Locarno, the Party, and the NKID

We have seen that when the governments of Europe first granted diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in 1924, the Politburo and the NKID Collegium together celebrated the successes of Soviet foreign relations. Party leaders and diplomats were in substantial agreement as to their analysis of both the international situation and the direction they expected

foreign relations to take. However, between the publication of the "Zinoviev letter" in the autumn of 1924 and the break in relations with England in the spring of 1927 that consensus broke down. A divergence emerged between the stated position taken by the party leadership and that taken by Narkomindel.

In its estimate of the situation, the NKID was cautious and tentative. Chicherin maintained that world politics were in flux, that the direction of international relations was indeterminate, and that the situation seemed to be both improving and worsening for the USSR. He and Litvinov did not directly accuse Chamberlain, the British Foreign Office, or the Baldwin government of pursuing a policy aimed at encircling the USSR with a hostile coalition of capitalist states, although the NKID did protest in London the anti-Soviet statements made by individual members of the British government. This suggests that Narkomindel intended to conduct a flexible and nuanced foreign policy, one aimed not only at maintaining Moscow's ties to Berlin and settling outstanding differences with France, but also at reopening debt/loan negotiations with England.

This policy position contrasted sharply with the view agreed to by the majority leadership of the Central Committee. To them the events of 1924 represented a decisive turning point in international history, one that would influence an entire phase in the development of Soviet society and foreign relations. The stabilization of both capitalism and Communism would provide a prolonged period of respite from capitalist attack, one that would last for years, even decades, and that would allow the USSR to industrialize, construct socialism, and consolidate its alliances with the exploited workers of Europe and the oppressed peoples of Asia. Eventually capitalist stabilization would be undermined by armed uprisings within the colonies of the imperialist powers and by the resistance of the German proletariat to the burdens of paying reparations.

By contrast, Stalin's own personal conception of the future direction of international politics denied that a protracted respite existed. In the events leading from the publication of the "Zinoviev letter" to the signing of the Treaties of Locarno a year later, he envisioned the approach of a second imperialist war that would begin "in a few years time." From the conferences, treaties, and anti-Soviet campaigns of 1925 he concluded that the imperialist powers were arming themselves, encircling the USSR, and preparing for military conflict. In all probability, this conflict would be preceded, he thought, by a preemptive strike against the USSR, a second war of imperialist intervention launched by the threatened ruling strata of the major powers to prevent the homeland of socialism from benefiting from the struggle among them.

Regarding the Locarno Treaties, there was considerable unanimity among the party leadership. Spokesmen from Bukharin to Zinoviev denounced them as a set of agreements that would complete the domination of the Continent by Anglo-American capital, consolidate and stabilize bourgeois control over Europe, and form the nucleus of a British-led coalition of powers hostile to the USSR.^[55] In December 1925, the month the treaties were signed in London, the Stalin- and Bukharin-dominated Fourteenth Party Congress resolved that "the relative stabilization and the so-called pacification of Europe under the hegemony of Anglo-American capital has led to a whole system of economic and political blocs, the most recent of which was the Locarno Conference, and the so-called 'guarantee pacts' which were directed at the USSR."^[56] In this response to the Locarno Treaties, Leninist ideology functioned obviously and significantly: Because of the presumed unremitting hostility of the international bourgeoisie toward proletarian power, Chamberlain's policy of disregard, Stresemann's policy of postponement, and the similar policy adopted by Herriot could not be passive. They had to be active ingredients in the formation of a hostile anti-Soviet coalition.

In turn, the allegation that the Treaties of Locarno formed the basis for a British-led capitalist coalition directed against the USSR functioned unmistakably in intracommunist relations. The emergence of a tangible foreign threat to the security of the socialist homeland was a means of committing foreign Communists to the defense of the USSR, thereby integrating the sections of the Comintern behind the purposes of the CPSU. As such, that threat functioned as an instrument of "bolshevization." By characterizing Locarno as a threat to the Soviet Union, the party's leaders suited their analysis of the European diplomatic situation both to their concern for Soviet security and to their increasing control over relations among the parties of the international Communist movement.

In reality, Locarno did not represent a direct threat to the USSR—largely because Chicherin was able to prevent German affiliation with the Western European security project and with the League of Nations from endangering Soviet security. In face-to-face negotiations with Stresemann in Berlin on the eve of the Locarno Conference, he reduced Soviet policy concerns to two fundamental elements and presented them to the German foreign minister. One was that Germany not participate in League sanctions against the USSR; the other was that Berlin not guarantee the borders of Poland. In that neither of these were in the interests of Germany, Stresemann gave to Chicherin binding commitments on both counts. Then at the conference in Locarno, the German delegation was able both to gain exemption from League sanctions and to avoid endorsing Poland's frontiers.^[57]

Significantly, it was conventional diplomacy conducted by the NKID, more than anything else, including international proletarian solidarity, that provided security for the USSR eight years after the October Revolution.

Not surprisingly, the NKID adopted a less strident attitude toward the Locarno agreements than did Stalin in his Political Report of the Central Committee to the Fourteenth Party Congress. In Chicherin's report to that same congress—which was then kept secret and not published until 1991— he surveyed what he called "the landscape after Locarno." While disparaging what he called the "phony noise of Locarno" and the "constant pacifist phraseology" surrounding the treaty, Chicherin concluded that, so far as the interests and security of the USSR were concerned, there were "no reasons for panic." With the exception of England, the major nations of the world from France to Japan have "finally become convinced of the stability of Soviet power" Earlier, a series of events from the Kronshtadt rebellion in 1921 to the death of Lenin in 1924 had led them to hope for its collapse, but that had changed. "The opinion that Soviet power is here to stay, and that there will be no other Russia to deal with, is becoming almost universal." Convinced of the value of Soviet natural resources, the importance of the Russian market, and the influence of the USSR in world politics, the governments of France, Germany, Poland, and perhaps Italy would soon be conducting negotiations with the Soviet Union. (With England, he admitted, there was at "this moment no hope of making a deal,... and we must abandon any thought of entering talks with her.") The NKID was engaged, Chicherin explained further, in a "program of reaching separate bilateral agreements with separate states," a diplomatic system for Europe that it offered in opposition "to the hypocritical system of Locarno."^[58]

Regarding the purposes of British foreign policy, Chicherin's views differed sharply from those of Stalin. "I must tell you," he stated bluntly to the party congress, "that my conclusion is that the English leadership is not considering a military intervention. There may be occasionally some chitchat about this, but that is superficial, not serious." Nor did the English government expect "to see Soviet power toppled," he added. Rather, their goal was to alter Soviet foreign relations, to "soften us, to make us repay the debts and to give up our policy in the East." The apparent means by which they were attempting to do this was economic pressure. By cutting the USSR off from foreign credits and by impeding Russia's foreign trade, London was trying to "exploit the discontent of peasants inside the Soviet Union" and to accentuate the social crisis within the USSR.^[59] Chicherin's bluntness reveals his confidence and his political realism at a time when the intraparty discussion of foreign relations was becoming both doctrinaire and contentious.

Thus, by the end of 1925, three not completely compatible concepts of world politics had been formulated in Moscow. Each differed from the others in its analysis of the international situation, in its predictions for the future, and in its prescription for Soviet foreign relations. The years 1924-1926, usually viewed in terms of the struggle among the party leadership over the issues of "socialism in one country" versus "permanent revolution" and over isolationist versus integrationist strategies of economic development, were also the years when the future of Soviet foreign policy was at stake.