Perspective.” In Soviet Economy in a Time of Change: A Compendium of Papers, U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, 3 vols. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. 2:208-243. Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert. (1999). Comparative Economic Systems, 6th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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Holzman, Franklyn D. (1974). Foreign Trade under Central Planning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kaser, Michael. (1969). “A Volume Index of Soviet Foreign Trade.” Soviet Studies 20(4):523-526. Nove, Alec. (1986). The Soviet Economic System, 3d ed. Boston: Allen amp; Unwin. Wiles, Peter. (1968). Communist International Economics. Oxford: Blackwell.
If the first official contact between France and Russia was established in 1049, when the daughter of Yaroslav, prince of Kiev, married Henri, King of France, bilateral relations were established with the treaty of friendship signed in 1613 by King Louis XIII and Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich. Since then, cultural exchanges regularly expanded, most notably during the reigns of Peter the Great and Elizabeth. However, on political and economic grounds, the exchanges remained thus: England retained primacy in Russian foreign trade throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and on the diplomatic scene, despite common geopolitical interests, France and Russia were quite often the victims of mutual hostile stereotypes. In 1793, embittered by France’s radical revolution, Catherine II broke all diplomatic relations with the revolutionary state; and in 1804, despite the treaty of nonaggression concluded in 1801 with Napoleon, Alexander I joined the Third Coalition to defeat the “usurper,” his political ambitions, and his expansionism. The war against Napoleon (1805-1813) was a national disaster, marked by several cruel defeats and by the fire of Moscow in 1812, but Alexander’s victory, marked by his entrance into Paris in March 1814, gave him a decisive role during the Congress of Vienna.
The second half of the nineteenth century brought a major change in Russian-French relations. If France took part in the humiliating Crimean War in 1854-1856, during the late 1860s reconciliation began to take place and, in 1867 and 1868, the Russian Empire participated in the universal exhibitions organized in Paris. Political and military concerns motivated a decisive rapprochement during the last third of the century: France, traumatized by the loss of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, desperately needed an ally against Bismarck’s Prussia, while for Alexander III’s Russia, the goal was to gain an ally against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which opposed the Russian pan- Slavic ambitions in the Balkans. In December 1888, the first Russian loan was raised in Paris and three years later, in August 1891, the two countries concluded a political alliance, followed by a military convention in December 1893. To sanctify the rapprochement, Tsar Nicholas II visited France three times, in October 1896, September 1901, and July 1909; and in July 1914, President Poincar? visited Russia to reinforce the alliance on the eve of World War I.
The October 1917 Revolution killed these privileged links. The Bolsheviks opted for a peace with no annexing and no indemnity-and refused to recognize the tsarist loans. As a result, the French state felt deceived, and in December 1917, it broke relations with Russia and engaged instead in a struggle against it. In the spring of 1918, France organized the unloading of forces to support the White Guard and took part in the Polish war against Russia (May-October 1920). However, these interventions failed to overthrow the Soviet regime and, by the end of 1919, French diplomacy opted for a policy of containment against the expansion of communism. By that time, French- Soviet contacts were reduced: the French presence in the USSR was limited to the settlement of a small group of radical intellectuals and to the visits of French Communists; similarly, there was no official Soviet presence in France, although communist intellectuals and artists continued actively promoting Soviet interests and values.
In 1924 Edouard Herriot, chief of the French government, decided to recognize the USSR. While he had no illusion about the authoritarian nature of the Soviet regime, he thought that France could no longer afford to ignore such an important country politically and that the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 could be dangerous. Therefore, for geopolitical reasons, he chose to reestablish diplomatic relations.
This decision gave rise to a rapid growth of economic, commercial, and cultural exchanges. In particular, Soviet artists became increasingly present in France: Maxim Gorky and Ilya Ehrenburg, for example, became brilliant spokesmen for the Socialist literature. However, this improvement was a fragile one and remained subject to diplomatic turbulences, due to Fascism and Nazism. Foreign
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French president Jacques Chirac shakes hands with Russian president Vladimir Putin as they meet in April 2003 to discuss the situation in Iraq. © AFP/CORBIS Commissar Maxim Litvinov tried to bring the USSR closer to France and England, but French hesitation, demonstrated by the ambivalent French-Soviet treaty concluded in May 1935 and the lack of strong reaction to the Spanish Civil War, led Josef Stalin to conclude an alliance with Adolf Hitler instead. And on August 23, 1939, the conclusion of the Soviet-German Pact sanctified the collapse of the Soviet-French entente.
Bilateral relations were reestablished during World War II. In September 1941, three months after the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin decided to recognize General Charles de Gaulle officially as the “Chief of Free France”; in December 1944 in Moscow, de Gaulle and Stalin signed a treaty of alliance and mutual assistance. However, the Cold War, which began to spread over Europe in 1946, had deep consequences for Soviet-French relations, and in 1955 the Soviet state denounced the treaty of 1944.
In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev’s proclaimed de-Stalinization was favorably received by French diplomacy, and in the same year the head of the French government, Guy Mollet, made a trip to the USSR. This trip reestablished contacts and led to a protocol on cultural exchanges. But from 1958 on, de Gaulle’s return to power brought a new dynamic to relations with Moscow. De Gaulle wished to encourage “d?tente.” In his view, this would restore France’s international significance. In June 1966, he signed several important bilateral agreements with the USSR. Two committees were designed to improve economic cooperation; cooperation was also planned for space, civil nuclear, and television programs; and an original form of cooperation took place in the movie industry.
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These agreements conferred a distinct flavor on bilateral relations: in contrast to the American-Soviet dialogue, which remained limited to strategic issues, the French-Soviet d?tente was in essence more global and covered a wide variety of areas of mutual interest. Political cooperation, economic and scientific exchanges, cultural exhibits, performers’ tours, and movie festivals all contributed to build a bridge between the two countries.
Perestroika brought a new impulse to these relations. When Mikhail Gorbachev introduced drastic changes in March 1985, Fran?ois Mitterrand’s diplomacy first hesitated but, after a few months, provided strong support for the new leader; and in October 1990, a bilateral treaty of friendship-the first since 1944-was signed.
The collapse of the USSR imposed another yet another series of geopolitical and cultural changes on the new leaders. But these changes had little impact on the long-lasting structural bonds forged with France through the centuries. See also: FRENCH INFLUENCE IN RUSSIA; FRENCH WAR OF 1812; NAPOLEON I; POLISH-SOVIET WAR; TILSIT, TREATY OF; WORLD WAR I; WORLD WAR II
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Shlapentokh, Dmitry. (1996). The French Revolution in Russian Intellectual Life, 1865-1905. Westport, CT: Prager.
The Free Economic Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture and Husbandry, established in 1765 to consider ways to improve the rural economy of the Russian Empire, became a center of scientific research and
