Lenin: Draft Directives to the Deputy Chairman and All Members of the Genoa Delegation












V. I.

Lenin



Draft Directives to the Deputy Chairman and All Members of the Genoa Delegation[1]


---





Published:

First published in 1964 in the Fifth Russian Edition of the Collected Works, Vol. 44.

Printed from the manuscript.


Source:

Lenin
Collected Works,

Progress Publishers,

1971,

Moscow,

Volume 42,

pages 390b-393a.


Translated: Bernard Isaacs


Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala and D. Walters


Public Domain:



(2004).

You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
Archive” as your source.

• README




---





1.11.1922

To Comrade Molotov for members of the Politbureau

I propose that the following directives to the deputy
chairman and all members of the Genoa delegation be endorsed:

1. All members of the delegation should be posted in a general way on
all political and financial questions that are likely to be brought up at
the conference. Moreover, every member of the delegation should make a
special and thorough study of one of the most important diplomatic
and one of the most important financial questions.

Chicherin and Litvinov are to be charged with drawing up an assignment
of these questions among all the members



of the delegation (with the exception of sick members like Rudzutak, etc.).

2. Every member of the delegation must prepare for the meeting on 22.11
(with the Politbureau of the C.C.) the briefest (maximum 2-3 pages
telegraphic style) of summaries of his programme of views and policies on
all cardinal questions, both diplomatic and financial.

3. Chicherin and Litvinov are to see to it that the appropriate
literature in different languages is collected and handed out to the
members of the delegation together with a systematic collection of
documents in the Russian language.

4. In view of the special importance and special difficulty of
financial questions, Chicherin and Litvinov, by arrangement with the
People’s Commissariat for Finance, the State Planning Commission and
A. D. Tsyurupa, are to draw up a list of financial experts and a plan of
work distribution among them; this to be done within 1 week.

5. All members of the delegation must be perfectly familiar
with Keynes’s book (The Economic Consequences of the Peace) and
with similar bourgeois and bourgeois-pacifist books and parts of
books (Lansing on the “imperialist” nature of the war and the peace
of 1918, and so on). Preparations should be on these lines: speeches and
statements should give the communist point of view in a nutshell,
set forth in such a way as to intimate that although we are Communists and
hold such-and-such communist views we wish to cite non-Communists to this
audience and to pose the question of annulling all debts and so forth from
the bourgeois standpoint (see 6 and 7).

6. All speeches and statements by our delegates at the conference
should be calculated in advance in such a way that whatever the course or
the outcome of the conference (even in the event of its speedy failure,
which we, of course, should try to prevent), there would be, as a result, a
brief but clear statement of the sum total of communist views (on questions
of international relations and economics) and a detailed statement of
bourgeois and bourgeois-pacifist views on the irreconcilable contradictions
of the imperialist world (and the imperialist peace).



7. It is highly probable, almost certain, that all the bourgeois
delegates at the conference will immediately form a silent but strong bloc
for attacking us on account of Georgia and with all the usual accusations
of petty-bourgeois and big bourgeois diplomacy and democracy. We should be
prepared for this in advance and make sure that we are the first to attack
(apart from our main object of dividing the different countries and setting
them by the ears). The initiative in taking the offensive should be done
mostly in a veiled form, for example by “hinting” (or by bourgeois
quotations from relevant works) at the most painful and shameful points of
imperialist relations (Korea; Amritsar; public flogging of revolutionaries
in India; Lloyd George’s speech against Briand at Cannes concerning
assassinations” and so on and so forth).

8. In view of the repeatedly proven desire on the part of our
specialists in general and the Menshevik-minded ones in particular to fool
us (very often successfully) by turning their foreign trips into a holiday
and a means of strengthening whiteguard ties, the Central Committee
proposes to limit ourselves in this case to an absolute minimum of fully
reliable experts, each of whom is to present a guarantee in writing from
the People’s Commissar concerned and from several Communists. Forty-five is
the top limit. The list of experts and of all members to be submitted for
approval to the C.C. within 11/2 weeks. This § to be taken charge of
by Comrades Litvinov, Joffe and Chicherin. They are also to choose a
business manager who will not permit night work and such-like scandalous
practices.

I move the following addendum to the draft theses of
directives for the Genoa delegation:

9. Our delegates should cite § 1 of the Cannes terms in their
speeches and statements as often as possible, this citing to be done,
first, exclusively in the wording of Petit Parisien, i.e., using
the’ words “system of property” and not just “system”; secondly, these
words and this § to be given an extended meaning as if implying
recognition of the inevitability of the capitalist system of property being
replaced by the communist system of property, as if the only point at issue
“between us” now remains the question of when this replacement will be
effected and in



what manner, i.e., by the Russian method of 1917-20 or by the Lloyd George
method of “truncated revolution” of the 1921 Irish type or the 1922

Egyptian type.[2]

Lenin




---



Notes





[1]

The idea of an international conference to deal with all questions
concerning the establishment of peace and economic co-operation in Europe,
and also the question of Russian debts, was put forward by the Soviet
Government, who addressed Notes to this effect to Britain, France, Japan,
Italy, and the U.S.A. (see Collected Works, Fifth Russian Edition,
Vol. 44, pp. 185-88). The decision to convene an international economic and
financial conference was taken by the Supreme Allied Council at a
conference in Cannes on January 6, 1922. The Allies invited Soviet Russia
to the conference in the hope of forcing from her a number of political and
economic concessions while at the same time establishing economic relations
with her.

The Soviet delegation to the Genoa Conference was elected at an
emergency session of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee on January
27. Lenin was appointed head of the delegation with Chicherin as his deputy
“vested with all the rights as chairman in the event of circumstances
preventing Comrade Lenin from attending the conference”. Among the other
members of the delegation were L. B. Krasin, M. M. Litvinov,
N. N. Narimanov, V. V. Vorovsky and Y. E. Rudzutak. The question of Lenin
going to Genoa was widely discussed by the people of the Soviet
Republics. Numerous letters were received expressing



apprehension for his life and safety˜and declaring against his going
to the conference. The Central Committee of the R.C.P.(B.) passed a special
decision on this question, under which Lenin resigned his commission to
Chicherin as head of the delegation.

Lenin directed the work of the delegation, drew up the C.C.’s
directives for it, and other important documents hearing on Soviet Russia’s
participation in the Genoa Conference (see pp. 394-95, 396-98, 401-404, 410
of this volume, and volumes 44 and 45 of the Fifth Russian Edition).

The Genoa Conference sat from April 10 to May 19, 1922. It was attended
by representatives from 29 countries. The declaration by the Soviet
delegation, which was approved by Lenin and endorsed by the Council of
People’s Commissars, stated:

“While remaining true to the principles of communism, the Russian
delegation recognises that in the present epoch, which makes the parallel
existence of the old and the emergent new social system possible, economic
co-operation between states representing the two systems of property is
imperatively necessary for universal economic reconstruction”
(Materialy Genuezskoi konferentsii. [Materials of the Genoa
Conference.] Verbatim Report. Moscow, 1922, p. 78).

The Genoa Conference failed to settle the problems confronting it. The
Soviet delegation vigorously repelled the attempts of the imperialist
powers to impose a colonial status upon Soviet Russia (the establishment of
control over Soviet finances, etc.) By proposing talks on a general
reduction of armaments and the banning of the most barbarous methods of
warfare (poison gases, military aircraft), the Soviet delegation
demonstrated to the world the peace-loving nature of Soviet Russia’s
Leninist foreign policy.

[2]

Lenin here alludes to the policy of partial concessions which the
British Government of Lloyd George carried out in the early twenties in
order to suppress the revolutionary movement for national liberation in
Ireland and Egypt.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed on December 6, 1920, following a long
and hard struggle for national independence by the Irish people. The Treaty
provided for the establishment of a dominion “Irish Free State” within
the British Empire. Six north-eastern counties (Ulster), the most
industrially developed part of Ireland, were alienated to Great Britain.

After crushing the rebellion of the Egyptian people against British
rule in December 1921, the British Government was compelled in February
1922 to terminate its protectorate and proclaim Egypt an “independent
kingdom”. Egypt, however, became only nominally “independent”, since all
her territory remained occupied by Britain, who controlled the Suez Canal
zone, ruled Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, etc.




---