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.