The Bolsheviks responded that the loans to the Tsar’s government were part of an imperialist web designed to make Russia the servant of Western capitalism. The Russian people had ‘long since redeemed’ anything they owed, with ‘a sea of blood and mountains of corpses’. Henceforth the issue of debt repudiation would pose a fundamental obstacle to any rapprochement between the Soviet regime and the Western Powers. Lenin and Trotsky had burned their boats.
