6
The Challenges of Capitalist Stabilization

Soviet Security and the German Revolution

Of all the countries with which the USSR had revolutionary and diplomatic relations during the 1920s, it was in Germany that the clumsy dialectic of "peaceful coexistence" and "world revolution" appeared most prominently. In the thirty months following the Genoa Conference, Soviet-German relations were infused with the "spirit of Rapallo," a "community of fate" the two countries shared as states excluded from the European order created by the victors of the World War. Relations between Berlin and Moscow—political, economic, and military—were closer during this period than at any time in Soviet history.^[1] They were nurtured by Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, formerly German foreign minister, who was dispatched to Moscow as ambassador from Berlin (1922-28) and who quickly developed a close working relationship with Chicherin.^[2] Brockdorff was obsessed with the thought that politicians in Berlin might make the mistake of aligning Germany with England or commit some other diplomatic gaffe that would push the USSR into alliance with France. In his dispatches to Berlin, he continually and demonstratively insisted that nothing be done that might impair Germany's "special relationship" with the Soviet Union. However, because of the ideological differences separating the elites of the two countries, he did not expect German-Soviet relations to develop beyond a mutual hostility toward the postwar settlement. These relations were, he wrote to President Hindenburg in July 1926, "a marriage by force"; "a marriage by love was out of the question."^[3]

Nikolai Krestinskii, the Soviet polpred in Germany, was a lawyer by training, a former member of the party's Central Committee and Politburo, and people's commissar for finance (1918-22). Before the revolution he

had been both legal adviser to the Bolshevik faction in the Duma and a staff member of Pravda . His family was close to Lenin; his wife was the first doctor to examine and treat the leader in the Kremlin after the attempt on his life in 1918. Krestinskii was fluent in Latin as well as in modern European languages, and his memory was legendary. When Lenin failed to recall important information, he would say "you'd better ask Krestinskii." A man of strong convictions and exceptional courage, Krestinskii was the only defendant at the trial of the "right-Trotskyist bloc" in 1937 publicly to plead not guilty. He refused to state that he had been a spy and maintained that he always was and remained a Communist. The trial was disrupted for one day while Krestinskii was tortured severely; at the next session he nodded his assent to the guilty charge.^[4] It was political, legal, and personal credentials such as these that Krestinskii brought to Germany in 1922. He was an appropriate choice because within the NKID, ties to Germany were considered vital, and Berlin was considered the most important post in the Soviet diplomatic service.

It was the post-Versailles geopolitical situation that made relations with Berlin crucial. Germany was situated in the center of Europe, separating Russia from the powers of Western Europe, juxtaposed to Poland, France's chief ally in Eastern Europe, and adjacent to the newly independent Baltic states bordering Russia to the northwest. For this reason it would have been difficult for the Allies to launch a second military intervention, or even to threaten military action against the Soviet Union, without German cooperation. Diplomatically, too, decisions made in Berlin determined what pressure the former Allied powers could apply to Moscow. To be sure, the Treaty of Rapallo ensured that no full capitalist coalition based on denying diplomatic recognition to the Soviet regime until the debts of the Russian past were acknowledged could be formed; nevertheless, Soviet diplomatic isolation diminished or increased as Berlin's relations with the victors of the World War fluctuated between antagonism and partial integration. Militarily, diplomatically, and commercially, also, German foreign policy determined whether the imperialist powers could form a constellation of anti-Soviet states in Europe—what the Bolsheviks called "capitalist encirclement."

At times, Soviet intentions toward Weimar Germany have been described as ideologically driven and depicted as an effort to isolate Germany from the assistance of Europe and America, thereby leaving it vulnerable to economic dislocation and revolutionary upheaval. At other times, Soviet-German relations have been described in the terminology of political realism, as based on a community of interest between those against whom the World War peace settlement was directed. In both explanations, Mos-

3.  European USSR in 1923

cow's relations with Berlin after 1922 are represented as an effort to separate Germany from Western Europe and to form an exclusive Russo-German partnership. An alternative to both these explanations not only denies that the central intention of Russia's German policy in the 1920s was to preserve an exclusive relationship; it also rejects the notion that favorable relations with Germany were the primary goal of early Soviet diplomacy. It asserts instead that Soviet relations with Germany were regarded as a bridge to Europe.^[5] Their primary purpose was to facilitate

agreements with the other states and to gain entry into the association of world powers by serving as a model for relations with other capitalist states. Rather than being aimed at forming an exclusive relationship with Germany, Soviet policy at the time of the Genoa Conference was directed at forming a British-German-Soviet combination. In 1923 and again in 1927, it was aimed at making a German-French-Soviet combination, and then in 1928 at a German-American-Soviet understanding, and finally in 1931 at a five-power pact.

Such was the maximum goal of relations with Germany; the minimum goal was to prevent Germany from being absorbed into a coalition of European powers, one from which the USSR was excluded. Prior to the 1925 Locarno rapprochement between Germany and France and Britain, the minimal objective was a neutral Germany balanced between Russia and the West—if possible, with a tilt toward Moscow. After Locarno it was neutrality and balance—with a tilt toward the West, if necessary. To these ends the Russians employed two strategies. In Berlin, Soviet representatives promoted enmity toward the former entente by reminding the Germans of their defeat and by depicting France as an aggressive power capable of mobilizing Poland and its other client states in East-Central Europe against the USSR. In Paris and London, meanwhile, Soviet diplomats warned of the dangers of German militarism and revisionism.

The Soviet-German Rapallo relationship operated to greatest effect during the Ruhr crisis of 1923. When French and Belgian troops and engineers occupied the Ruhr district of Germany in January in an effort to enforce the reparations provisions of the Treaty of Versailles,^[6] the NKID feared for German independence. Were France to gain strategic control of western Germany, Chicherin believed, the geopolitical conditions for a second war of intervention would be established. Moscow responded by warning Poland against using the Ruhr occupation as an opportunity to attack Germany from the east, and the NKID undertook a diplomatic offensive in Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland aimed at guaranteeing nonintervention in German affairs and at maintaining freedom of transit between the USSR and Central Europe.^[7]

At the same time, the collective leadership decided that the crisis to which the Ruhr occupation had brought the German economy and the Weimar political system meant that the day of proletarian revolution in Germany was imminent. Meeting on 23 August, the Politburo decided to take the measures necessary to prepare for that event and to supervise it when it occurred.^[8] With Lenin incapacitated, the collective leadership was led to a policy of insurrectionary initiative by the enthusiasm of Trotsky, a man with little actual experience in German affairs but with a strong

theoretical sense of the interconnection between the Russian and German situations. Zinoviev supported the initiative, but apparently did so with more prudence than Trotsky showed, forecasting that the outbreak of revolution in Germany was a matter of months rather than of weeks. More cautiously, Stalin did not think that a German revolution would occur in 1923, and he doubted whether one could take place by the spring of 1924.

The opinion of Karl Radek played a key role. Although he did not sit on the Politburo, he attended the meeting as the German affairs expert among the Bolsheviks and the Comintern's chief tactician. He had surveyed the German situation firsthand the previous May, and he concluded that the preconditions for proletarian revolution—a massive German Communist Party (KPD) with mass support—did not yet exist. His solution to this problem, which he had proposed at the Third ECCI Plenum in June (with the support of Zinoviev), was a new strategy—a direct appeal to those elements of the lower-middle class that had been drawn to nationalist and fascist politics out of a sense of social despair and national humiliation.^[9] It did not work; Communist speakers before nationalist audiences failed to attract many supporters. Radek therefore urged the KPD leadership to continue the "united front" strategy and warned them against premature insurrectionary action. However when asked to report on the German situation at the 23 August Politburo meeting, he reportedly gave an optimistic assessment. Perhaps he sensed the mood of Trotsky and Zinoviev, deferred to them, and gave a report that expressed their beliefs more than his own. A decision to instigate a revolution in Germany resulted.

By the end of September, plans formulated in the Politburo and the ECCI were put in place. The resistance of the cautious Heinrich Brandler, who was chairman of the KPD Central Committee (1921-23) and who complained that he was not "a German Lenin," was worn down. In a series of nighttime meetings in Moscow he succumbed to the enthusiasm of the experienced revolutionaries of Russia and to the criticism of the Left Opposition within the KPD Central Committee led by Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow. According to the plans formulated in Moscow, the German Communist Party, led by Brandler, would form a coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and enter the government of Saxony. That government would, under the terms of a previous agreement between the two parties, organize the workers of Saxony into proletarian defense units designed to protect the state against fascist attack by arming what were presumed to be 50,000 to 60,000 workers eager for proletarian revolution.

Accordingly, a secret and illegal infrastructure was constructed. The proletarian defense units were formed under the supervision of Józef Unszlicht, deputy chairman of the GPU and a member of the Revolution-

ary Military Commission. Russian money and advisers were channeled through the diplomatic mission in Berlin. Weapons were shipped by cargo ship from Petrograd to Hamburg, where they were unloaded by Communist longshoremen and stored on wharves under their control. Radek was appointed head of a commission of four and sent to Germany to supervise the revolution. Larissa Reisner accompanied him and acted as courier and messenger between the Comintern delegation in Dresden and the KPD leadership in Berlin. Trotsky wanted to set a specific date for the uprising, 9 November, the anniversary of the revolution in Russia. Less commemoratively, the Politburo scheduled it for sometime during the six-week period of October through early November. Zinoviev activated the project in a telegram sent to the KPD Central Committee on 1 October.

From a historical perspective, it is evident that the Politburo majority that decided on a German insurrection in 1923, and the ECCI that engineered it, did so in an exercise of wishful thinking. Seduced by the prospect of "a German October," they mistook the Germany of 1923 for the Russia of 1917, and grasped at what looked to them like an opportunity to revive the momentum of proletarian revolution in Europe.^[10] Not surprisingly, the revolution aborted. Before the German Communists could act, the commander of the local Reichswehr ordered the dissolution of the proletarian defense units, took control of the Saxon police, and moved army units into Dresden. Without consulting Radek, the KPD leadership called off the mass uprising in Saxony. It was unable, however, to prevent the party in Hamburg from acting. An uprising there was crushed by the police. In Moscow, Kuusinen, Piatnitskii, and Manuilskii sat up all night smoking and drinking coffee while they waited in vain for a telegram from Germany bringing news of the success of the insurrection.^[11]

The failure of the "German October" was an event of importance in the seventy-four-year history of Soviet foreign relations. Six years after the revolution in Russia, it made evident, even to the most optimistic of Bolsheviks, that the prospects for successful proletarian insurrection in Europe were highly unfavorable—even in an industrialized capitalist state, and even in conditions of acute social and political crisis. The "stillborn revolution" in Germany confirmed the defensive stance for revolutionary strategy in Europe that had been adopted in 1920-21. Although revolution would be exported to the areas of East-Central Europe where it could be protected by Soviet armed forces in the years 1944-1948, the "German October" proved to be the last armed insurrection against any of the imperialist regimes. Never again would the leaders of the USSR risk their participation in the association of world powers by committing weapons and advisers to the overthrow of one of the major capitalist states.^[12]

The Dawes Plan and the "Zinoviev Letter"

By early 1924, Soviet diplomacy appeared extremely successful. The policies of "peaceful coexistence," which were confirmed by the failure of the "German October," were reinforced further when the first of the former Allied powers granted diplomatic recognition to the USSR the following February and when the German government used diplomatic channels to become the first major capitalist power to issue a formal apology to the young Soviet state in May.^[13] In Britain the Baldwin-Curzon-Churchill government met defeat in the general election, and England's first Labour government, led by Ramsay MacDonald, granted Moscow formal diplomatic recognition almost immediately upon coming to office.^[14] Italy quickly followed; Mussolini had gone on record in November 1923 as favoring recognition without any counterdemand for debt payment.^[15] Much of the rest of Europe followed in what E. H. Carr called "the year of recognitions,"^[16] and in 1925, China, Japan, and several Latin American states acted also. Spain and the United States recognized the USSR in 1933, the states of the Balkan region in 1934, and Belgium in 1935.

The Labour Party before coming to office had been committed to recognition, but not to unconditional recognition. That was determined in negotiations between MacDonald and the most effective Soviet diplomat of the 1920s, Christian Rakovskii.^[17] Prior to becoming diplomatic representative in London in 1923, Rakovskii had served as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukraine, where he was a member of the party's Central Committee and of its Politburo. He was also a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, a cofounder of the Communist International, and a delegate to the Second and Third Comintern congresses. The son of a prominent Bulgarian intellectual, Rakovskii had attended medical school in Geneva, where he became friends with the Plekhanov-Zasulich group of Russian Social Democrats even before Lenin did and also developed extensive connections among European socialists, including Friedrich Engels, Jean Jaurès, Karl Kautsky, and August Bebel. In manner and experience the most European of the Bolsheviks, Rakovskii spoke a dozen languages and became a prominent figure in Parisian leftist intellectual and artistic circles when he subsequently served as polpred in France from 1925 to 1927.

In France, pressure to recognize the USSR came from business groups that wanted access to the Russian market.^[18] It was resisted by the strongly anti-Bolshevik president of the Republic, Alexandre Millerand, and by Premier Poincaré, who, while favoring trade with Russia, opposed recognition without full debt settlement. In May-June 1924 the Cartel des gauches

defeated the Bloc nationale in general elections; the Poincaré government resigned, and Millerand was subsequently forced out of office. Edouard Herriot formed a government based on a Radical and Socialist coalition in the Chamber of Deputies in which he served as premier and foreign minister. Almost immediately he came under pressure from two conflicting sources.^[19] On one side stood the representatives of the holders of the Russian debt and those whose property had been nationalized in the revolution, who met throughout the summer at the Quai d'Orsay to coordinate their claims against the Soviet government. On the other side stood a group of influential Radical and Socialist deputies and senators led by Anatole de Monzie, Henry de Jouvenel, and Louis Loucheur—politicians who were closely connected to business interests and who believed strongly that economic relations with the USSR could be the solution to France's pressing economic and financial problems. Herriot, who personally favored recognition, decided that the regulation of France's relations with Germany must take precedence over relations with Russia. He adopted this stance in a telegram to Chicherin in mid-July, and not until late October did his government recognize the USSR.

Paris and Moscow then exchanged diplomatic representation immediately. Krasin, the commissar for foreign trade, was dispatched to Paris, and Jean Herbette, an important Parisian journalist and an enthusiastic advocate of Franco-Russian friendship, went to Moscow, where he shook the hand of every member of the honor guard that attended his arrival, greeting each with "Bonjour, comrade!"^[20] The British, however, postponed the exchange of ambassadors until subsequent agreements were reached, and in London and Moscow the governments of Russia and Britain were represented at the level of charges d'affaires. Both the French and the British recognitions were de jure, and neither depended on prior settlement of Russian debts. Diplomatic recognition by the powers of European capitalism constituted a big step toward Russia's reentry into the association of major powers on Soviet terms. A wave of unmitigated optimism swept over the collective leadership. As early as June 1924, Stalin celebrated the international success of the USSR: "Instead of isolation of the Soviet Union, the result has been the isolation of the isolators, the resignations of Poincaré and Curzon."^[21]

Rakovskii was chief Soviet negotiator at the Anglo-Soviet Conference that followed recognition and that began in April. By August the conference had produced a treaty composed of two documents.^[22] One was a trade agreement extending the one concluded in 1921. The other established the basis on which negotiations on debts and loans, the most thorny issues in

Anglo-Soviet relations, were to be continued. The Soviet government agreed to pay prewar tsarist debts that had been contracted in foreign currencies and that were in the hands of British citizens prior to March 1921, and also to compensate British property owners for losses resulting from revolutionary nationalization. Specific claims would be negotiated between English bondholders and proprietors and the Soviet government. If these negotiations succeeded, the British government would then guarantee a loan to the USSR that would be floated by London banks.

Although MacDonald held the offices of both foreign secretary and prime minister, he took little responsibility for the negotiations and gave to them only intermittent and halfhearted support. Labour's Russia policy was conducted by Arthur Ponsonby, parliamentary under-secretary for foreign affairs, who strongly advocated the integration of the USSR into Europe on a basis of equality.^[23] Ponsonby distrusted the Foreign Office, where opponents of expanded relations with Soviet Russia were strong, and he maintained close connections with E. D. Morel and the Union for Democratic Control, which spoke for those trade unionists and radical Labour backbenchers most committed to favorable relations with the USSR. Progress toward the treaty came largely as a result of the personal diplomacy conducted between the two chief negotiators, Ponsonby and Rakovskii, and when their negotiations came to the verge of breakdown, a group of radical backbenchers led by Morel and George Lansbury intervened to rescue them.

When the Anglo-Soviet Draft Treaty was agreed upon in principle, Izvestiia published a front-page article praising Rakovskii's qualities as a diplomat. Kamenev, a member of the ruling triumvirate (along with Stalin and Zinoviev), characterized the treaty as "a cornerstone in the development of the Soviet Union." Chicherin hailed it as a document of "tremendous" significance. "For the first time," he stated, "we have signed a final peace treaty regulating our relations with the most powerful state among the Great Powers." The agreement signified, he thought, "international recognition of the October Revolution as the basis of the Soviet state." Looking toward the future, Chicherin foresaw the "entry of the USSR and England upon an era of friendly relations" and what he subsequently termed "a general pacification in world relationships."^[24]

Chicherin's expectations went unfulfilled. In late August-September 1924, Soviet foreign relations suffered two historic reversals. The first was the inception of a German rapprochement with the victors of the World War. The adoption of the Dawes Plan in August at a conference in London provisionally settled the issue of German reparations, liquidated the Ruhr occupation, and opened the door to an influx of foreign lending that tied the

growth of the German economy to Anglo-American capital.^[25] The Dawes Plan was one of a series of agreements by which Germany and the former Allies ended the victor-vanquished antagonisms of the immediate postwar period and reestablished their relations on the basis of mutual compromise and relative goodwill. Another step in rapprochement was taken at the September 1924 meeting of the League of Nations Assembly, at which MacDonald, without prior consultation with his government, and to the surprise of nearly everyone, dramatically proposed that Germany be invited to join the League. Herriot consented, and in December the German government committed itself in principle to joining. It did so without coordinating its move with the other prewar great power that had been excluded since the League's inception in 1919—its Rapallo partner, Soviet Russia.^[26] As Chicherin viewed this rapprochement, Germany achieved a degree of internal economic and political stability, but did so at the cost of its economic and diplomatic independence.^[27]

The second reversal resulted from what Chicherin called "the English crisis." After ten months in office, the first Labour government fell apart in October 1924 and then suffered a severe defeat in the elections that followed. In this shift in British politics, the rapprochement with the USSR was the chief issue. Lloyd George, who had concluded the first commercial agreement with Soviet Russia in 1921 and who had synthesized the Genoa scheme to reintegrate Russia into the community of great powers, saw in parliamentary ratification of the Anglo-Soviet Draft Treaty an issue by which Labour could be defeated and the Liberal Party called upon to form a government. Faced with this Liberal defection from the coalition on which his government was based, MacDonald responded by committing it more fully to ratification of the treaty. The government would have been defeated over this issue had not MacDonald chosen to call for a vote of confidence over "the Campbell affair."^[28]

In the electoral campaign that followed, the détente with the USSR, the ratification of the Draft Treaty, the alleged subservience of the Labour Party leadership to left-wing, pro-Soviet backbenchers within the party, the charge that the Labour government was soft on Communism, a purported campaign of sedition conducted in Britain by the CPGB, and the supposed support given to it by the Comintern in Moscow were all focused into a full-scale Red Scare by the "Zinoviev letter." The latter was a document purportedly sent by Zinoviev, as president of the Presidium of the ECCI, to the Central Committee of the British Communist Party in London. The letter contained three statements. First, it was essential for the Labour Party, and for the British proletariat in general, to undertake a serious effort in favor of ratification of the Anglo-Soviet Draft Treaty and

to counteract those reactionary elements of the British bourgeoisie who opposed settlement of the differences between the two countries. Second, a settlement would "assist in the revolutionizing of the international and British proletariat" and in extending and developing "the ideas of Leninism in England and the Colonies." Third, the CPGB was to establish cells in all units of the British army, in munitions factories, and in arms depots, which would form the nucleus of a British Red Army in time of civil strife. The letter was published in the anti-Communist Daily Mail four days before the parliamentary election, and the headlines above it read: "Civil War Plot by Socialists, Moscow Order to Our Reds, Great Plot Disclosed Yesterday." The "Zinoviev letter" alone did not decide the outcome of the election, but it did ensure that the victory of the Conservative Party, which had consistently taken an anti-Soviet stand, would be an overwhelming one.^[29]

The authenticity of the "Zinoviev letter" was debated from the moment it appeared in print. Over the years, historical scholarship has put certain facts beyond dispute. As president of the ECCI, Zinoviev did send messages to foreign Communist parties instructing them in matters of organization and strategy, and, in the case of the German party, authorizing it to launch a proletarian insurrection. Since 1920, British intelligence had come into possession of genuine ECCI and NKID correspondence, mainly through intercepts. The Labour government, like the governments that preceded it, sanctioned these intercepts and accepted the authenticity of the intelligence gained thereby. The "Zinoviev letter," however, was not an intercept but one of three similar documents that had come to the attention of MacDonald and the Foreign Office via the Special Branch and the Home Office since April. Nevertheless, Scotland Yard, the Foreign Office, and the Secret Service, organizations that had considerable experience dealing with forgeries, considered all three documents authentic. MacDonald accepted the authenticity of the first two letters, dated 17 March and 7 April; not until the third letter, dated 15 September, appeared in October, however, did he authorize lodging a protest in Moscow. All this lends some credence to the argument that the document might have been genuine.^[30]

On the other hand, scholarly examination of the style and content of the letter reveals a pattern of forgery rather than one of authenticity. The language of the three letters, which are similar in style and content, does not consistently resemble that of other Comintern documents. The suggestion that the ratification of the Anglo-Soviet Draft Treaty would help revolutionize the British working class and lead to proletarian insurrection in England is not to be found in any other known Comintern or CPGB document. The actual instructions of the ECCI to the CPGB for the October election are in line with the doctrines expressed in published Comintern resolutions during the same period, and are not consistent with the "Zinov-

iev letter." These instructions did not call for subversion of the military and preparation for insurrection, but rather for the CPGB to work to "return a Labour majority in the election as a challenge to the capitalist class."^[31] Each of the three intercepted letters reads as if it had been deliberately designed to discredit the Labour government and its foreign policy by suggesting that the government was being duped by the Soviet delegation in London, which was conducting propaganda and subversive activities while negotiating the treaty.

MacDonald's Foreign Office dispatched a note of protest to the Soviet government on 24 October and condemned the "Zinoviev letter" as outside interference in British internal affairs. Rakovskii replied on his own the next day dismissing the letter as a forgery. The NKID Collegium responded on 27 October with a note demanding an apology and the punishment of those involved in the forgery. The Foreign Office rejected it.^[32] The full extent of the damage done to Anglo-Soviet relations became evident on 21 November 1924 when Austen Chamberlain, foreign secretary in the new Conservative cabinet (1924-29), inaugurated the government's relations with the USSR with two notes to Moscow. One stated that the government would not present the Anglo-Soviet Draft Treaty to Parliament for ratification; the other asserted the authenticity of the "Zinoviev letter."^[33] Then in December, on his first trip out of the country as foreign secretary, Chamberlain visited Paris, where he met with Herriot and officials of the Quai d'Orsay. There they agreed that London and Paris would coordinate their policies toward Russia. They would collaborate against the Comintern by exchanging information regarding the activities of its agents, and they would consult each other prior to any further debt/loan transactions with the USSR.^[34] Before long, the newly opened, postrecognition negotiations between Paris and Moscow became deadlocked over such issues as the repayment of private debts and relaxation of the trade monopoly. Discussions soon came to a halt.

Chicherin responded vigorously. With the publication of the "Zinoviev letter," he went to Comintern headquarters, where he spoke with Piatnitskii and Kuusinen and raged about the damage done to Soviet diplomacy.^[35] No longer did he speak of the "entry of the USSR and England upon an era of friendly relations," and he referred to the "general pacification in world relationships" as a thing of the past. Instead, he suggested to the Central Committee on 18 October that the "Zinoviev letter" incident "may be the first of a series of crises on a world scale and the beginning of new trials for our Republic." Evidence existed, he added, of a "united front of bourgeois governments against the USSR, largely resuscitated as a result of the intensification of imperialist and reactionary tendencies."^[36]

Had an anti-Soviet coalition come into existence and, if so, was it a mu-

table, transient, and tactical diplomatic alignment, or was it the embryo of a permanent offensive alliance against the USSR? These questions troubled both the NKID and the party leadership in October-November 1924. And both continued to ponder them for the next twenty-four months—the period during which London and Paris settled with Berlin and Washington the issues of war debts and reparations, of security and disarmament, and of international trade, currency exchange, and industrial relations.^[37] Did this comprehensive and complex resettlement of postwar international relations, which party and Comintern resolutions called "international capitalist stabilization," include an anti-Soviet front directed from London? Chicherin's assessment was consistently tentative and subtle. There were opposing currents in the European situation, he thought; the dominant characteristic of international relations was their fluidity, fluctuation, and a lack of definition and clarity. "The present moment," he reported to the Third Congress of Soviets in May 1925, "is distinguished by the extraordinary abundance of obscure and inconclusive indications in world affairs and in particular in the system of relations with us." There was "a wealth of indications" in the English and world press, he stated, that "English influence is playing a part in creating an atmosphere of general hostility towards us, in which we now have to work." However, he was extremely cautious about directly accusing Chamberlain, or the Foreign Office, or even the Conservative government specifically of any overt anti-Soviet action.^[38] He professed not to know with certainty the direction in which international relations were moving or whether an anti-Soviet alliance was being formed in London. The tentativeness of Chicherin's estimate of the international situation contrasted strongly with the one made by the post-Lenin leadership emerging within the RCP(B). Among them were those certain to the point of dogmatism in their definition of the current international situation and of the direction relations between the USSR and the major capitalist powers were taking.

The Foreign Relations of "Socialism in One Country"

The doctrine of "socialism in one country" had as its central proposition that it was possible to construct socialism in the Soviet Union alone—in the absence of proletarian revolution in Europe, and out of the social circumstances and economic resources present in the USSR. Russia had, after all, achieved and consolidated proletarian power without the assistance of revolution in Europe. A secondary proposition was that, although socialism could be constructed in the USSR independently, there would be no "complete victory" for socialism, and no guaranteed security for the revolution in Russia, until the threat of imperialist interference and intervention was

banished by proletarian revolution in several European countries. "Socialism in one country" formally deprioritized international revolution on the agenda of Soviet politics and asserted the primacy of the task of internal development. Revolutionary internationalism was not ideologically renounced, however; it remained an integral feature of the Bolshevik theory of global history.

"Socialism in one country" was implicit in elements of Bukharin's thought as early as November 1923, at the time of the failure of "the German October." Stalin first enunciated the idea formally in December 1924. Bukharin began to address the question publicly and explicitly in April 1925. The resolutions of the Fourteenth Party Congress the following December adopted the doctrine as the central principle of socialist construction. In general, it was Bukharin who worked "socialism in one country" into a proto-program for the socialization and industrialization of Soviet Russia, and who developed the theoretical basis for it. Stalin popularized the idea by proclaiming it in his speeches and writings during the two years extending from late 1924 to late 1926. He thereby gained the political benefit that accrued from the acceptance of the doctrine among the party rank and file.^[39]

"Socialism in one country" was a significant ideological innovation. Before the years 1924-1926 the transition from capitalism to socialism had been linked in Marxism-Leninism to transnational proletarian revolution. Socialism would emerge throughout Europe as the result of a single process during one historical period lasting, the Bolsheviks thought, at first weeks, then months, and then perhaps years. This was Lenin's original vision of "world revolution," and it was this conception of Lenin's, rather than the "permanent revolution" of Trotsky, against which Stalin was really polemicizing between 1924 and 1926, although for obvious political reasons he could not and did not say so.^[40] By contrast, "socialism in one country" formulated in ideological terms the proposition that socialism could be achieved independently in separate nations at different times, that Soviet Russia would survive into the indefinite future in a world composed of nations as well as of classes, and that its "complete victory" would be guaranteed when revolution in one or more of the imperialist powers rendered impossible outside capitalist interference with socialist construction in Russia. Thus, in the doctrine of "socialism in one country," the achievement of socialism became a national occurrence, its survival and ultimate triumph a matter of international relations. It has been aptly termed "a theory of international relations par excellence. "^[41]

Indeed, declaration of the doctrine was accompanied by a thorough consideration of the matrix of foreign relations in which the USSR was set

in the mid-1920s. Stalin and Bukharin were impressed by the twin reversals of late 1924: on the one hand, the "Zinoviev letter," the fall of the Labour government, and the rejection of the Anglo-Soviet Draft Treaty; on the other, the Dawes Plan, the intervention of American capital in Europe, and Germany's attraction to what Stalin now consistently called "the capitalist camp."^[42] In these events they saw a decisive turning point in the international situation, one that would influence an entire phase of historical development. Bukharin first proclaimed—in June 1924 at the time the Dawes Plan was formulated—that a new stabilization period in the history of capitalism was beginning, a notion he then vigorously defended in theoretical debates.^[43] Stalin meanwhile explained the international situation to the party membership in a series of articles, interviews, speeches, and reports beginning in September 1924 and culminating in December 1925 with his presentation of the Political Report of the Central Committee to the Fourteenth Party Congress.^[44]

The Stalin-Bukharin conception of world politics began with the proposition that "world revolution" was not an event but a lengthy process. The "epoch of world revolution," which had begun with the struggle of the proletariat in Russia in 1905, comprised "a whole strategic period, which will last for a number of years, perhaps even a number of decades." As did Lenin, Stalin and Bukharin regarded the state of equilibrium that resulted from the ebb of the revolutionary tide and from the stabilization of capitalism as the characteristic feature of the international situation. They then expanded and extended the notion: The imperialist system had "succeeded in extricating itself from the quagmire of the postwar crisis" and achieved a "partial" and "temporary" stabilization. The Soviet system had also stabilized. The Russian economy was growing; socialism was under construction; the exploited of Europe and the oppressed of Asia were rallying around the USSR. "A certain temporary equilibrium between these two stabilizations" resulted. Although the duration of this equilibrium could not be predicted, "there is no doubt," Stalin stated, "it will be a long one." In 1918, Lenin had thought the end of the war with Germany would be followed by a short "peace break"; after the Civil War he predicted a lengthier truce; in 1924-25, Stalin announced what he called "a whole period of respite." What had begun in 1920-21 as a tenuous breathing space, Stalin told the Fourteenth Party Congress, "has turned into a whole period of so-called peaceful coexistence of the USSR with the capitalist states."^[45]

The data informing the Stalin-Bukharin analysis of capitalist stabilization and international equilibrium came from the events of global politics: With the failure of the revolution in Germany in November 1923, "the

period of revolutionary upsurge has come to an end." There existed now "a new situation" in which the Communist parties would have to find their bearings again.^[46] The stabilization of capitalism, although it remained temporary and partial, was now definite in a way it had not been in 1921. In Europe, the postwar inflation had ended; currencies were stabilized; agricultural output and industrial production were increasing; international trade was expanding; both production and commerce were approaching prewar levels. This financial-economic stabilization had been achieved "mainly with the aid of American capital, and at the price of the financial subordination of Western Europe to America."^[47] Most important, Germany—once the locus of revolutionary upsurge in Europe—had been "Dawesified" into an appendage of Anglo-American capital. With the Dawes Plan, the British, the Americans, and the French had struck a deal regarding "the scale on which [Germany] was to be robbed," and the United States had come to the verge of financial hegemony in the capitalist world.^[48] While capitalism was stabilized on these conditions, there were others in addition. The British, the Americans, and the Japanese had struck a "deal" over China (the Washington treaties of 1922), and the imperialist powers had made arrangements among themselves promising mutual respect for each other's colonial possessions. And there was one more. "The stabilization of capitalism," Stalin forecast in May 1925, "may find expression in an attempt on the part of the imperialist groups of the advanced countries to strike a deal concerning the formation of a united front against the Soviet Union."^[49]

Capitalism had stabilized for the present, but, according to the dialectic Stalin elucidated in 1925, "the process of capitalism's 'recovery' contain[ed] within itself the germs of its inherent weakness and disintegration."^[50] Stabilization had not settled the issues over which the World War had been fought. The imperialist powers still struggled with each other for markets. Anti-imperialist national liberation movements were "growing step by step" and "beginning in some places to assume the form of open war against imperialism (Morocco, Syria, China)."^[51] And while "the capitalist world [was] being corroded by a whole series of internal contradictions .... the world of socialism [was] becoming more and more closely welded, more united." Industry had revived and would continue to develop, giving the proletariat of the USSR "a new way of life" and leading the workers of Europe to demand workers' states of their own. At the same time, the working class of Europe had come to regard the Soviet state "as its own child," Stalin stated, and "having adopted our state ... is ready to defend it and fight for it" "against imperialism and its interventionist machinations."^[52]

In predicting the eventual demise of capitalism, the Stalin-Bukharin

duumvirate counted heavily on the Dawes reparation agreement of 1924 proving incapable of stabilizing the Weimar Republic. Their prognostication was that German workers would be required to bear the costs of reparation payments to France, Britain, and Belgium in addition to the surplus extracted by the German bourgeoisie, and would impose on them a "double yoke" of exploitation. "To think that ... the German proletariat will consent to bear this double yoke without making repeated serious attempts at a revolutionary upheaval means believing in miracles." "The Dawes Plan must inevitably lead to a revolution in Germany." Correspondingly, the governments of Britain, France, and Italy had to increase the burden of taxation on their populations to make war debt payments to the United States, meaning that "the material conditions of the working people in Europe ... will certainly deteriorate and the working class will inevitably become revolutionized."^[53]

The developing international conflict was disguised, Stalin claimed, by a facade of "false and mendacious bourgeois-democratic pacifism." When the London Conference adopted the Dawes Plan in July-August 1924, MacDonald and Herriot had indeed emphasized the peaceful collaboration of Britain and France, reconciliation with Germany, and normalization of relations with the USSR. Stalin maintained that such statements camouflaged not only the contradictions among the victors of the World War but also "the intense antagonism between Germany and the entente" and "the deadly enmity of the bourgeois states" toward the Soviet Union.^[54] When the Locarno agreements were concluded in October 1925—accompanied by further rhetoric lauding a new spirit of international cooperation and peace—they confirmed in Stalin's mind the view that international relations were recapitulating those of the pre-1914 era. Like the treaties, agreements, and conferences that preceded the World War, Locarno was "an example of the matchless hypocrisy of bourgeois diplomacy, when by shouting and singing about peace they try to cover up preparations for a new war." "If the Dawes Plan is fraught with a revolution in Germany," Stalin told the Fourteenth Party Congress, "Locarno is fraught with a new war in Europe."^[55]

Such was the concept of international relations generated by the Stalin-Bukharin duumvirate for the collective leadership and adopted by the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925. What was its significance for the development of Soviet foreign relations? The adoption of the Dawes Plan and the signing of the Locarno Treaties called into question the fundamental precepts of post-revolution Leninist foreign relations as they had been formulated in 1920-21: that the German problem was insoluble, that the postwar crisis would bring proletarian insurrection to Europe despite

the setbacks of 1919, and, most important of all, that the inevitability of interimperialist conflict could be counted on to make the Soviet Union secure from the danger of a united anti-Soviet coalition. The developing reconciliation between Germany and the former Allies and the increasing stabilization of international relations in the West made imperative a comprehensive and agonizing reappraisal of Soviet security policy in the light of new realities seven years after the October Revolution. Seemingly no such reappraisal took place either in the ECCI or the NKID, or in the Politburo, despite a few inconclusive efforts in this direction.^[56] Instead, the party reaffirmed Lenin's notion that the antagonisms among the imperialist powers could be depended on to benefit Soviet security. That reaffirmation was strongly influenced by the position Stalin had articulated to the Moscow party organization the previous January. "The struggle, conflicts, and wars between our enemies," were among what Stalin called the three available "allies of Soviet power," the other two being the proletariat of the advanced capitalist societies and the oppressed colonial peoples.^[57] Here was a statement remarkable in two respects. Stalin not only reaffirmed Lenin's belief that interimperialist conflict would protect the USSR but he also formally raised relations among nations to the level of class relations in deciding the eventual outcome of the contest between socialism and capitalism.

From the principle that Soviet security could depend on intercapitalist conflict, the collective leadership derived an optimistic prognostication for the future of the one country in which socialism was being constructed. To wit, it was within the capability of foreign policy to extend the prolonged respite from imperialist war by centering foreign relations on "the struggle for peace." Both by means of diplomacy and through the activities of foreign Communist parties, they could moderate the war-prone tendencies of the imperialist powers and extend the conditions of "peaceful coexistence." Such a prolonged respite constituted an opportunity for constructing an independent industrial economy in the homeland of socialism. This prognostication was resolved by the delegates to the Fourteenth Party Congress. However, the doctrine of the inevitable resumption of imperialist warfare was not forgotten. The potential threat it posed to the USSR, the resolution continued, made imperative the creation of a modern defense establishment.^[58]

In promoting this defense establishment, Stalin personally played a particularly important role. Although he informed the Party Congress in December that the international situation was at a point of stable equilibrium that would last for years, Stalin had told a closed session of the Central Committee the previous January that "a radical change in the international situation has begun lately." In fact, on at least three separate

occasions during the relatively tranquil year of 1925, he stated that current international relations resembled those which had existed during the prelude to the outbreak of the great imperialist war in 1914.^[59] There was another crisis in Morocco, and the powers of Europe were again contesting among themselves for control of North Africa and the Balkans. A renewed postwar arms race was under way. The French were building a large air force, and the British, Americans, and Japanese were competing over naval power. "The conflict of interests among the victor countries is growing and becoming more intense," he stated; "collision among them is becoming inevitable, and in anticipation of a new war, they are arming with might and main." Coming to a conclusion that differed strikingly from the line adopted by the party as a whole—"a whole period of peaceful coexistence" based on prolonged capitalist stabilization—Stalin maintained that a new war was inevitable within a few years and that the USSR must prepare for it by building up its armed forces.

Thus, as Stalin emerged as a member of the duumvirate that directed the collective leadership and as spokesman for the party's conception of foreign relations, he brought with him a distinctive set of opinions about international relations in the mid-1920s. The stabilization of capitalism, he thought, was "ridiculously unstable" and a second imperialist war was both inevitable and imminent, "not tomorrow or the day after, of course, but in a few years time." The approach of war would "intensify the internal revolutionary crisis both in the East and the West," bringing revolution to Germany and uprisings to the colonies of the European powers. That revolutionary surge, Stalin's scenario continued, was "bound to turn the ruling strata of the Great Powers against us." Threatened with global revolution, they would attack at its source. "The danger of intervention," Stalin concluded as early as January 1925, "is again becoming real."^[60]

During 1925, Stalin's version of the international situation made significant inroads among the Soviet party/state elite. In May the resolutions of the Third Soviet Congress stated: "The capitalist states are making preparations for new conflicts and new wars," preparations that are accompanied by "a hostile encirclement of our Union which takes the form of an entire system of military conferences, agreements, and support for the measures taken by different governments against the USSR, and also of campaigns based on forgeries and lies." The delegates to the Fourteenth Party Congress in December, selected by Stalin (except for those from the Leningrad Soviet controlled by Zinoviev), partially incorporated Stalin's foreign relations concept in the resolutions they adopted. Those resolutions assailed the "blocs of capitalist states under Anglo-American hegemony [that are] accompanied by the frenzied growth of armaments and therefore fraught

with the danger of new wars, including the danger of intervention." The resolutions of both May and December stressed the need for the USSR "to guard its frontiers from possible attack," to strengthen the country's defense capabilities, and "to intensify the power of the Red Army and the Red Navy and the Air Force."^[61]

The USSR and the World Economy: Isolation or Integration?

During much the same period that the doctrine of "socialism in one country" was being introduced and adopted, what has been called "the industrialization debate" was also going on among the party/state elite. Contrary to what has at times been assumed, the context of this debate was not a turn away from the international scene and toward the tasks of internal development as part of an ideological assimilation of the disappointing results of the revolution export project of the years 1917-1923. In actuality, the debate over industrialization was closely linked to considerations of foreign relations and, in particular, to a foreboding conception of world politics: The world was divided into two camps, a "capitalist camp" headed by the Anglo-Americans, and the camp of the Soviet Union. As both camps stabilized, the contradictions between them became stronger. New wars loomed, both interimperialist and interventionist, and, as a prelude to such wars, capitalist Europe would impose diplomatic isolation and economic blockade on the USSR. It was on the basis of this scenario that the collective leadership of the party concluded that the Soviet Union must achieve economic independence from the capitalist states.

Bukharin was convinced that the capital required for the economic development and socialist construction of the USSR would not come from Europe. The abortive "German October" insurrection made clear that a Communist Germany was not about to become Soviet Russia's economic provider. And neither the Genoa Conference of 1922 nor the Anglo-Soviet Conference of 1924 had resolved the issue of Russian debts or unleashed large-scale, long-term development loans from European banks. Initially, Bukharin believed that the grain surplus held by prospering farmers might be sold abroad to finance imports of industrial equipment. However, the difficulties encountered by the government in procuring that surplus from the harvest of 1925 convinced him that the economy could not be dependent on an international market controlled by the bourgeoisie. He concluded that the capital for economic development could be amassed only from the increasing profitability of state industry, from a progressive income tax on entrepreneurs prospering under NEE and by mobilizing the voluntary savings deposits of the peasantry. None of these sources would

provide vast sums very soon, however, and Bukharin's program for socialization included no clear solution to the problem of capital accumulation for industrialization. Apparently it was not a critical issue for him. Vast amounts of capital were unnecessary, he thought, because existing industrial machinery could be used more intensively, and socialism could develop in the USSR without vast new investment—slowly, gradually, and "at a snail's pace," as he stated in December 1925.^[62] Bukharin's contribution to the industrialization debate was, therefore, to recast the New Economic Policy, which Lenin had introduced in order that the Russian economy could be partially integrated into that of the capitalist world system, and identify it with building socialism in isolation under conditions of slow, autarkic economic development.

Stalin seems to have given little thought to how industrialization would be financed when he first proclaimed that socialism could be constructed in Russia separately in 1924-25. Apparently he believed that funds for capital investment could simply be borrowed from the state treasury. Of greatest importance, he thought, was the international political situation. Ties to world capitalism, that is, economic dependence on Europe, led "to a whole series of new dangers," as it was expressed in the phrase incorporated in the resolutions of the Fourteenth Party Congress, or, as Stalin himself stated it, the USSR would be "vulnerable to blows from the side of our enemies."^[63] The immediate challenge, he thought, was the Dawes Plan. Western observers from John Maynard Keynes to Stanley Baldwin were suggesting publicly that the best solution to the problem of postwar international indebtedness would be for Germany to create the favorable balance of payments necessary to fund reparations to France and Britain by selling manufactured goods to the USSR in exchange for agricultural commodities and raw materials. Stalin objected to such proposals. They were intended, he maintained, to "squeeze money out of the Russian market for the benefit of Europe." "We have no desire," he added, "to be converted into an agrarian country for the benefit of any other country whatsoever, including Germany."^[64]

Stalin's own distinctive program for the industrialization of the USSR aimed directly at economic independence, which to him meant that Russia would produce the means of production rather than acquiring them from abroad. The Soviet Union must be converted, he stated, "from a country which imports machines and equipment into a country which produces machines and equipment.... In this manner the USSR ... will become a self-sufficient economic unit building socialism."^[65] This policy position contrasted sharply with the integrationist consensus that had formed in 1920-21, and it constituted a sharp break from the intentions that had

guided economic development and foreign policy since then. Moreover, it is significant that, in Stalin's concept of economic development, independence was the goal of industrialization, but not only the goal. Industrialization was not merely the way for the USSR to become independent of capitalism; the USSR had to be independent in order to industrialize. The central premise of Stalin's economics as of 1925 was that both the capital and the technology for industrialization could, should, and would come from Russia's own resources. Otherwise, the capitalist states could stifle or interrupt Soviet industrialization by imposing economic blockades. In this manner, autarky was the means as well as the end of Soviet economic development for Stalin.

The alternative to the autarkical development strategies of Bukharin and Stalin was formulated by Trotsky, who of all the leading Bolsheviks, Richard B. Day has argued, examined the difficult and complex issues of industrialization most realistically.^[66] After his dismissal from the office of commissar for military and naval affairs in January 1925, Trotsky served on the Supreme Council of National Economy (Vesenkha) and as chairman of the Principal Concessions Committee, posts at which he experienced firsthand the many problems involved in planning and managing the weak and undeveloped industrial sector of the Soviet economy. During the most intense period of the industrialization debate, Trotsky identified low labor productivity—rather than the threat of dependence on the capitalist camp— as the most critical problem for Russian economic development. And the solution, he decided, was to encourage foreign trade and capital imports, to transfer the advanced technology of America and Europe to the USSR, and to achieve thereby a rapid tempo of industrialization and a high level of productivity. Industrialization "at a snail's pace," he thought, simply perpetuated the misery of the masses. Development based on Russia's indigenous engineering and metallurgy would merely bind the USSR to a primitive technology, require an industrialization period of ten to twenty years, and result in low-quality products. Importing the most sophisticated and expensive technology, by contrast, would catapult the USSR into the industrial future and allow it to create the objective basis for true economic independence from capitalism. For these reasons, Trotsky argued, the Soviet Union could not isolate itself from the global economy. Industrialization required, he concluded, not a reduction but an increase in relations with the outside world and, likewise, a temporary increase in dependence on the world market.

Accordingly, Trotsky was in 1925-26 the leading exponent among the party leadership of economic integration into the world economy and political accommodation with Europe and America. Russia, he maintained,

lacked not only advanced technology but also capital; it needed foreign concessions to develop Russia's natural resources and foreign credits to purchase machinery. He announced this in a Pravda article in June 1925, and in August he told the British representative in Moscow of the horrible state of Soviet technology, stressed the crucial importance of a machine-building industry, and informed him that unless the British stopped insisting on cash-and-carry and granted the USSR credits, they would lose out in machine sales to the United States.^[67] Trotsky did not hesitate to follow the logic of his development strategy and economic foreign policy to their diplomatic consequences. He supported the debt/loan negotiations that opened with France in February 1926, seeing in them prospects for foreign credits three times the size of what Vesenkha expected to be able to invest in industry in 1925-26, and he urged noninterference in the British General Strike the following May in order not to jeopardize the prospects for loans from Britain and other European states.^[68]

The crucial issues of socialist construction and economic development were the material of the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925. There the Central Committee committed the party to building socialism separately and to transforming the USSR into a self-sufficient industrial nation. Important issues were left undecided, however. At what tempo would socialism be constructed? With what technology would the USSR be industrialized? How would industrialization be capitalized? The reason for such irresolution was intraparty politics. The commitment of Stalin and Bukharin to "socialism in one country," transcribed as "autarkical economic development," bound them in theory to industrializing the USSR with indigenous technology and capital. To deny this would have constituted a victory for Trotsky. On the other hand, to call for industrialization and to prioritize production of the means of production, and to do so without designating the sources of investment capital and assuming that it could come from the state treasury, that is, from deficit spending, ran the risk of ruinous inflation.

Unless capital was supplied by foreign loans, the only available policy alternative was the one espoused by the leading party economist, Evgenii Preobrazhenskii. He advocated immediate and rapid industrialization, with priority given to large-scale heavy industry, and with investment capital mobilized by transferring to state industry what could be accumulated internally within the private sector, especially in agriculture. At the center of his strategy for industrialization was the expropriation of agrarian surpluses, which he termed "primitive socialist accumulation."^[69] Preobrazhenskii's proposal represented a direct challenge to the smychka , the worker-peasant alliance on which NEP was based, and to Bukharin's gradu-

alist, voluntarist, and harmonious concept of how "socialism in one country" would be constructed. Bukharin in turn ridiculed Preobrazhenskii's strategy as "super-industrialization," industrialization at any cost, and he included in his condemnation Trotsky, who shared Preobrazhenskii's preference for rapid industrial growth but did not identify himself with the notion of peasant expropriation.^[70] Stalin simply ignored the problem of industrial investment, probably to avoid possible dispute with his ally Bukharin.

"The stabilization of capitalism" was no mere Comintern catchphrase. It integrated ideologically the concepts of socialist construction, economic development, and foreign relations adopted in the period 1924-1926. It also had a basis in international reality. Starting in late 1924, following within months of the breakthrough to diplomatic recognition that had begun the previous February, Soviet foreign relations sustained serious reversals. The Germans engineered a rapprochement with Britain and France that undermined the "specialness" of the Soviet-German relationship symbolized by the Treaty of Rapallo. That rapprochement posed a possible threat to Soviet security, in the estimate made by the NKID, unless Berlin gave the proper guarantees to Moscow. Moreover, the Conservative government in England renounced the Anglo-Soviet Draft Treaty negotiated by their Labour predecessors and subsequently refused to discuss measures to improve or even to repair relations with Moscow. And as part of the reestablished Anglo-French Entente of 1924, the British Foreign Office and the French Foreign Ministry agreed to coordinate their policies toward the USSR. Finally, all three powers—Germany, Britain, and France—in effect put relations with the USSR on hold in 1925 while they resolved their differences and subjoined treaties regulating war debts, trade, and security to the Dawes Plan. Chapter 7 considers how these reversals were managed by those who conceived and conducted the foreign relations of the USSR.