For Peace and Money looks at late imperial Russia’s financial and diplomatic relationship with the nations that came to be its allies in World War I, exploring British and French private and government loans to Russia from 1894 through the Genoa Conference of 1922. Russia was the foremost international debtor country in pre–World War I Europe. From the forging of the Franco-Russian alliance onward, Russia’s needs were met, first and foremost, by Russia’s allies and diplomatic partners in the developing Triple Entente. This web of financial and political interdependence affected both foreign po ... More

For Peace and Money looks at late imperial Russia’s financial and diplomatic relationship with the nations that came to be its allies in World War I, exploring British and French private and government loans to Russia from 1894 through the Genoa Conference of 1922. Russia was the foremost international debtor country in pre–World War I Europe. From the forging of the Franco-Russian alliance onward, Russia’s needs were met, first and foremost, by Russia’s allies and diplomatic partners in the developing Triple Entente. This web of financial and political interdependence affected both foreign policy and domestic society in all three countries. The Russian state was so heavily indebted to its Western creditors, rendering those Western economies almost prisoners to this debt, that the debtor nation in many ways had the upper hand; the Russian government at times was actually able to dictate policy to its French and British counterparts. Those nations’ investing classes—which, in France in particular, spanned not only the upper classes but the middle, rentier class, as well—had such a vast proportion of their savings wrapped up in Russian bonds that any default would have been catastrophic for their own economies. That default came not long after the Bolshevik Revolution brought to power a government that felt no responsibility, whatsoever, for the debts accrued by the tsars for the purpose of oppressing Russia’s workers and peasants. The ensuing effect on Allied morale, the French and British economies, and, ultimately, on the Anglo-French relationship, was grim and far-reaching.