Abstract
The strategy of ‘peaceful penetration’1 appeared to have got off to an auspicious start when the New Economic Policy (NEP), effectively de-nationalising small-scale industry and retail trade and returning to more orthodox principles of public finance and law, was endorsed by the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in March 1921. Its decisions, the Review of Reviews declared, had been ‘in favour of the abandonment of Communism’. The ‘Communistic experiment had failed’, commented the New Statesman; Lenin was now ‘driving the Russian State furiously back on the road to capitalism… All in Russia acknowledge this save a handful of desperate doctrinaires’.2 Lenin, added the Spectator, the author and head of the organisation which had administered Communism by means of the Soviets, had ‘admitted the economic collapse of his system’. It was now conceded that the abolition of private enterprise and private commerce had been a ‘disastrous fiasco’, wrote the Economist; the Soviet leaders themselves admitted that the ‘attempt to force Communism on the nation had failed’. From a business point of view, the paper added, there were ‘undoubtedly big possibilities’.3
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Lyubov Krassin, Leonid Krassin: His Life and Work (London 1929), p. 156; The Times, 19 November 1921.
Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary vol. 1 (London 1969),p. 196.
Trotsky archives T726, quoted in Louis Fischer, Russia’s Road from Peace to War (New York 1969), p. 95.
Louis Fischer, The Soviets in World Affairs (London 1930), vol. 1, p. 332; Chicherin to NKID, DVP, vol. 5, no. 101, p. 181, 4 April 1922.
The account which follows is necessarily restricted to those aspects of the Conference which affected British-Soviet relations most directly. See further, for a detailed contemporary account, J. Saxon Mills, The Genoa Conference (London 1922),
and for an authoritative Soviet discussion, A. A. Gromyko et al. (eds.), Istoriya Diplomatii vol. 3 (Moscow 1965), pp. 249–94.
B. Shtein, Geneuzskaya Konferentsiya (Moscow 1922), p. 35.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1979 Stephen White
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
White, S. (1979). Conferences. In: Britain and the Bolshevik Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04299-9_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04299-9_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-04301-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-04299-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)