Today, it is common to contrast the statism of today’s Russia with the Western neoliberal order, which is based on the primacy of political and economic freedom. European journalists and experts discuss Putin’s Russia as though it were a revisionist state that is not only ready for military aggression but is also driven by internal destructive forces: a “populist international” of right and left parties, attacking an imaginary “establishment.” [1]
Debt— Lloyd George blames the Soviets
8 October 2017, byIn the final plenary conference, Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, made a revealing reply:
"There is a real sympathy for Russia’s condition. If Russia is to get help, Russia must not outrage the sentiments — if they like, let them call them the prejudices — of the world. (…) what are these prejudices?
Reasserting debt repudiation ends with success
8 October 2017, byBefore the Genoa conference, Soviet Russia had managed to sign bilateral treaties with Poland, the Baltic Republics, Turkey and Persia. More importantly, it had managed to sign a trade agreement with the UK. Signed in 1921, this agreement had sanctioned the Soviet laws of nationalization before UK courts and this meant that companies that traded with Russia no longer ran the risk of getting into trouble. [2]
Genoa (1922): proposals and, counter-proposals on the Tsarist debt
8 October 2017, byOn 20 April 1922, Chicherin announced the Soviet response to the Western powers’ proposals of 15 April. It indicated that: “The Russian delegation are still of the opinion that the present economic condition of Russia and the circumstances which are responsible for it should fully justify the complete release of Russia from all her liabilities mentioned in the above proposals by the recognition of her counter-claims”.
In 1922 creditor powers again attempt to subjugate the Soviets
7 October 2017, byWestern 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.” [3]
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 [4] 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.
Footnotes
[1] This idea is, for example, one of the main theses of the expert paper: ‘Post-Truth, Post-West, Post-Order?’, presented at the Munich security conference at the beginning of 2017. https://www.securityconference.de/e...
[2] Article 9 of the Anglo-Soviet trade agreement stipulated: “The British Government declares that it will not initiate any steps with a view to attach or to take possession of any gold, funds, securities or commodities not being articles identifiable as the property of the British Government which may be exported from Russia in payment for imports or as securities for such payment, or of any movable or immovable property which may be acquired by the Russian Soviet Government within the United Kingdom.” https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Anglo-Soviet_Trade_Agreement.
On this topic see also E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. 3, pp. 286-9.
[3] See full text at https://moodle2.units.it/pluginfile.php/78252/mod_resource/content/1/1922_Genoa_Conference_papers.pdf
[4] 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”.
