Dictated: Dictated by phone on April 18, 1922
Published:
First published in 1959 in Lenin Miscellany XXXVI.
Printed from secretarial notes.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1976,
Moscow,
Volume 45,
pages 530c-531a.
Translated: Yuri Sdobnikov
Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
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Litvinov’s telegram on the signing of the agreement with Germany[1] raises the question of whether it is appropriate to publish this right away or to postpone it until there is more clarity on whether or not a break at Genoa is inevitable.[2] I believe this question should be settled this very day.
[1] A reference to the treaty concluded by Soviet Russia with Germany on April 16, 1922, at Rapallo, near Genoa, during the Genoa Conference.
Lenin gave an assessment of the Rapallo Treaty in his “Draft Decision of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee on the Report of the Delegation to the Genoa Conference” (see present edition, Vol. 33, pp. 356–57).
The All-Russia C.E.C., in a decision on the delegation’s report adopted on May 17, 1922, recognised “only this type of treaty as being normal for the R.S.F.S.R.’s relations with capitalist states” (III sessia Vserossiiskogo Tsentralnogo Ispolnitelnogo Komiteta IX sozyva. Bulleten No. 5, 19 maia 1922 goda, p. 17). The report on the signing of the Rapallo Treaty was published in Izvestia VTsIK No. 85 of April 19.
[2] A reference to the situation which had taken shape at the Genoa Conference.
On April 11, 1922, the Soviet delegation was handed the “experts’ report” worked out at a conference of experts from Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium and Japan in London in March (London Memorandum). It contained demands that the Soviet Government should pay all the debts of the tsarist and Provisional governments and all the authorities which had existed in Russia, return to foreigners their former property which had been nationalised by the Soviet state, or compensate them for the damage inflicted on their property, or for the loss of it, and establish economic and legal privileges for foreigners, and a number of other demands which in fact meant abolition of the foreign trade monopoly.
The official reply of the Soviet delegation to the “experts’ report” was set out in its memorandum of April 20. The Soviet delegation firmly rejected these demands, qualifying them as an attempt to “introduce in Russia a system of capitulations encroaching on her sovereignty” (Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR, Vol. V, Moscow, 1961, p. 235), and put forward counter-claims for compensation of the losses inflicted on Russia by the foreign intervention, stressing that the R.S.F.S.R. Government was prepared to negotiate on compensation of the losses of foreign citizens only on the basis of reciprocity.
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