Treaty of Rapallo

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The Treaty of Rapallo was signed by Germany and the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic on April 16, 1922.

As part of a plan to encourage economic recovery after World War I, the Allies invited Germany and Soviet Russia to a European conference in Genoa, Italy, in April 1922. Lenin accepted the invitation and designated Foreign Minister Georgy Chicherin to lead the Soviet delegation. Accompanied by Maxim Litvinov, Leonid Krasin, and others, Chicherin stopped in Berlin on his way to Italy and worked out a draft treaty. The German government, still hopeful for a favorable settlement at Genoa, refused to formalize the treaty immediately. In Genoa, the Allied delegations insisted that the Soviet government recognize the debts of the prerevolutionary governments. The Soviets countered with an offer to repay the debts and compensate property owners if the Allies paid for the destruction caused by Allied intervention. While these negotiations remained deadlocked, the German delegation worried that an Allied-Soviet treaty would leave Germany further isolated. When the Soviet delegation proposed a private meeting, the Germans accepted, and the Russian-German treaty was signed by Chicherin and German foreign minister Walter Rathenau.

The two sides agreed to drop all wartime claims against each other, to cooperate economically, and to establish diplomatic relations. The Treaty of Rapallo surprised the Western powers. Germany ended its isolation with an apparent shift to an Eastern policy, while Soviet Russia found a trading partner and won normalization of relations without resolving the debt issue. This special relationship between Soviet Russia and Germany, including some military cooperation, lasted for ten years.

Bibliography

League of Nations Treaty Series, Vol. 19. (1923). London: Harrison and Sons.

—HAROLD J. GOLDBERG

See also: Treaty of Rapallo, 1920

The Treaty of Rapallo was an agreement that was made in the Italian town of Rapallo on April 16, 1922 between Germany (the Weimar Republic) and Soviet Russia under which each renounced all territorial and financial claims against the other following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and World War I.

The two governments also agreed to normalise their diplomatic relations and to "co-operate in a spirit of mutual goodwill in meeting the economic needs of both countries".

The Treaty was signed during the Genoa Conference by Georgi Chicherin, foreign minister of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic, and his German counterpart Walther Rathenau.

A supplementary agreement signed at Berlin on November 5 extended the treaty to cover Germany's relations with Russian controlled (or heavily influenced) Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and the Far Eastern Republic.

A secret annex signed on July 29 allowed Germany to train its military in Soviet territory, thus violating one of Germany's obligations as stated in the the Treaty of Versailles.

The treaty ended the diplomatic isolation of both countries in the wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was intended to form an anti-Versailles axis against the West, since both groups lost a considerable amount of territory and political power under the treaty. In the West, it was viewed with alarm as strengthening the international position of both governments. Many conservative and far-right elements with the Weimar Republic were also alarmed by the government's decision to negotiate and maintain good relations with a communist state, despite the Weimar coalition's SPD having been involved in the brutal suppression of the national communist party (KPD) including the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Poland, the Baltic states and Finland were concerned by this strengthening of Russian (now USSR) positions. The attempt to counter this development by closer cooperation in the fields of defence and foreign politics failed however, mainly due to resistance in the parliaments.

Though reaffirmed on paper in the Treaty of Berlin, 1926, the understanding between the two powers waned with Germany's reapprochement with Britain and France in the middle years of the decade.

See also

• Soviet-German relations before 1941

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Treaty of Rapallo (1922)

• The text of the agreement (Mount Holyoke College website)

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