Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin

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.

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.

In the late 1920s Chicherin's health collapsed. In August 1928 he submitted a statement asking to be relieved of his post on health grounds. In a letter to Molotov that summer he wrote that he had moved to the Kremlin hospital, after which a medical consilium required treatment abroad. He called spending foreign currency on his own treatment pointless, since any improvement would not last; he said that with the existing composition of the collegium he could no longer work after ten years, and that his overload since the cuts of late 1927 had become unbearable at his age and with his illnesses. Then he concluded: "I am one of the expended ones." The letter also records pressure from colleagues: Voroshilov accused him at a Politburo session of defending other governments' interests and reproached him with his origin; Rudzutak wrote that his writings smelled of stupidity; Tomsky argued at almost every Politburo session that he was not up to the job; Kalinin seized every opportunity to allege poor defence of Soviet interests; and Bukharin called him an antagonist.

The Politburo refused the resignation. It decided instead to grant him three months' leave abroad for treatment after two weeks of treatment in Moscow, and to place his commissar duties with Litvinov for the duration. Chicherin left for Berlin and did not return either after four months or after half a year. In March 1929 the Soviet plenipotentiary in Germany, Nikolai Krestinsky, wrote to Karakhan that no normal person would understand such a method of treatment and that it seemed the man had decided to leave work and to wear Moscow down. Chicherin repeatedly wrote to Stalin pointing out mistakes in foreign-policy matters, while Stalin answered that things were not so bad and gently but insistently asked whether it was not time for the commissar to return.

Why the handling was so soft: after the defeat of the oppositionists at the April 1929 Central Committee plenum a mass non-return of high-ranking officials who disagreed with the general line began, and the addition of a serving commissar to their ranks would have been a serious blow to the prestige of the party and its general secretary. On 3 October 1929 the counsellor Grigory Besedovsky fled from the Paris embassy, after which the Kremlin grew still more anxious about Chicherin; on 14 November the Politburo resolved to have his attending physician Lev Levin write that his arrival in the USSR was desirable at the end of November, to send Levin as his escort, and to have Karakhan go to Berlin immediately. On 3 December a further decision ordered that his arrival be expedited. He returned to Moscow on 6 January 1930.

On his return Chicherin found that over the year and a half of his absence almost all people close to him had been dismissed and the work system he had built destroyed, so that his main occupation until his resignation became the writing of an instruction for the future commissar. He never handed the document to anyone, because in July 1930 Litvinov was appointed commissar. From July 1930 he was on pension.

The instruction named the "internal enemies" of Soviet diplomacy. First among them was the Comintern: until 1929 it had caused endless trouble but the situation had been manageable, whereas from 1929 it had become utterly unbearable. "This is the death of foreign policy." The Comintern speeches of leading comrades and any discovery of contacts between the apparatus and foreign communist parties were especially harmful and dangerous. Second was the GPU: arrests of foreigners without agreement with the Commissariat led to millions of international incidents; sometimes it emerged years later that a foreigner had been unlawfully shot, and foreigners must not be executed without trial; and the Commissariat had been told nothing, because the GPU treated it as a class enemy. The instruction also recorded the destruction of the apparatus and of his working arrangements: as he wrote in 1930, cuts and purges removed good workers and replaced them with useless ones; he asked Stalin to write on his grave, "Here lies Chicherin, victim of cuts and purges"; he warned that a 20% cut would be his ruin and that nobody ever took his words into account. He also described how, as commissar, he decided nothing himself and the Politburo might or might not heed the chief diplomat, omitting only to say that in such conditions the foreign ministry effectively played no role.

A continuing terminal illness burdened his last years, forcing him away from his friends and from active work and leading to an early death. He died on 7 July 1936 and was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow. He held no Soviet awards and was decorated with the Order of the Red Banner of the Mongolian People's Republic. After his death and until the Khrushchev Thaw he was rarely mentioned in Soviet literature: the Soviet Diplomatic Dictionary gave him 52 pages in its 1950 edition, against 92 for Litvinov and 292 for Molotov. A memorial plaque was installed in Moscow on the wall of the building where he worked, and streets were named after him in Moscow, Orenburg, Peterhof and many other Russian cities.

One distinction belongs in the record. The claim that Molotov persuaded Stalin to remove Chicherin, and that Chicherin then sat alone at his dacha on the Klyazma, played the piano and died prematurely "of melancholy and inactivity", is attributed in the Russian source to Anastas Mikoyan as reported by Stalin's interpreter V. M. Berezhkov. That is an attributed recollection, not a documented cause of the dismissal or of the death.