United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

Page 24 text:

States at first refused to recognize the Treaty of Riga of March 18, 1921, following the close of the Polish-Russian war since it clearly violated the territorial integrity of Russia. The United States and Russia were in the early period the only major powers outside the League of Na¬ tions constantly advocating non-aggression, neutrality and disarmament. Nevertheless, the United States withheld recognition and made rapprochement between itself and Russia impos¬ sible while it maintained that the Soviet regime was based on ‘force and cunning’ and ‘the nega¬ tion of every principle of honor and good faith and every usage and convention underlying the whole structure of international law’. The Russian government’s support of the Third International made its diplomats ‘the agitators of dangerous revolt’ and rendered it incapable of discharging its international obligations. 1 In the mid Twenties Stalin emerged as the strongest single figure in the Communist party. With his ascendance came an even more clearly defined shift of Soviet strategy. Stalin enun¬ ciated and championed the ‘socialism in one country’ theory. This was not an entirely new theory since Lenin had foreseen possibilities for this as early as 1915, but Stalin was the first to champion this concept while pushing the world revolution to the background—not denying it but, in his viewpoint, putting first things first. When Stalin came to the fore Russia was reap¬ ing the first fruits of Chicherin’s efforts at Rappalo and London. The isolation of Russia had been broken. This hopeful situation made Stalin even more skeptical of the possibility of world revolution. Stalin, on June 9, 1925 in a speech before the students of Sverdlov Uni¬ versity, estimated that Russia could remain at peace with the Capitalist world until 1945. “Thus extreme skepticism about world revo¬ lution and confidence in the reality of a long truce between Russia and the Capitalist world were the twin premises of ‘socialism in one country.’ ” 2 The failure of an early world revolution was brought home with the debacle of German Com¬ munism in 1923. It may well have been that the failure of the German revolution was caused in no small part by Stalin’s undervaluation of the 1. Notes on the Colby Letter quoted by Frederick L. Schu- man, Op. Cit., p. 181, 182. 2. Deutscher, Op. Cit., p. 391. revolutionary potential in Germany. In 1927, the hopeful development in China collapsed with the seizure of power of Chiang Kai-shek and his middle class supporters. Chiang cruelly suppressed his former partners in the Kuomin- tang, the product of the Sun-Yat-Sen revolu¬ tion. The subsequent coalition of the Com¬ munists with leftist liberals of the Kuomintang broke down in turn and left the Communist hopes in China extremely poor. Here again it may be argued that Stalin directly contributed to the failure in China by his view that a bourgeois revolution was all that the Chinese could now achieve. He argued that a revolution in China would unify and modernize China but would not bring socialism. The failure of the revolution in Germany and the severe set back in China emphasized the hopelessness of pro¬ letarian revolution and gave support to Stalin’s theories of ‘socialism in one country.’ The need for strengthening the Soviet base of Communist world operations and tentative abandonment of world revolution in favour of security and ‘socialism in one country’ was evinced by Con¬ gress XV in 1927 when it voted to expel Trotsky and his supporters of world revolution as the immediate goal of Communist strategy. England was recognized by the diplomatic strategists of Russia to be one of the keys to Russia’s success or failure in its attempts to break down the hostility of the Capitalist na¬ tions tow ard her. England was probably the strongest of the victorious allied powers in Western Europe and had played a leading role in the wars of intervention against Russia. The Kremlin recognized that any armed coalition against Russia could very well be led by an English Tory government against her and there¬ fore it was of prime importance to win friend¬ ship with her or at least to come to some mutual agreement against a renewal of war between the two powers. Anti-Soviet sympathies played a key role in the election of 1924 in Britain. The Tories widely criticized the Anglo-Soviet trade treaty signed by the first Labor cabinet on August 8, 1924. The treaty provided for the most-favored-nation treatment and for an ex¬ tension to the U.S.S.R. of the British program of export credits and a loan to the Soviet gov¬ ernment guaranteed by the British government. On October 25, just five days before the general election, the famous Zinoviev letter was pub- Page Twenty-two

Page 23 text:

United States and Russia to remove Japanese forces from Eastern Siberia aided the Soviet cause in the Far East. Secretary Hughes of the United States of America ilicited from Baron Shidehara a statement pledging evacuation, non intervention and respect for Russian territorial integrity. The end of October, 1922 saw the com¬ pletion of evacuation of Japanese troops from Vladivostok. In November of the same year the Far Eastern Republic set up by Russia as a buffer zone against Japan joined the Soviet Union. On May 1, 1925 Japanese forces with¬ drew from Northern Sakhalin. At Genoa in April, 1922, Chicherin produced a rapprochement between Russia and Germany. By the Treaty of Rapallo, signed on April 16 by Chicherin and Walter Rathenau, the Soviet Government was given de jure recognition from the German Republic, a mutual cancellation of all financial claims, and a regulation of German- Soviet trade on the basis of the most-favored- nation clause. By this treaty both Russia and Germany enhanced their bargainin g power in Western European power politics. Attempts at financial settlement at the conference met with failure. Against Allied claims of £13 billion against Russia for Tsarist and Kerensky debts and confiscated property, Chicherin pressed Soviet counter claims for £60 billion for dam¬ ages suffered by unlawful intervention. At Lausanne in late 1922 a conference was begun to settle the control of the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. During the course of the negotiations Vaslov Vorovsky, a Soviet delegate, was as¬ sassinated by a Russian emigre of Swiss descent, but the conference ignored the incident and the Swiss courts acquitted him. On July 24, 1923 the Straits Convention signed at Lausanne de¬ militarized the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, but limited foreign naval forces permitted to enter the Black Set. The Russian government approved the settlement and became a member of the Straits Commission. During the long and protracted negotiations carried out by Chicherin and Litvinov, positive gains were made for more friendly relations with the Western powers. De jure recognition was granted by many states during 1934: Britain, February 1; Italy, February 7; Norway, Febru¬ ary 13; Austria, February 20; Greece, March 8; Sweden, March 15; China, May 31; Denmark, June 18; Mexico, August 1; France, October 28 and Japan, January 20, 1925. The United States, alone among the great world powers refused to formally recognize the new Soviet regime but for all intents and purposes Chicherin had broken the isolation of Russia and it was once more a recognized member of the family of nations. 1 Soviet diplomacy was determined in large measure upon the fears of a renewal of Western intervention. Marxian theorists believed that the Capitalist powers could not remain long at peace especially with a Socialist neighbour. Added to this fear was the realization of the inadequacy and, in many cases, frank injustice perpetrated by the Versailles Treaty that the Russian government as well as the United States refused to sanction. There was little doubt in Russian political strategists’ opinion about the likelihood of a further war and that it could be directed against Russia. Russian strategy there¬ fore had to resolve upon the establishment of mutual defence agreements to remain neutral in any new major conflict. Russia feared the domination of Europe by any single power or group of powers and sought to overcome this through systems of mutual alliances whereby she could safely remain neutral until the op¬ portune moment when her entrance on one side would tilt the scales and be of great bargaining power to her. “Russia sought to counteract the domination of the Continent by a single military power.” 2 Despite the fact that similar interests and parallel actions may be traced between the Soviet Union and the United States the latter remained openly hostile to the government of the Soviet Union, refusing recognition until 1933. American distrust and fear of Japanese aggrandizement at the expense of Russia caused the United States of America to further the re-establishment of the Soviet position in East¬ ern Siberia. Both the Soviet Union and the United States denounced the Versailles Treaty. The United States was the first to break the anti-Soviet group and argue for the respect of Russian territorial integrity, refusing to recog¬ nize the Baltic States and maintaining that Russia’s boundaries should include the whole of the former Empire with the exception of Fin¬ land, ethnic Poland and Armenia. The United 1. Frederick L. Schuman, Op. Cit., p. 191. 2. Deutscher, Op. Cit., p. 390. Page Twenty-one

Page 25 text:

lished, calling upon the British Communist Party for armed insurrection and although the Soviet charge Rakovsky declared it to be a forgery it had a pronounced effect on the elec¬ tion. The Anti-Soviet Tory Party was elected to power. After the failure of the General Strike of May, 1926, to which the Soviet trade unions donated £1,000,000, all Soviet efforts to effect a settlement were coldly rejected by the English Government. On May 26, 1927, Prime Minister Baldwin terminated the trade agreements and severed diplomatic relations. On May 30, 1929 the election of a Labor-Liberal majority to the House of Commons brought a hope of renewal of friendly relations. On October 1, 1929, diplo¬ matic relations were resumed followed by a temporary commercial treaty on April 16, 1930. Relations with the United States continued to be unfavorable despite the similarity of in¬ terests and actions pointed out earlier. Trade was carried on with the United States but Soviet representations for the opening of diplo¬ matic relations were dismissed as preposterous. In a reversal of its previous position the United States in 1922 recognized Esthonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In spite of the similar distrust of Japan in the Far East, friction continued be¬ tween the United States and the Soviet Union and reached a near crisis over the ownership and operations of the Chinese Eastern Railway. 1 Russia was invited to participate in the Pre¬ paratory Commission of the League of Nations established to prepare a general disarmament conference. Litvinov shocked the assembled delegates when, in 1927 at the fourth session in Geneva, he proposed an immediate world¬ wide agreement to abolish all military forces, fighting equipment, armaments, war materials and war preparations of any kind. When his proposals were rejected he offered a second plan for partial and gradual disarmament on a quota basis which suffered the same fate. To the Commission Litvinov issued a prophetic warning: “May those who believe that they have in¬ definite time at their disposal not receive a rude shock one day.” 2 1. On May 31, 1924, a Sino-Soviet agreement renounced all Russian privileges, concessions and rights of extra-territoriali¬ ty in China and provided for joint control of the Chinese Eastern Railway. Frederick L. Schuman, Op. Cit., p. 228. 2. Ibid, p. 30. 3. Ibid, p. 230. Facing the realization that it would be highly unlikely to establish iron-clad agreements of mutual aid, Russian strategists attempted to neutralize her neighbours and the great powers against participation in a war aimed against Russia. “The Narkomindel had meanwhile woven an impressive web of peace pacts. Through the use of the then popular panacea for preserving peace by outlawing war, the objective of Mos¬ cow was to thwart any combination of Powers against the U.S.S.R.” 3 The Locarno Treaty of Mutual Guarantee, October 16, 1925, providing a joint Anglo-French-German-Italian and Bel¬ gian guarantee of the German-French and Ger- man-Belgian frontiers and the supplementary treaties between Germany, on the one hand, and France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Po¬ land on the other, added fuel to the fires of Russian distrust that an armed coalition was being prepared against her. In 1925, Turkey and the U.S.S.R. concluded a treaty of neutrality in the event of a war in¬ volving either power and pledged themselves not to attack one another nor to enter into any blocks or coalitions against one another. A new Soviet-German treaty was produced in 1926 re¬ affirming the Rapallo agreement and providing for: neutrality in any war in which either party was involved, abstention from economic or financial boycotts of each other and the Ger¬ man government was pledged to oppose anti- Soviet moves at Geneva. Similar non-aggres¬ sion and neutrality pacts were signed with Lithuania (September 28, 1926), Afganistan (August 31, 1926), Iran (October 1, 1927), Es¬ thonia (May 2, 1932), Latvia (February 5, 1932), Finland (January 21, 1932), Poland (July 25, 1932), and finally with France (November 29, 1932). On February 9, 1929, the “Litvinov Protocal” was signed by representatives of the U.S.S.R., Poland, Roumania, Esthonia and Lat¬ via. Lithuania signed on April 1, Danzig on April 30 and Iran on July 4, 1929. This “proto¬ cal” was based on the Kellog-Briand Pact of Paris of August 27, 1928, signed by Russia (the first power to ratify it) on August 31. The Kel¬ log-Briand Pact renounced war as an instru¬ ment of national policy and pledged the signa¬ tories to settle disputes peacefully. The Soviet government, concerned with the threat of a war directed against her, aimed at neutralizing Page Twenty-three