Britain recognises the USSR

On 1 February 1924 the British government sent Moscow a note recognising the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as the lawful – that is, de jure – authority in those territories of the former Russian Empire that acknowledged its rule. The decision was taken by a cabinet that had been in office for ten days: the first Labour government in history, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, who was both Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. Britain was not the first state to recognise the Bolsheviks; their neighbours and Germany, among others, had done so earlier. It was, however, the first of the great powers of the victorious coalition to do so, and within weeks and months Italy, France and many smaller states followed its example. For Moscow, this meant the end of the isolation in which it had found itself since the October Revolution. For London, it was meant to be the beginning of a settlement of all the disputed questions: debts, propaganda and trade. Recognition turned out to be easier than anything that was to follow.

From intervention to a trade agreement

After the Bolsheviks seized power, Britain’s relations with Russia fell apart within a few months. Vladimir Lenin’s government made the peace of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, refused to repay the debts of the tsarist regime and the Provisional Government, most of them contracted in London and Paris, and nationalised foreign enterprises. Britain sent troops to Archangel, Murmansk and the Caucasus, and during the Civil War supplied the Whites with weapons, money and advisers. The most fervent advocate of the fight against Bolshevism was the War Secretary, Winston Churchill, who called for Bolshevism to be “strangled in its cradle”. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, however, believed that the intervention could not be won and that British voters did not want another war. By the autumn of 1919 British troops had left northern Russia.

The British labour movement had opposed the intervention from the outset. In May 1920 London dockers refused to load munitions intended for Poland onto the ship Jolly George. In August, as the Red Army advanced on Warsaw, the Labour Party and the trade unions set up Councils of Action and threatened a general strike should the government try to drag the country into the war on Poland’s side. The government had no intention of doing so anyway.

Lloyd George wanted to replace war with trade. He believed that the exchange of goods would tame Bolshevism more effectively than a blockade. On 16 March 1921 the President of the Board of Trade, Robert Horne, and the Soviet People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade, Leonid Krasin, signed the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement in London. It was Soviet Russia’s first such agreement with a great power. Both sides undertook to refrain from hostile propaganda, and London recognised Soviet Russia de facto. In those same days the Tenth Congress of the Bolshevik party, meeting in the shadow of the Kronstadt rebellion, adopted Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which permitted private trade and foreign concessions. Full recognition, however, did not follow. A Soviet trade representative worked in London and a British commercial agent, Robert Hodgson, in Moscow, but there were no ambassadors.

Lloyd George tried to go further. In April 1922, at the Genoa Conference, the Western powers offered Russia credits and recognition in return for acknowledging its debts. The talks stalled, and the Soviet delegates, led by the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Georgy Chicherin, meanwhile concluded the Treaty of Rapallo with Germany. Germany thus became the first of Europe’s major states to recognise Soviet Russia de jure. In the autumn of 1922 Lloyd George fell, and the Conservative governments proved considerably cooler towards Moscow. On 8 May 1923 the Foreign Secretary, Lord George Curzon, sent Moscow a note through Hodgson with a ten-day deadline. He demanded an end to anti-British propaganda in Persia, Afghanistan and India, the release of detained British trawlers and compensation for repression against British subjects, threatening to terminate the trade agreement. After a few weeks Moscow gave way on most points, but the “Curzon ultimatum” long remained a symbol of British hostility in the USSR.

The first Labour government

In December 1923 the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, called an early election, counting on support for protective tariffs. The Conservatives won the most seats but lost their majority. Labour, with 191 MPs, came second and H. H. Asquith’s Liberals third. Asquith decided not to rescue Baldwin but to let Labour govern, convinced that as a minority government it would be unable to carry out anything radical. On 21 January 1924 the House of Commons passed a vote of no confidence in Baldwin’s government, and the next day King George V asked MacDonald to form a government. On that same 21 January, at Gorki near Moscow, Lenin died.

Recognition of the USSR was one of the few Labour manifesto pledges that a government without a majority could fulfil. It required no legislation, since the recognition of states was a prerogative of the Crown exercised by the government. Labour had for years been calling for normal relations with Russia, and its leaders hoped that opening up the Soviet market would help in the fight against unemployment, which since 1921 had not fallen below a million. Yet MacDonald was no friend of the Bolsheviks. He was a declared opponent of communism and of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which had been trying to get into the Labour Party, and he knew of Soviet repression of socialists. He believed, however, that without recognition it was impossible even to begin talks on debts and propaganda.

On 12 February he explained this in the House of Commons. He said that as Foreign Secretary he had recognised Russia “without delay”, because any minister who tried to settle questions of debts, treaties and propaganda with a Russian representative who was not even a chargé d’affaires would fail to settle them “if he lived to the age of Methuselah”. “The condition precedent of a settlement was recognition,” he concluded.

The note of 1 February

The note reached Moscow while the Second Congress of Soviets of the USSR was in session there. On 31 January that same congress had adopted the first constitution of the Soviet Union, formally established on 30 December 1922. MacDonald deliberately addressed the document to the congress, which he regarded as the supreme authority of the state. In it the British government declared that it recognised the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as the de jure government in those territories of the former empire that acknowledged its authority. It invited Soviet representatives to London to prepare agreements on debts, claims, the old treaties and trade. It also stated that genuinely friendly relations would not be possible without mutual confidence, and that there could be none without abstention from interference in the other state’s internal affairs. This was an allusion to the activities of the Comintern, headed by Grigory Zinoviev.

Moscow replied at once. According to MacDonald, within an hour of the note’s delivery the congress sent London a telegram “of the most cordial kind”, and a few days later Chicherin sent a formal reply by post. The British note appeared in the press on 2 February and the Soviet reply on 9 February. The two sides agreed for the time being to exchange chargés d’affaires rather than ambassadors. Hodgson became the British chargé d’affaires in Moscow, and the USSR was represented in London by Christian Rakovsky, former head of the government of Soviet Ukraine and a close associate of Leon Trotsky. Doing without ambassadors also spared the King’s feelings. George V was a cousin of Nicholas II, murdered with his family by the Bolsheviks in 1918, and according to his biographers he found it hard to accept the idea of receiving representatives of their government.

A race to recognise

London beat Rome by a few days. Benito Mussolini, who had long been negotiating a trade agreement with Moscow, had wanted Italy to be the first to recognise the USSR, and did so on 7 February 1924 by signing a commercial treaty. The head of the Fascist government had no qualms about doing business with communists if it paid. In February and March the USSR was recognised by Norway, Austria, Greece and Sweden, in May by China, and on 28 October by France, governed since the spring by the left-wing government of Édouard Herriot. Japan followed at the beginning of 1925. In Moscow 1924 was called the “streak of recognitions”. Of the powers, only the United States remained outside this circle; it did not recognise the USSR until November 1933.

Treaties that never came into force

On 14 April 1924 an Anglo-Soviet conference opened at the Foreign Office. The British delegation was led by the Under-Secretary of State, Arthur Ponsonby, and the Soviet one by Rakovsky. The talks went badly. British holders of Russian bonds and the owners of nationalised enterprises demanded compensation, while Moscow advanced its own claims for damage caused by the intervention and demanded a loan. At the beginning of August the negotiations broke down, but a group of Labour MPs undertook to mediate, and on 8 August two treaties were signed: a general treaty and a commercial treaty. The general treaty postponed the question of debts to a further agreement, upon whose conclusion the British government was to guarantee a loan to the USSR.

It was the loan guarantee that unleashed the storm. Conservatives and Liberals asked why the British taxpayer should lend money to a state that had not repaid its old debts and was financing revolutionaries. In the autumn came the case of the communist editor John Campbell, whom the prosecution charged with inciting soldiers to mutiny and then dropped the charge. The opposition accused the government of yielding to pressure from the far left. On 8 October the House of Commons passed a Liberal motion that MacDonald treated as a vote of no confidence, and Parliament was dissolved. The election was set for 29 October.

Four days before the vote the Daily Mail published a letter, purportedly signed by Zinoviev as chairman of the Comintern, calling on British communists to prepare for revolution and arguing that ratification of the treaties with the USSR would further that aim. The Foreign Office had already sent Rakovsky a protest about the letter. Historians now agree that the “Zinoviev letter” was a forgery, although it captured the tone of genuine Comintern documents well. The Conservatives won a landslide. Labour lost 40 seats, despite winning more votes than a year earlier, while the Liberals suffered a real disaster. On 21 November 1924 Baldwin’s new government, with Austen Chamberlain as Foreign Secretary, informed Moscow that it would not submit the treaties to Parliament. It did not, however, withdraw recognition.

Rupture and restoration

Relations remained poor. Baldwin’s government accused the USSR of supporting the General Strike of 1926 and the revolution in China. On 12 May 1927 police in London searched the premises of the Soviet trading company Arcos and of the trade delegation. The government announced that it had evidence of espionage and at the end of May broke off diplomatic relations. A war scare broke out in the USSR, which Joseph Stalin exploited in his struggle against the opposition of Trotsky and Zinoviev. Relations were restored in October 1929 by MacDonald’s second government, and in December the two sides at last exchanged ambassadors.

Significance

The recognition of 1 February 1924 ended the period in which the victors of the Great War had treated the Bolshevik state as a temporary phenomenon that could be overthrown by intervention or blockade. The Soviet Union entered the international system as a recognised state, with embassies, treaties and credits, although through the Comintern it continued to support parties that sought to overthrow the governments of its partners. This dual character of Soviet policy – diplomacy and revolution at once – cast a shadow over all the years that followed. In Britain it entrenched the Conservatives’ conviction that Moscow could not be trusted, and for years the “Zinoviev letter” served the right as proof that the left was too naive about communism.

That distrust weighed heavily in 1939. When Britain and France were negotiating an alliance against Hitler with the USSR in the spring and summer, Neville Chamberlain’s government approached the talks half-heartedly, and Stalin did not believe in the West’s sincerity. On 23 August 1939 Vyacheslav Molotov signed a pact in Moscow with Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Only the German attack on the USSR in June 1941 made Britain and the Soviet Union allies. The government of Churchill, a lifelong opponent of Bolshevism, signed an agreement on joint action with Moscow in July 1941, and in London, under British auspices, General Władysław Sikorski concluded the agreement with the Soviet ambassador. The road to that alliance began with the note of February 1924.