Karakhan Manifesto
카라한 선언
The declaration to China signed on 25 July 1919 by Lev Karakhan, deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs of Soviet Russia. Offering to renounce the territories, extraterritoriality, concessions and Russian share of the Boxer indemnity that tsarist Russia had taken from China, it became known in China in the spring of 1920 and, set against the powers at Versailles, greatly raised Soviet prestige among Chinese intellectuals. A dispute over the text, and its clause on the free return of the Chinese Eastern Railway, followed.
In depth
Background: beset by civil war and foreign intervention, the Soviet government sought allies in Asia. In July 1918 Foreign Commissar Chicherin told the Fifth Congress of Soviets that Russia renounced the tsarist conquests in Manchuria, and a year later his deputy Karakhan signed the declaration “to the Chinese people and the governments of North and South China”.
Reception: the Beijing government did not reply at first, but when Soviet power reached the Far East in late March and early April 1920 the declaration became known in China and was greeted with enthusiasm; a French text was delivered to Beijing on 26 March 1920. That a country had appeared that would give up the unequal treaties, unlike the powers that had given Shandong to Japan at Paris, meant much to intellectuals turning towards Marxism after May Fourth.
Dispute: the text the Chinese government received promised the free return of the Chinese Eastern Railway, but a year later the Soviet government said this was not the official text, and the revised version published in Izvestiia lacked the clause. A second declaration of 27 September 1920 and Karakhan’s third statement of 1923 followed, but in 1922 Joffe said the declarations were only a starting point for negotiations with no legal force, and through the agreements of 1924–25 the Soviet Union kept its rights in the Chinese Eastern Railway.