Georgy Chicherin

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The Soviet statesman Georgi Vasilyevich Chicherin (1872-1936) guided Soviet foreign policy in the years following the foundation of the U.S.S.R.

Born in Tambov Oblast in 1872, Georgi Chicherin was a member of the Russian aristocracy - an unlikely background for a future Bolshevik. After graduating from the University of St. Petersburg, he trained for and later joined the foreign service. During the Revolution of 1905, however, he became involved in the socialist movement, and in 1907 he left Russia. He spent the next decade abroad, mainly in England, where he agitated against World War I. The Russian Revolution of 1917 converted him to bolshevism, and the British jailed him as a "hostile alien" but allowed him to return to Russia early in 1918.

As the only Bolshevik with formal diplomatic training and experience, Chicherin was assigned the post of people's commissar of foreign affairs, succeeding Leon Trotsky. He was strongly in favor of establishing friendly relations with other countries, most importantly Germany, in order to enhance the stability of the Soviet regime. After the failure of the Soviet march on Warsaw in 1920 and the initiation of Lenin's New Economic Policy in 1921, Chicherin was able to pursue his policy of strong ties with Germany and advantageous ties elsewhere.

Chicherin's crowning achievement was the Treaty of Rapallo (1922), in which the pariah nations of the Soviet Union and Germany ratified mutually advantageous diplomatic, economic, and military agreements. Chicherin secured diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union from every major world power except the United States, and he was also successful in normalizing his country's relations with its Moslem neighbors, especially Turkey. He was not able, nor did he seek, to establish comprehensive ties, such as those with Germany, with other foreign powers; in fact, Soviet relations with many nations, notably England, remained very shaky. Chicherin's policies, however, did give the Soviet regime a needed degree of stability in international affairs and thus facilitated development of the New Economic Policy.

Chicherin avoided involvement in the intraparty dispute of the 1920s, but this conflict made his work at the Foreign Office difficult. Moreover, his failing health caused him to give greater power to his deputy Maxim Litvinov, and by the late 1920s Litvinov was in effect the director of Soviet foreign policy. Chicherin formally retired as commissar of foreign affairs in 1930 and spent the next years in semiseclusion. He died on July 7, 1936.

Further Reading

A highly sympathetic sketch of Chicherin is in Louis Fischer, Men and Politics: Europe between the Two World Wars (1966). Chicherin's tenure as commissar of foreign affairs receives considerable analysis in Fischer's The Soviets in World Affairs … 1917-1929 (2 vols., 1930; 2d ed. 1951). Some of Chicherin's defenses of early Soviet foreign policy are in his own Two Years of Foreign Policy (1920; trans. 1920).

Additional Sources

O'Connor, Timothy Edward, Diplomacy and revolution: G.V. Chicherin and Soviet foreign affairs, 1918-1930, Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988.

(1872 - 1936), revolutionary and diplomat.

Georgy Chicherin was born on November 12, 1872, in Karaul, Tambov Province, into an aristocratic family of declining fortunes. He studied in the history and philology faculty at St. Petersburg University. After graduation, he worked in the archives department of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Disillusioned with the Romanov regime, Chicherin fled to Western Europe in 1904, spending the next fourteen years immersed in socialist émigré politics. He belonged to the Menshevik wing of Russian socialism, but his strong opposition to World War I aligned him with Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik faction.

Returning to Russia in January 1918, Chicherin joined the Bolshevik Party and soon was appointed commissar of Foreign Affairs. He was uniquely qualified for the post, possessing a thorough knowledge of diplomatic history, experience in the tsarist Foreign Ministry, command of several foreign languages, familiarity with European conditions, and considerable negotiating experience from his days in the fractious émigré community. Block-daded by the Allies during the period of Civil War and foreign intervention in Russia, Chicherin used radio and the press to create a novel diplomacy of propaganda. Bolshevik appeals to the governments and peoples of the West for fair treatment of Soviet Russia were mixed with revolutionary calls to overthrow those same imperialist regimes.

The failure of the Bolshevik Revolution to spread abroad convinced Chicherin that a new period of capitalist stabilization had begun. He led the diplomatic component of the USSR's New Economic Policy (NEP), seeking peaceful relationships with the great powers as well as foreign trade, technology, loans, and investment. Chicherin coined the term "peaceful coexistence" to characterize this new era of temporary accommodation with the capitalist world.

Chicherin's major diplomatic successes were the 1921 Anglo-Soviet Trade Treaty and, with Germany, the 1922 Rapallo Treaty and 1925 Berlin Treaty. He saw strong political, economic, and even military ties with Germany as the key to preventing a European-wide anti-Soviet alliance of capitalist powers. He also fought tirelessly against the League of Nations because he saw it as the framework for an anti-Soviet coalition. In the 1920s the USSR received full diplomatic recognition from all the great powers, except the United States. These successes were offset by a number of failures. The USSR was unable to secure sufficient financial and technological assistance from the West. Britain and France continued to manifest undisguised hostility toward Moscow, causing Kremlin leaders to fear renewed armed intervention against Soviet Russia. Germany moved closer to the Anglo-French camp by signing the Locarno Accords in 1925 and joining the League of Nations.

Chicherin saw opportunities in the nationalliberation movements in Asia. Support for anticolonial struggles, he hoped, would sap the strength of the imperialist powers.

Chicherin was never a significant figure in Kremlin politics, though he was elected to the Party's Central Committee in 1925. He played a significant role in foreign policy formulation because Lenin greatly valued his knowledge, experience, and abilities. After Lenin's incapacitating stroke in 1922, Chicherin began to lose influence, and was eclipsed gradually by his deputy, Maxim Litvinov. A combination of Chicherin's estrangement from the Stalinist elite and his increasingly poor health virtually eliminated his role in foreign affairs after 1928. He was replaced by Litvinov as foreign commissar in 1930 and lived on a pension until his death, of natural causes, in 1936.

Bibliography

Jacobson, Jon. (1994). When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

O'Connor, Timothy E. (1988). Diplomacy and Revolution: G.V. Chicherin and Soviet Foreign Affairs, 1918 - 1930. Ames: Iowa State University Press.

—TEDDY J. ULDRICKS

Georgy Chicherin in 1925

Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin (Russian: Георгий Васильевич Чичерин) (24 November [O.S. 12 November 1872] 1872– 7 July 1936) was a Marxist revolutionary and a Soviet politician. He served as People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs in the Soviet government from March 1918 to 1930.

Biography

A distant relative of Aleksandr Pushkin, Georgy Chicherin was born in an aristocratic family. His father, Vasily N. Chicherin, was a diplomat in the service of the Russian Empire. As a young man, Chicherin became fascinated with history as well as classical music, especially Richard Wagner (and indirectly Friedrich Nietzsche), two passions which he would pursue throughout his life. He spoke all major European languages and a number of Asian ones^[1]. After graduating from St. Petersburg University with a degree in history and languages, Chicherin worked in the archival section of the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs from 1897 until 1903.

In 1904 Chicherin inherited the estate of his celebrated uncle — Boris Chicherin — in the Tambov region and became very wealthy. He immediately used his new found fortune to support revolutionary activities in the runup to the Russian Revolution of 1905 and was forced to flee abroad to avoid arrest later in the year. He spent the next 13 years in Western Europe, mostly London, Paris and Berlin, where he joined the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and was active in emigre politics.

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Chicherin adopted an anti-war position, which brought him closer to Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks. In 1917 he was arrested by the British government for his anti-war writings and spent a few months in the Brixton prison. In the meantime, the Bolsheviks had come to power in Russia after the October Revolution of 1917 and the first head of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (which had replaced the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Leon Trotsky, secured Chicherin's release and safe passage to Russia in exchange for British subjects held in Russia at the time, including George Buchanan, the British ambassador.

Upon his return to Russia in early 1918, Chicherin formally joined the Bolsheviks and was appointed Trotsky's deputy during the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. After the treaty was signed in late February 1918, Trotsky, who had advocated a different policy, resigned his position in early March. Chicherin became the acting head of the Commissariat and was appointed Commissar for Foreign Affairs on May 30.

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Tchitcherin Wants Japan Excluded

In 1922, Chicherin participated in the Genoa Conference and signed the Treaty of Rapallo with Germany. He pursued a policy of collaboration with Germany and developed a closer working relationship with Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau. During this period, he also held diplomatic negotiations with nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, on the status of the Roman Catholic Church in the newly formed Soviet Union.

Although known for his workaholic habits from 1918 and until the late 1920s, he became increasingly sidelined by an illness from 1928 on and was formally replaced by his deputy, Maxim Litvinov, in 1930. After his death his name was erased from the Communist Party's history^[2]

Notes

1. ^ See G. Gorodetsky. Soviet Foreign Policy 1917-1991: A Retrospective, Routledge, 1994, ISBN 0-7146-4506-0, p.23
2. ^ Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, 1971

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Georgy Chicherin

• Timothy Edward O'Connor. Diplomacy and Revolution: G.V. Chicherin and Soviet Foreign Affairs, 1918-1930, Ames, Iowa State University Press, 1988, ISBN 0-8138-0367-5, 250p.
• J. F. Van Agt, Alexandre Andreyev. Soviet Russia and Tibet: The Debacle of Secret Diplomacy, 1918-1930s, Brill Academic Publishers, 2003, ISBN 90-04-12952-9, Brill's Tibetan Studies Library v. 4, ISSN 1568-6183 , p.76.

Political offices
Preceded by Leon Trotsky	People's Comissar for Foreign Affairs 1918–1930	Succeeded by Maxim Litvinov

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