The first foreign commissar who translated the revolution into diplomacy
"Chicherin is a superb worker, most conscientious, intelligent, knowledgeable. Such people should be valued. That his weakness is a lack of 'commandership' — that is not a problem." — Lenin, July 1918
An aristocratic-born socialist exile, he succeeded Trotsky as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs in 1918. Through successive treaties with Estonia, Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan he peeled away revolutionary Russia's diplomatic isolation, and at Rapallo in 1922 he broke the Versailles quarantine by normalizing relations with Germany. After thirteen years building the institutional foundations of Soviet diplomacy, he handed the post to Maxim Litvinov in 1930, worn down by illness and overwork.
Career Timeline
- 1923–1930People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionForeign affairs commissarHe signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and led Soviet diplomacy through blockade and intervention.
- 1922.12Formation of the USSRForeign affairs commissarDrawing on Genoa and other diplomatic experience, he pressed the need for a single union subject capable of concluding treaties.
- 1921–1928The New Economic Policy (NEP)People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs
From Tsarist Diplomat to People's Commissar
Georgy Chicherin was born into one of Russia's oldest noble families. His uncle Boris Chicherin was a renowned legal philosopher, and through his mother he descended from the Meyendorff dynasty of Baltic German diplomats. After graduating from the history and philology faculty of Petersburg University in 1897, he entered the Tsarist Ministry of Foreign Affairs the following year, working in its archives and contributing to the ministry's centenary history. It was the path prescribed for the scion of a distinguished house.
But in 1904, Chicherin left for Germany on health grounds, and never returned. The next year he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party on the Menshevik side and renounced all hereditary property, including his landholdings. He lived as a socialist exile in Berlin, Paris, and London, and during the First World War conducted anti-war agitation in Britain. In August 1917, British authorities arrested him as a threat to public safety.
The turning point came after the October Revolution. Following two protest notes from Trotsky to British ambassador George Buchanan, Chicherin was released on 3 January 1918 in what amounted to a prisoner exchange for Buchanan. He arrived in Petrograd on 19 January; two days later he was appointed Trotsky's deputy at the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and simultaneously joined the Bolshevik Party. When Trotsky moved to military affairs in March, Chicherin became acting commissar, and on 30 May 1918 he was confirmed as People's Commissar. The young aristocrat who had begun his career in the archives of the Tsarist Foreign Ministry was now in charge of the revolutionary state's diplomacy.
The Rapallo Breakthrough of 1922
On 16 April 1922, on the margins of the Genoa Conference, Soviet Russia and Germany signed the Treaty of Rapallo. Both pariahs of the Versailles order, they renounced mutual claims and normalized relations. Chicherin broke the diplomatic encirclement at the very conference Western powers had designed to isolate the USSR. The treaty marked the first equal normalization between Soviet Russia and a European great power, a precedent that shattered the blockade. Chicherin's strategy was straightforward: exploit the fractures between imperialist powers and carve out space for the revolutionary state. Rapallo was its most successful execution.