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Litvinov and Kamenev—Ambassadors Extraordinary: The Problem of Soviet Representation Abroad

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Richard Kent Debo
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Extract

In November 1917, the Bolshevik Party came to power in Russia with a foreign policy based on “proletarian internationalism” and the aim of spreading the socialist revolution to all parts of Europe. Developed by V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky this policy sought to take advantage of the disruption of European society caused by World War I to transform that conflict of state against state into a vast international civil war of class against class. Believing that the peoples of Europe were weary of war and ripe for revolution the Bolsheviks called for the negotiation of a “just and democratic peace” based on the principles of no annexations, no indemnifications and the liberation of all colonial, dependent and oppressed nations. The Bolsheviks hoped that bourgeois governments would be unable to accept these principles and that their failure to do so would generate sufficient popular unrest to ignite revolution everywhere in Europe.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , September 1975 , pp. 463 - 482
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1975

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References

1. The literature on proletarian internationalism during World War I is quite extensive. The two classics are Fainsod, Merle, International Socialism and the World War (Cambridge, Mass., 1935)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Gankin, Olga and Fisher, H. H., eds., The Bolsheviks and the World War: The Origin of the Third International (Stanford, 1940)Google Scholar. In recent years much new work has been added. See especially Korolev, N. E., Lenin i meshdunarodnoe rabochee dvizhenie, 1914—1918 (Moscow, 1968)Google Scholar; Lademacher, Horst, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1967)Google Scholar; and Temkin, la. G., Lenin i mezhdunarodnaia sotsial-demokratiia, 1914-1917 (Moscow, 1968)Google Scholar.

2. Ullman, Richard H., Intervention and the War (Princeton, 1961)Google Scholar; Kennan, George F., Russia Leaves the War (Princeton, 1956)Google Scholar; Bradley, John, Allied Intervention in Russia, 1917-1920 (London, 1968)Google Scholar.

3. Debo, Richard K., “The Making of a Bolshevik: Georgii Chicherin in England, 1914-1918,” Slavic Review, 25, no. 4 (December 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Great Britain, Public Record Office, London. Foreign Office Papers, . Record Group 371, Volume 3020, Document 237030. Foreign Office papers will henceforth, be cited as PRO F.O. 371 followed by the volume and document numbers. See also PRO F.O. 371/3019/229362; 371/3020/233970, 242028.

5. PRO F.O. 371/3298/1957.

6. PRO F.O. 371/3298/2689.

7. Ibid.

8. PRO F.O. 371/3298/3346.

9. Great Britain, Public Record Office, London. Cabinet Papers, Record Group 23, Volume 4, Folio 278. See also Ullman, , Intervention and the War, pp. 58–60 Google Scholar.

10. PRO F.O. 371/3298/3346.

11. PRO F.O. 371/3298/4558.

12. PRO F.O. 371/3298/10026.

13. PRO F.O. 371/3312/11543.

14. PRO F.O. 371/3298/9300; 371/3298/10017.

15. PRO F.O. 371/3298/13444.

16. PRO F.O. 371/3312/16563.

17. PRO F.O. 371/3298/28849; 371/3299/31794.

18. PRO F.O. 371/3299/33471.

19. PRO F.O. 371/3299/37234.

20. Ibid. Lord Robert Cecil, the Parliamentary under secretary of state for foreign affairs, minuted on Thomson's report: “Personally I feel convinced we shall have to expel Litvinov, and I see very little objection to that being done.”

21. PRO F.O. 371/3298/15369; 371/3298/20491.

22. Fokke, D. G., “Na stsene i za kulisami Brestskoi tragikomedii,” Arkhiv” russkoi revoliutsii, 20, p. 161 Google Scholar. Also see Wheeler-Bennett, John W., Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace (London, 1938), pp. 196–197 Google Scholar.

23. PRO F.O. 371/3315/19692.

24. Sadoul, Jacques, Notes sur la Revolution Bolchevique (Paris, 1920), p. 215 Google Scholar.

25. Cited in Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, p. 403.

26. Zalkind, Ivan A., “N.K.I.D. v semnadtsatom godu,” Mezhdunarodnaia zhizn', no. 10 (1927), pp. 15–25 Google Scholar.

27. Sisson, Edgar, One Hundred Red Days: A Personal Chronicle of the Bolshevik Revolution (New Haven, 1931), p. 1931 Google Scholar.

28. Ibid., p. 304.

29. France, Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangeres, Quai d'Orsay, Paris. Record Group: La Guerre de 1914-1918. Russie, Action des Allies; Volume 32; Folios 62-63. Hereafter cited as MAE, followed by collection title, volume and folio numbers.

30. MAE, Guerre, Russie, Action des Allies, 32/66.

31. See Schapiro, Leonard, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy (New York, 1965), pp. 52–88 Google Scholar.

32. Sadoul, , Notes, p. 215 Google Scholar.

33. Ibid.

34. Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk, p. 284. Wheeler-Bennett seems to have been misled by former members of the British Foreign Office whom he consulted when preparing his work. This erroneous information not only caused him to make the inaccurate statement noted above, but also to place the origin of the Kamenev mission in the wrong context, dating its inception from the crisis of late February when the Bolsheviks seemed ready to accept Allied aid against Germany instead of late January when it actually began.

35. Institut Lenin pri TsK VKP (b), Protokoly Tsentral'nogo komiteta RSDRP (b): Avgust 1917 g.-jevral’ 1918 g. (Moscow, 1929), pp. 199-207.

36. Ibid. Also see Lenin, V. I., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., 55 vols. (Moscow, 1958), 35: 191-194, 243-251Google Scholar.

37. MAE, Guerre, Russie, Action des Allies, 32/64.

38. MAE, Guerre, Russie, 29/5; PRO F.O. 371/3299/32015.

39. MAE, Guerre, Russie, Action des Allies, 28/43.

40. MAE, Guerre, Russie, Action des Allies, 32/74-75.

41. PRO F.O. 371/3315/19692.

42. MAE, Guerre, Russie, Action des Allies, 32/76-78, 86.

43. MAE, Guerre, Russie, Action des Allies, 32/82-83.

44. MAE, Guerre, Russie, Action des Allies, 32/99, 116.

45. MAE, Guerre, Russie, Action des Allies, 32/124.

46. MAE, Guerre, Russie, Action des Allies, 32/119.

47. PRO F.O. 371/3315/29125.

48. PRO F.O. 371/3315/35184.

49. PRO F.O. 371/3315/34847. The two Bolsheviks, in fact, landed at Aberdeen on February 23.

50. PRO F.O. 371/3315/36741.

51. PRO F.O. 371/3315/41362. This inventory raises some rather interesting questions about the purpose of Zalkind's mission to Switzerland. If he was engaged in the same type of enterprise as Kamenev, why should he be carrying blueprints of Russian warships and a report concerning the movement of British submarines in the Baltic? As Zalkind intended to use Switzerland as a base for revolutionary propaganda in Germany he may have been intending to use these items as some type of “bait” to tempt the German authorities, but it is still difficult to account for their presence in his baggage. British Foreign Office sources unfortunately do not throw any light on the subject, simply stating that “in the opinion of the Admiralty Division Representative this information would be very valuable to the enemy, and it is considered dangerous.”

52. PRO F.O. 371/3315/46733.

53. Ibid. Also see PRO F.O. 371/3299/36404.

54. PRO F.O. 371/3315/35184.

55. MAE, Guerre, Russie, Action des Allies, 32/157.

56. MAE, Guerre, Russie, Action des Allies, 32/125, 129, 130-135, 142, 155.

57. MAE, Guerre, Russie, Action des Allies, 32/100-101.

58. MAE, Guerre, Russie, Action des Allies, 32/161.

59. MAE, Guerre, Russie, Action des Allies, 32/159.

60. MAE, Guerre, Russie, Action des Allies, 32/160.

61. MAE, Guerre, Russie, Action des Allies, 32/158.

62. MAE, Guerre, Russie, Action des Allies, 32/158, 165, 167.

63. PRO F.O. 371/3315/35127.

64. PRO F.O. 371/3315/42956.

65. PRO F.O. 371/3315/38742.

66. Chicherin, G. V., Two Years of Soviet Foreign Policy (New York, 1920), pp. 19–20 Google Scholar. Zalkind, who travelled with Kamenev only as far as Sweden, eventually succeeded in reaching Switzerland by way of Germany.

67. Maisky, Ivan, Journey into the Past (London, 1962), p. 63 Google Scholar.