Tsarist Debts and Tsarist Foreign Policy
In: Slavic review: interdisciplinary quarterly of Russian, Eurasian and East European studies, Band 27, Heft 4, S. 529-541
ISSN: 2325-7784
The sheer size of the Russian foreign debt in 1917 has profoundly affected our view of the influence of foreign capital on tsarist diplomacy. It has been argued by both Western and Soviet historians that Russian foreign relations were in good part influenced by, or even determined by, Russia's debtor status to France and—to a lesser degree—to Great Britain. Thus a Western historian argued recently that in the last years of tsarist rule "foreign credit became a tool of power politics and a limitation on Russian sovereignty in general. … Between 1887 and 1917 Russian policy was tied to French policy, inasmuch as French investments were controlled, to a large extent, by the French Government." Recently published Soviet works, while revising Stalin's judgment that Russia was economically a semicolony of Western capital, continue to assert that the "financial-economic dependence on the capital, continue to assert that the "financial-economic dependence on the Entente countries pushed tsarist Russia into a military alliance with them."