The Treaty of Rapallo

On 16 April 1922, Easter Sunday, in the Hotel Imperiale in the Ligurian resort of Rapallo, the German foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, and the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of Soviet Russia, Georgy Chicherin, signed a short agreement of six articles. The two states restored full diplomatic relations, renounced their mutual claims arising from the war and the revolution, and promised each other economic cooperation. The content was modest, but the circumstances turned the agreement into a sensation. It was signed in the middle of a great economic conference at Genoa, behind the backs of Britain and France, who wanted to settle relations with Moscow themselves. Two states shut out of the post-war order, defeated Germany and Bolshevik Russia, showed that they could reach an understanding without the victors’ consent. In Paris, London and Warsaw the immediate question was against whom the agreement was directed. For many years afterwards the word “Rapallo” became a byword for German–Russian collusion.

The outcasts of Europe

After the First World War Germany and Soviet Russia found themselves outside the mainstream of European politics. Germany, bound by the Treaty of Versailles, was not a member of the League of Nations and was paying reparations, and in May 1921 the London Ultimatum had imposed on it a schedule of payments totalling 132 billion gold marks. Its governments pursued the so-called policy of fulfilment: they tried to pay in order to show that the victors’ demands could not be met. Few states recognised Bolshevik Russia. It had refused to pay the tsarist debts and nationalised the property of foreign firms, and from 1919, through the Communist International, it had been calling on the workers of the world to make revolution. Exhausted by the civil war and the great famine, however, after the Kronstadt rebellion it had switched to the New Economic Policy and was looking for foreign credit, technology and trade.

The two states also had more in common. Each had lost to the reborn Poland lands it regarded as its own, and neither accepted Poland’s borders. The Red Army had lost the war with Poland, and the Peace of Riga of March 1921 had left Moscow with a sense of defeat. In Germany, after the Upper Silesia plebiscite and the partition of the province in 1921, hostility towards Poland was widespread. Secret talks between German soldiers and the Bolsheviks had been going on since 1920, and in the spring of 1922 the first Reichswehr officers travelled to Russia. In May 1921 Berlin and Moscow had concluded a trade agreement under which they exchanged trade missions and Germany recognised the Soviet government as the sole representative of Russia.

Two schools of thought clashed in the German Foreign Ministry. The “Easterners”, led by the head of the Eastern Department, Ago von Maltzan, wanted a swift understanding with Moscow that would strengthen Germany’s hand against the West. The supporters of a Western orientation believed that the revision of Versailles could be achieved only in agreement with London, and that a flirtation with the Bolsheviks would make it harder. Rathenau belonged to the second group: an industrialist and liberal of Jewish descent, he had been foreign minister since 31 January 1922 in the government of Chancellor Joseph Wirth. Wirth himself was closer to the “Easterners” and made no secret, among confidants, that an understanding with Russia would be useful against Poland.

The Genoa Conference

The economic conference at Genoa was the idea of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George. He wanted to revive European trade, soften the dispute over reparations and draw Russia back into the world economy, and at the same time to score a success he needed in domestic politics. He obtained agreement to the conference in January 1922 at Cannes from the French prime minister, Aristide Briand. Briand paid for his accommodating attitude towards the British with the loss of office, and his successor, Raymond Poincaré, laid down tough conditions: at Genoa there was to be no discussion of either reparations or the revision of the peace treaties. He did not go to Genoa himself.

The conference, attended by delegations from 34 states, opened on 10 April 1922 in the medieval Palazzo San Giorgio. The United States declined to take part. For the first time since the war the Germans, with Wirth and Rathenau, and the Russians sat at the same table as the victors. The Soviet delegation was led by Chicherin and included Maxim Litvinov, Leonid Krasin and Adolph Joffe. The Russians were lodged at the Hotel Imperiale in Rapallo, some thirty kilometres from Genoa.

The most important talks soon moved from the conference halls to the villa where Lloyd George was staying. From 14 April the British, French, Italians and Belgians talked there with the Russians, without the Germans, about the tsarist debts, compensation for nationalised property and credits. The Germans, kept out of these talks, grew alarmed. They feared that the victors would come to terms with Moscow at their expense, for instance by allowing Russia to invoke Article 116 of the Treaty of Versailles, which reserved its right to German reparations. The Russians fed these fears, while for months they had been offering Berlin a bilateral agreement whose draft was largely ready.

The pyjama conference

The decision came on the night of 15–16 April. After midnight – around one or two in the morning, according to accounts – Joffe telephoned the Germans’ hotel in Genoa and proposed a meeting in Rapallo later that same day. According to the recollections of those involved, Maltzan woke his colleagues and the German delegation conferred in Rathenau’s room, in pyjamas and dressing gowns. This night-time meeting went down in history as the “pyjama conference”. Rathenau hesitated. He feared Lloyd George’s reaction and that Germany would lose the trust of the West, on which he had built his entire policy. Maltzan and Wirth argued that such an opportunity might never come again, and that if Germany refused, the Russians would strike a deal with the Allies. In the end Rathenau gave way.

On Easter Sunday the German diplomats drove to Rapallo. The talks at the Hotel Imperiale lasted several hours and concerned only details, since the text had been agreed beforehand. In the evening Rathenau and Chicherin signed. Only then did the Germans inform the other delegations. The hotel still stands, although after a change in municipal boundaries in 1928 it found itself in neighbouring Santa Margherita Ligure.

What the agreement provided

The agreement was short. Both states renounced reimbursement of war costs and compensation for war damage, including requisitions and losses suffered by civilians. They also renounced reimbursement of expenditure on prisoners of war, and Germany in addition waived the costs of interning Red Army soldiers who had crossed into East Prussia in 1920 while fleeing the Poles. Most important for Moscow was Article 2: Germany renounced claims arising from the Soviet nationalisation of the property of German citizens, provided that Russia did not satisfy similar claims by third states. This was a breach in the united front of the creditors, who at Genoa were demanding precisely compensation for nationalised property. Article 3 restored diplomatic and consular relations with immediate effect. Article 4 introduced the most-favoured-nation principle in trade and in the treatment of nationals, and Article 5 committed the two governments to economic cooperation and to consulting each other before either concluded an international agreement on Russia’s economic affairs.

The agreement contained no military provisions. Rumours of a secret military annex circulated from the very first days, but historians have not confirmed them. Most of the provisions came into force at once, the rest after the exchange of instruments of ratification in Berlin on 31 January 1923. On 5 November 1922 a separate agreement extended the Rapallo provisions to the Soviet republics allied with Russia: Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Far Eastern Republic.

Storm at Genoa

News of the agreement caused a storm at Genoa. Lloyd George was furious, because his plan of drawing Russia into Europe on Western terms lay in ruins. The French saw the agreement as proof that Germany had no intention of abiding by Versailles. On 18 April the Allies sent Germany a note of protest and excluded it from further talks on Russian affairs. The conference dragged on until 19 May and ended without any agreements. Poincaré used Rapallo as an argument that Germany had to be dealt with firmly. A few months later, in January 1923, French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr.

In Germany the agreement was mostly welcomed, because for the first time since 1918 German diplomacy had acted on its own initiative. General Hans von Seeckt greeted it with enthusiasm, seeing it as cover for military cooperation with the Red Army. President Friedrich Ebert and some Social Democrats had doubts, as did Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, who warned in the summer of 1922 that overly close ties with Moscow would alienate the West. Even so, in November he became Germany’s first ambassador in Moscow and one of the most faithful executors of the Rapallo policy. The far right, though pleased at the slap in the face for the West, heaped abuse on Rathenau as a Jew and a “fulfilment politician”. On 24 June 1922, less than ten weeks after Rapallo, assassins from the far-right Organisation Consul shot him dead in Berlin.

For Moscow Rapallo was a great success. For the first time a major power had recognised the Soviet government de jure, and for several years Germany became its most important trading partner and its window on Europe. Vladimir Lenin had long argued that the contradictions between capitalist states should be exploited, and Rapallo was the first major example of such a policy. In Poland, whose delegation at Genoa was led by the foreign minister, Konstanty Skirmunt, Rapallo was received with alarm, as a harbinger of cooperation between the country’s two largest neighbours at the Republic’s expense. Formally, Poland’s relations with Berlin and Moscow did not change, but the fear of a new “Rapallo” accompanied Polish foreign policy throughout the interwar years.

Significance

Rapallo was not an alliance. It contained no political or military commitments, and in the following years Germany tried to maintain a balance between West and East: in 1925 it signed the Locarno Treaties and in 1926 it joined the League of Nations, but in the same year it renewed its understanding with Moscow in the Treaty of Berlin. Under the cover of good diplomatic relations, secret cooperation between the Reichswehr and the Red Army developed until 1933: German pilots trained at Lipetsk, tank crews near Kazan, and Soviet commanders learned German staff methods.

Rapallo also gave both states the sense that together they could undermine the Versailles order, and above all Poland’s borders. Seeckt wrote in September 1922 that the understanding with Russia should lead to Poland’s disappearance. After Adolf Hitler came to power relations cooled sharply, but in August 1939 Hitler and Joseph Stalin returned to the same logic. The pact signed on 23 August by Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, with its secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe, was later compared with Rapallo, although it was something far more dangerous: not an agreement between two weak outcasts but a deal between two dictatorships on a joint act of aggression. To this day, in Poland and the Baltic states, the “spirit of Rapallo” stands for the fear that Germany and Russia will come to terms over the heads of their neighbours.