"Band of confessions". Comintern. Zinoviev and Trotsky. HISTORY OF SOVIET RUSSIA - USSR

SOVIET RUSSIA. Brief history of the USSR

 

SOVIET FOREIGN POLICY

"Band of confessions". Comintern. Zinoviev and Trotsky

 

The first great summit meeting of the 20th century, as the Genoa Conference was called, did not lead to the establishment of strong relations between Soviet Russia and the West. Britain was in no hurry to replace an important, but limited and unstable trade treaty with a comprehensive peace agreement. France was even more hostile, because by the time of the October Revolution, the Russian state had 1.5 million French securities, which exerted the strongest pressure on their government, demanding compensation for damages. The Bolsheviks, in their turn, connected the solution of this problem with a diplomatic claim.

 

According to Krasin, the Hague Conference, which took place in the summer of 1922 (completed its work on July 20), turned out to be “boring and useless”; it did not settle the economic relations between Soviet Russia and the West.

 

However, the only government in the world that openly declared that it was impossible to develop relations with the USSR while the Bolsheviks were in power was the US government. During this period, only it put forward the demand for a boycott of the Soviet economic system.

 

The attacker in 1923, in certain party circles of the USSR, inspired hope for a global re-evolution. The situation in Germany related to the occupation by France of the Ruhr region (in response to Germany’s support for the payment of the next amount of reparations) prompted the Bolshevik leaders to rely on the German revolution. Using the greatest prestige in the Comintern, Zinoviev and Trotsky sought to "push" the armed uprising of the working class in Germany, seeing in it many similarities with the Russian October. The performance in Germany was, meanwhile, suppressed. Labor movements in Bulgaria and Poland were crushed.

 

International events began to change dramatically in early 1924. In January, British conservatives were defeated in parliamentary elections. Labor Party leader D.R. MacDonald became Prime Minister.

 

On February 1, 1924, his government recognized the USSR de jure and proposed organizing an Anglo-Soviet commission to study the unresolved economic and political problems between the two countries.

 

The initiative of England caused a wave of recognition of the Soviet government and other countries of the West in the years 1924-1925. On February 7, 1924, the Italian government of B. Mussolini formally recognized the USSR. In the Soviet Union, it was believed that Italy could significantly help in the development of the southern outskirts of the country, as Germany did with respect to the central regions of the USSR.

 

Adhering to a tough anti-Soviet stance for a number of years, France, represented by the chairman of the new government, E. Herriot, officially recognized the USSR on October 28, 1924. Meanwhile, the economic problems of Franco-Soviet relations were almost insoluble, since neither side wanted to concessions on the issue of public debt of pre-revolutionary Russia. The USSR Drug-Foreign Affairs Committee at that time considered relations with France as a means of exerting pressure on Germany and keeping the latter from reorienting to the west. France, for its part, did not want to invest in the Soviet economy under any pretext.

 

An important result of Soviet foreign policy in the Far East was the restoration of ties with China. This process was complex and long, since this country was divided into several parts, each of which had its own ruler. Only in May 1924, a prominent Soviet diplomat L. M. Karakhan succeeded in signing an agreement with China in China on the resumption of diplomatic relations and on maintaining Soviet control over the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), which ran through Manchuria.

 

In 1924, the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations with Austria, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Greece. In January 1925 - with Japan. In total for this period, the USSR recognized 13 states.

 

The widespread diplomatic recognition of the USSR was greatly facilitated by the transition to NEP. In the years 1923-1925 on the stock exchanges of the capitalist countries, Soviet chervonets were quoted as hard currency. In March 1924 the chervonets on the New York Stock Exchange was quoted at 5 dollars 20 cents (although it must be remembered that 1 chervonets was equal to 10 rubles and, therefore, the Soviet ruble was quoted at 52 cents). The quotes of chervonets abroad ceased in 1926 after the prohibition to take them out of the country.

 

In the 20s. The volume of trade between Soviet Russia and Germany continued to expand, reaching 30% of our country's foreign trade turnover. This was facilitated by a treaty of friendship and mutual neutral-aunt, signed in Berlin on April 24, 1926. It extended the validity of the Rapall treaty for five years.

 

In the military sphere, relations between Soviet Russia and Germany began to improve as early as 1920. Then they had the character of secret cooperation . The main goal for the command of the Red Army in military contacts with the Reichswehr (German armed forces in 1919-1935; in 1935, the Wehrmacht was established on the basis of the Reichswehr) was to introduce the latest German technology and the work of the German headquarters during the First World War. For Germany, a more important circumstance was the training of personnel for the future mass army, as well as the testing on the territory of Soviet Russia of the newest means of warfare.

 

 At the request of the German side, a flight school in Lipetsk was founded in the USSR, which trained dozens of pilots for the German Air Force, the future Luftwaffe, and a tank school in Kazan. A large enterprise was also organized for the joint conduct of chemical experiments and the combat use of toxic substances. In the Soviet tank school, the future Wehrmacht colonel-general and commander of the tank army in 1941 on the Soviet-German front G. Guderian studied military art. From the side of the Red Army, Tukhachevsky, Egorov, Dybenko, Uborevich, Yakir, Kork, Fedko and other commanders who studied new military equipment there visited various periods in Germany.

 

In general, military cooperation between Soviet Russia and the Weimar Republic in 1920-1933, which lasted until Hitler came to power and curtailed at the initiative of the Soviet side, was quite an ordinary phenomenon for foreign policy practice and did not have any substantial scope.

 

International cooperation has always been closely associated with the economic relations of states. NEP, as noted above, has become a kind of conductor of Soviet foreign policy. It was no coincidence that I. I. Rykov in one of his speeches in 1924 noted that almost no country in Western Europe could be found in any way that would in one way or another be drawn into trade relations with Soviet Russia. At the same time, the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars emphasized that the Soviet state is the largest "economic factor in the international market, and it is no longer possible to oust it from there."

 

History of the Soviet Union and Russia in the 20th Century

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Lenin

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