Leonid Krasin and the Soviet Attempt to Achieve a Detente

Abstract

During Russia’s Civil War, when the Allied powers were intervening to aid the anti-Bolshevik forces, Soviet leaders tended to view Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as obstacles to their policy of spreading revolutions to the West. But these states, especially Estonia, were also being used as a staging area by White Guardists, such as Yudenich, who launched an assault aimed at Petrograd in the autumn of 1919. When the Red Army drove his forces back, it might easily have pursued them into Estonia and tried to ‘liberate’ that tiny nation. But Chicherin warned Lenin ‘not to fall into a trap’, since a Soviet violation of Estonian territory might play into the hands of the ‘war party’ in the West. Lenin then told Trotsky that ‘Chicherin is right’, and countermanded orders which called for crossing the border. When, on 27 November, the Estonians requested peace negotiations, the Soviet Premier sent a peace delegation, headed by Leonid Krasin, to pursue peaceful coexistence instead of revolution.³

‘Our relations with Estonia must be the touchstone ... for our peaceful coexistence with bourgeois countries ... we have to remove everything that may obstruct this policy.’

— Chicherin¹

(March 22)

‘the real difficulty ... arose from the fact that there were extremists on both sides’.

— Krasin²

(June 16)