be confiscated and returned to the national heritage. In repudiating these debts, the Soviet government was implementing a decision made in 1905 by the soviet (people’s council) of Petrograd (St Petersburg) and the various parties that supported it. This triggered a wave of unanimous protest from the capitals of the major allied powers.
From Tsarist Russia to the 1917 revolution and the repudiation of debt
6 October 2017, byThe Napoleonic wars ended with Russia emerging as a great European power and participating in the Holy Alliance of three European monarchies, founded on September 26, 1815 in Paris, at the behest of Tsar Alexander I. The Alliance had won over the Napoleonic Empire and they wanted to consolidate their positions and protect themselves from revolutions. Originally, the Russian Empire, the Empire of Austria and the Kingdom of Prussia were the constituents, while France (where the monarchy had been restored) joined in 1818 and London extended its support.
Russia: Repudiation of debt at the heart of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917
6 October 2017, byIn February 1918, the repudiation of the debt by the Soviet government shocked international finance and sparked off unanimous condemnation by the governments of the great powers.
"There are more reasons to be anti-capitalist today than there were yesterday"
5 October 2017, byOn the programme: the history of the Spanish Trotskyist movement; the regime crisis in Spanish state; the idea of plurinationality and Catalonia; relations with the NPA, and the strategy of Podemos with regard to the constraints of Europe.
Footnotes
[1] See full text at https://moodle2.units.it/pluginfile.php/78252/mod_resource/content/1/1922_Genoa_Conference_papers.pdf
[2] When the Conference of Genoa took place, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics did not yet exist. It was founded in December 1922 and officially dissolved in December 1991. At the Conference of Genoa, the Soviet delegation officially represented the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which we have abbreviated in the present text to “Soviet Russia”.
