World Revolution and International Diplomacy, 1900–39
Key to the participation of a state in international diplomacy is its recognition by foreign powers. Recognition, however, cannot be imposed on others by brute force. Successful negotiation requires membership in a group of states with shared norms, practices, and procedures. Diplomats have to master the “structure, grammar, and rules of a common language; … the rules and understandings underlying the practice of international politics.”1 Revolutionaries have always faced difficulties in communicating to the world the legitimacy of their new state. The English Civil War and the French Revolution are cases in point. The leaders of social revolutions often vacillated between sweeping efforts at replacing the symbolic sphere of monarchs with the insignia of a new ideology, on the one hand, and the alignment of new political practices with the old international order, on the other.2 But one need not hark back to the early modern period to see this dynamic: the same [End Page 204] principle holds true for the Soviet case. Alastair Kocho-Williams has written an insightful monograph about the tensions between traditional diplomacy, inherited from the Russian Empire, and Soviet foreign relations. A central concern of his book is whether diplomacy was shaped by developments external to the course of events in Russia and the Soviet Union, or whether diplomatic practice evolved from national political ideology and domestic politics.
Recently, diplomatic history has emerged from the shadows that the proverbial “great men” continued to cast over the discipline while cultural and social historians were shedding light on many unexplored areas of the past. Historians of international relations have since called for an opening up of their field by turning to “culture” broadly conceived.3 Meanwhile, the cultural turn has embraced high politics, top-level decision making, and foreign policy, resulting in numerous studies of the sociocultural conditions and symbolic dimensions of the political process across domestic and international domains.4 The convergence of politics and culture set the stage for the emergence of a field that, labeled as the “new diplomatic history,” has been bringing together scholars of diverse methodological backgrounds, different periods, and varied geographical expertise, including Russian and Soviet history.5 Their interests range from traditional subjects such as the European states-system, diplomatic institutions, recruitment and staff [End Page 205] organization, to nonstate actors, go-betweens, language, ritual, norms, and behavior of diplomatic practice, cultural encounter, and network analysis, as well as broader literary, legal, and intellectual contexts. Although Kocho-Williams does not explicitly situate his work within this historiographic landscape, his original, multiarchival research is an important contribution to the rejuvenated field of diplomatic history, especially since he covers a period, and a world region, that because of both linguistic barriers and a predominant focus on more recent eras tends to be underrepresented.
Kocho-Williams’s analysis focuses on the changes wrought upon Russian diplomacy by the revolutions during the transition from the late tsarist empire to the new Soviet state. Drawing on source materials from archives in Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the author combines a prosopographic analysis of Russian foreign policy institutions with a study of diplomatic norms, behavior, ceremony, and conceptions of prestige. For the latter, he makes moderate use of Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital, although, in general, he gives significantly more room to solid institutional history and biographical case studies than to the cultural unpacking of revolutionary diplomacy.6 The book proceeds in strict chronological order. It covers 40 years of Russian and Soviet foreign policy from the beginning of the 20th century to the eve of World War II, tracing the internal friction between international diplomatic culture and socialist dogma in four stages.
Taking 1900 as his starting point, Kocho-Williams emphasizes continuity in the period up to 1917. Until then, the institutional culture and the composition of the diplomatic corps were shaped by the administrative instrument of the tsar’s foreign policy, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministerstvo inostrannykh del, MID). Despite reforms resulting from the 1905 revolution, the Russian Empire’s last foreign ministers, Vladimir N. Lamsdorf, Aleksandr P. Izvolskii, Sergei D. Sazonov, Boris V. Stürmer, and Nikolai N. Pokrovskii, adhered to old-style diplomacy, in which the tsar held a strong grip on the recruitment of ambassadors and the overall design of foreign relations. For diplomatic appointments, status, adroitness in protocol, and social skills for life at court (backed up by the requisite private wealth) counted more than formal training and merit. In the first chapter, Kocho-Williams assesses the role of foreign ministers, specifically the attempts of Izvolskii and Sazonov to reform the MID in response to bureaucratic inertia, [End Page 206] nepotism, and a lack of effective communication between administrators in St. Petersburg and diplomats abroad. He describes the institutional structure of the MID and explains why reform programs such as reducing departments and streamlining responsibilities were hindered by institutional decay and the resistance of long-serving personnel, until the plans were dropped completely with the outbreak of World War I. Following the MID’s decline during the war, the February Revolution initiated a phase of transition. The Provisional Government started to take down the tsar’s portraits and reshuffled its embassy personnel, but it continued to pursue relations with foreign states according to old-style diplomatic culture.
The problem of recognition arose with the “Soviet Takeover of Diplomacy” (chapter 2). The People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (Narodnyi komissariat inostrannykh del, Narkomindel) inherited the MID’s infrastructure. However, in the direct aftermath of the revolution, the Bolsheviks defied what they saw as bourgeois tradition and regarded diplomatic practice as a field of revolutionary activity. They called for an end to secret diplomacy, jettisoned diplomatic ranks for the sake of equality, and brought in new men and women who had proven themselves as activists and propagandists. Their attempt to exploit diplomacy to continue revolutionary struggle by other means made foreign powers highly suspicious of the new leaders and almost barred the Soviet Union from international diplomatic exchange. Other states responded with delays of consular services, held back diplomatic privileges, and even pursued the expulsion of ambassadors. The issue was further complicated by foreign governments’ continued recognition of the Provisional Government’s diplomats. The competition between parallel institutions resulted in a curious overlap between tsarist diplomats and “red” diplomacy, with foreign powers engaging the representatives of the old government and the new state at the same time. Narkomindel’s directives were met with great resistance from ambassadors whose careers had started in imperial Russia and who opposed the regime change, while Narkomindel also had to deal with the Communist International (Comintern), which, although not a diplomatic institution in the strict sense, came awkwardly close to its sphere of action. Kocho-Williams skillfully analyzes how material ownership of embassy buildings and, importantly, diplomatic archives, determined symbolic authority and recognition of statehood in times of uncertainty, parallel structures, and conflicting claims to legitimate representation.
Exporting the revolution through diplomacy was a short-lived idea. Although in the beginning the Bolsheviks sought to replace international diplomacy with communist internationalism, they soon realized that [End Page 207] diplomacy was not an appropriate battleground for the revolutionary cause. They understood the need to play by the rules of the states-system if Russia was to remain a big player on the world’s stage. The world revolution was relegated to other foreign policy institutions like the Comintern or absorbed into image fashioning through cultural diplomacy and tourism.7 As a result, the initial strides toward infusing diplomacy with a global ideology gave way to pragmatic compromise for the sake of recognition and new opportunities in international trade. The third chapter shows how, in the wake of the New Economic Policy, Narkomindel gradually dissociated itself from communist doctrine and propaganda in order to align its diplomatic practice with that of other states. The USSR’s participation in the 1922 Genoa Conference and successful negotiations with Germany at Rapallo confirmed that Russia could reestablish itself as a European great power only by adjusting to the norms of the international community. The author traces this process in the personal testimony of Aleksandra Kollontai, for example, who held diplomatic appointments in Norway, Sweden, and Mexico, and whose engagements as a Soviet representative were instrumental in promoting international recognition. She wrote in her memoirs that her life as a diplomat changed significantly compared to her role as an activist in women’s movements during the revolution. Kocho-Williams concludes that “a diplomat’s life was not of a revolutionary nature in the 1920s, but rather meant leaving revolution behind and integrating into the world of diplomacy” (105).
By implication, the equation of a diplomat’s representational duties with state ideology and domestic policy resulted in self-imposed isolation. This was the course that Soviet diplomacy took in the 1930s, as becomes clear in the fourth and last chapter of the book, which is mainly dedicated to the era of the purges. In the first half of the decade, under Maksim M. Litvinov’s leadership of Narkomindel, Soviet diplomacy continued to dispense with ideological conformity on the surface. Four years after his appointment, in 1934, Litvinov founded the Institute for Diplomatic and Consular Personnel (the predecessor of today’s Diplomatic Academy) to provide training for incoming young diplomats who did not possess the personal experience of the émigré revolutionary intelligentsia and had to be groomed for the international diplomatic corps. The USSR gained universal recognition during this period and was accepted into the League of Nations. Diplomats became well versed in the art of double-speak, “speaking Bolshevik” (Stephen Kotkin) as members of Stalinist society, and “speaking diplomacy” (Kocho-Williams, 116) as representatives of the Soviet Union. [End Page 208]
Dramatic shifts, however, occurred with the onset of the Great Purges. Narkomindel fell victim to Stalinist terror and paranoia. Its gradual withdrawal from international diplomacy began with the closure of numerous foreign diplomatic representations in the Soviet Union as well as with the reduction of major Soviet embassies to the status of consulates. After 1938, the purges hit the regime’s diplomatic corps and Narkomindel with the full force of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del, NKVD). Ambassadors were recalled from their posts; many were accused of “cosmopolitanism,” as well as conspiratorial contacts with foreigners, and some were executed. By the end of the 1930s, according to Kocho-Williams’s figures, more than half of senior personnel and embassy staff were affected by the purges, with many of those in ambassadorial posts and senior officials shot. The author concludes that the attacks against Narkomindel were intended to divest it of the relative independence it had gained within government institutions thanks to Litvinov’s leadership and to bring it under the complete control of Stalin. Soviet diplomatic culture, previously fashioned by the norms of diplomatic society, came under internal pressures exerted by the chief diplomat, Stalin.
After the steady decline of Soviet diplomatic culture, the Soviet Union shifted to full retreat from international diplomacy. Kocho-Williams describes a development here that helps explain why, in the post-Stalin era, Soviet ambassadors and statesmen struggled to resume diplomatic relations with Western powers.8 The Great Terror, World War II, and Stalin’s tight grip on foreign policy seemed to have wiped the rules of international society from the minds of Russian diplomats who, as Kocho-Williams’s study effectively shows, had tried to balance the norms and practice of diplomatic society with revolutionary ideology between 1905 and the late 1930s.
Kocho-Williams foregrounds the role of individual actors in foreign policy by showing how career patterns, institutional developments, and international conventions formed both the mindset and behavior of diplomats. In this way, he provides new insights into 20th-century diplomatic culture from the perspective of Soviet history—without, however, engaging in the methodological discussion that distinguishes the new diplomatic history from the classic narratives of diplomacy. It is of great merit that Kocho-Williams has expanded the focus from Soviet political ideology to diplomatic practice in the international arena, a perspective that helps us assess afresh the role of ideology as a determinant of foreign policy in the 20th century. The upshot is that diplomatic culture was not necessarily tied to national identity [End Page 209] and political ideology but rather to the rules and mechanisms of international political communication, even if its norms and codes of conduct contradicted the social values of the society that a diplomat represented. It is worth harking back to the early modern period in support of Kocho-Williams’s findings to point out that this seeming paradox was not unique to Soviet diplomacy and appears to be universal across time. Free Imperial Cities in the Holy Roman Empire, for example, willingly dropped the symbolism of civil liberty and emulated the political culture of the nobility in foreign policy matters in order to be recognized by their princely neighbors as sovereign and independent polities.9
Although Kocho-Williams focuses on Russia and the Soviet Union, he has not written a national history of Russian diplomacy. Like many studies emerging from the new diplomatic history, this book moves away from the national paradigm to emphasize the transnational process that shaped diplomatic culture. In doing so, the author departs from traditional works of diplomatic history, but he presupposes the reader’s knowledge of old-style diplomacy and international society, which in his study serve as a foil to the developments and changes in Russia. Western diplomacy in the first half of the 20th century was in flux, too, as it saw the world order collapse with the clash of world empires. His study thus is an invitation to continue the conversation between historians of Russia and experts of international relations and diplomatic history in order to engage in comparative research. [End Page 210]
Sabancı University
Orta Mahalle, Tuzla
Üniversite Caddesi no. 27
34956 Istanbul, Turkey
janhennings@sabanciuniv.edu
Footnotes
1. Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), xii.
2. See Bulstrode Whitlocke, A Journal of the Swedish Ambassy, in the Years M.DC.LIII. and M.DC.LIV. from the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 2 vols. (London: T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt, 1772), 2:47–48, for a revealing exchange between the Swedish master of ceremonies and an English Commonwealth diplomat about the latter’s reception at court. The Englishman was pressing for the honors equal to those of anointed kings. But he struggled to gain recognition of his master’s sovereign status and his precedence in the international hierarchy, since he was “only ambassador to the protector, a new name and not sacrée.” For the French Revolution, see Linda Frey and Marsha Frey, “The Reign of the Charlatans Is Over: The French Revolutionary Attack on Diplomatic Practice,” Journal of Modern History 65, 4 (1993): 706–44, esp. 707.
3. For the early modern period, see Hamish M. Scott, “Diplomatic Culture in Old Regime Europe,” in Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century: Essays in Honor of T. C. W. Blanning, ed. Scott and Brendan Simms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 58–85. See also Simms, “The Return of the Primacy of Foreign Policy,” German History 21, 3 (2003): 275–91. Earlier attempts to introduce cultural history to the study of international relations focused on the modern period. See, e.g., Akira Iriye, “Culture and International History,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 214–25; and Ursula Lehmkuhl, “Diplomatiegeschichte als internationale Kulturgeschichte: Theoretische Ansätze und empirische Forschung zwischen Historischer Kulturwissenschaft und Soziologischem Institutionalismus,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27 (2001): 394–423, for a discussion. See also Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht and Frank Schumacher, Culture and International History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003).
4. For a discussion, see Frank Bösch and Norman Domeier, “Cultural History of Politics: Concepts and Debates,” European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 15, 6 (2008): 577–86.
5. John Watkins, “Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, 1 (2008): 1–14; Markus Mösslang and Torsten Riotte, eds., The Diplomats’ World: A Cultural History of Diplomacy, 1815–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). For Russia, see Susanne Schattenberg’s, Jan C. Behrend’s, and Ragna Boden’s contributions to the “Neue Ansätze in der Geschichte der internationalen Politik,” special issue of Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 56, 1 (2008).
6. Excellent complementary readings are Boris I. Kolonitskii, Simvoly vlasti i bor´ba za vlast´: K izucheniiu politicheskoi kul´tury rossiiskoi revoliutsii 1917 goda (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2001); and for prerevolutionary political culture, Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995, 2000).
7. See Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
8. See Susanne Schattenberg, “Dialog zweier Taubstummer? Die Kultur der Außenpolitik Chrushchevs und Adenauers Moskaureise 1955,” Osteuropa, no. 7 (2007): 27–46.
9. André Krischer, Reichsstädte in der Fürstengesellschaft: Zum politischen Zeichengebrauch in der Frühen Neuzeit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).
