The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

Furthermore, nothing was more likely to isolate that dictatorship from Russia’s allies in the Entente than the decision, anticipated in London and Paris since December 1917, and finalized by the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee on 3 February 1918, to repudiate Russia’s massive foreign debts: $4.92 billion piled up in the pre-war era, $3.9 billion since the start of the war, the latter sum formally guaranteed by the British and French governments. The Soviet government’s refusal to accept responsibility for the liabilities of its predecessor was, as London protested, a challenge to the ‘very foundations of international law’. 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.