Treaty of Rapallo

What happened at Genoa?

The Genoa Conference of spring 1922 was the first great international gathering to invite Soviet Russia, convened to discuss the reconstruction of Europe's postwar economy. For a Soviet government that had opened its doors with the New Economic Policy it was a chance to return to the international stage, but the talks ran aground on tsarist debts and compensation for nationalised foreign property. In the middle of that deadlock, foreign affairs commissar Chicherin reached overnight for the conference's other outcast, Germany, and concluded a separate treaty at the nearby resort of Rapallo.

What did the treaty change?

The two states renounced mutual claims to reparations and debts, restored relations at ambassadorial level and promised each other most-favoured-nation treatment in trade. Germany became the first European great power to recognise the Soviet government in law, and Soviet Russia cracked the powers' common front and broke the encirclement of isolation. The treaty itself contained no military clauses, but in its shadow the two armies' secret cooperation grew: German tank and aviation training forbidden by Versailles took place on Soviet soil, and the Soviet side took German military technology in exchange.

Why did Rapallo become a symbol?

Rapallo became more than a treaty: the name of the possibility that Europe's two excluded states might join hands over the West's head. The memory revived in its worst form in the pact of 1939, and survived through the Cold War and after as Western diplomacy's idiom of warning against any separate German-Russian approach. In the history of Soviet diplomacy, Rapallo stands as the greatest achievement of the Chicherin era's pragmatism, an early model of opening the state's way by calculation of interest rather than ideology.