regime, Chi-cherin fled to Western Europe in 1904, spending the next fourteen years immersed in socialist ?migr? 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 ?migr? 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
CHINA, RELATIONS WITH
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 national-liberation movements in Asia. Support for anti-colonial 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. See also: CENTRAL COMMITTEE; LEAGUE OF NATIONS; LITVINOV, MAXIM MAXIMOVICH; RAPALLO, TREATY OF
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.
From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, one of the core problems in Russian foreign policy has been how to manage relations with China. A vast Eurasian land power, Russia adjoins China, its giant neighbor to the south, along the sparsely populated territories of eastern Siberia and the Maritime Province. Further to the west, the buffer states of Mongolia and Kazakhstan lie between Russia and China. For most of the past century and a half, Russia enjoyed a significant power advantage vis-?-vis China in military and economic terms. The world recognized Russia as one of the great powers. Meanwhile, China, weakened by domestic turmoil and foreign imperialism, experienced the successive traumas of dynastic collapse, civil wars, revolution, and radical communism. More recently, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the balance of power between the two countries has shifted in favor of China. In the short term, a diminished post-Communist Russia, shorn of its Central Asian territories as well as its western borderlands, has worked out an amicable relationship with China. In the longer term, however, Russian policymakers, like their tsarist and Soviet predecessors, will continue to confront the question of whether an increasingly powerful China is friend, foe, or changeling.
FROM THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO 1917
Russian-Chinese relations date from the seventeenth century. Russia’s eastward expansion at the time was driven by a spirit of adventure, the quest for profits in the fur trade, and the dream of state aggrandizement. Unruly bands of freebooting Cossacks led by Russian adventurers such as Yerofei Khabarov established initial contacts along the Amur River with tribal dependents of China’s ruling Qing dynasty. Conflicts that flared up within an as- yet-undefined frontier area came to the attention of Chinese officials, who viewed the Russians as the latest in a long series of armed aggressors from Central Asia. Meanwhile, early Russian diplomatic missions to Beijing, intended to promote commerce and to gauge the strength of the Chinese Empire, ran afoul of China’s elaborate court ritual that the Russians neither understood nor respected. The Russian exaction of tribute from tribal peoples whom the Qing considered their dependents, and the encroachment of armed Russian settlements along the Amur, led to military clashes between Russian and Chinese forces in the 1680s. In 1689, the Treaty of Nerchinsk, the first modern international treaty between China and a European country, began to define a boundary between the two empires and established rules for regulating commercial intercourse. The Treaty of Kiakhta in 1728 readjusted the commercial relationship, further defined the border, and granted Russia permission to build an Orthodox church in Beijing, which became the nucleus of Russian sinology. Thereafter, relations stabilized for the next century on the basis of equality, reciprocity, limited commerce, and peace along the border.
CHINA, RELATIONS WITH
In the mid-nineteenth century, Russia seized the opportunity afforded by the decline of the Qing dynasty to expand its eastern territories at China’s expense. Its ultimate objective was to bolster its status as a European great power by playing an imperial role in East Asia. Nikolai Muraviev, the governor-general of Eastern Siberia, was the most prominent of the new generation of empire builders who were determined to make Russia a Pacific power. Combining the threat of force with skillful diplomacy and blandishments, Muraviev and his peers imposed upon China the Treaties of Aigun (1858), Peking (1860), and Tarbagatai (1864), which added 665,000 square miles (1,722,342 square kilometers) to the Russian Empire in Central Asia, eastern Siberia, and the Maritime Province. In 1896 Russian officials bribed and bullied China to grant permission to build the Chinese Eastern Railway across Manchuria (Northeast China), to connect the Trans-Siberian Railway with Vladivostok, Russia’s major port on the Pacific Ocean. Russian occupation of Manchuria in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion, an antiforeign Chinese nativist movement, and growing tension with imperial rival Japan over Manchuria and Korea, led to the Russo-Japanese War and Russia’s humiliating defeat. With the Rising Sun ascendant, Russian influence in China was restricted to northern Manchuria and the Central Asian borderlands.
SOVIET-CHINESE RELATIONS, 1917-1991
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 had a profound and lasting impact upon Russian-Chinese relations. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912, China dissolved into civil war and chaos. A small but determined band of revolutionary Chinese intellectuals, disillusioned with Western liberal democracy, discovered in Russian Bolshevism a template for political action. Desiring to revive China and promote revolutionary social transformation, they responded to Bolshevik appeals by organizing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921 and joining the Communist International (Comintern), which ordered the fledgling CCP into alliance with the Chinese Nationalists led by Sun Yat-sen. Moscow dispatched veteran revolutionary Mikhail Borodin and hundreds of military and political advisers to China in the early 1920s to guide the Chinese revolutionary movement to victory. The Comintern dictated strategy and tactics to the CCP. In 1927, Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen’s successor, severed his
