The Genoa Conference of 1922 Through the Eyes of Russian Anarchists

Abstract

In the article the author examines the attitude of Russian anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists to the 1922 Genoa Conference and the participation of representatives of Soviet Russia in it. This subject has not received much coverage in the works of anarchism scholars, who have so far focused primarily on the study of the general stance of Russian anarchism towards the Soviet regime and the issue of the New Economic Policy, on the problem of anti-anarchist repressions in Russia and on the ideological and organisational processes in the Russian anarchist emigration. The author made it his task to identify the place that the critique of the “Genoa policy” of the Soviet government enjoyed in the ideological concepts and political work of the anarchists, and to trace the main line of their reasoning. The main source for this article was the original, mainly émigré, press of the Russian anarchists between 1922 and 1923. The author demonstrates that the Russian anarchists' view of the Genoa Conference was primarily determined by ideological motives and their general analysis of the course and fate of the Russian Revolution itself. Being anti-statists, the anarchists had no particular conception of foreign policy and were indifferent to so-called state interests. The “Genoa policy” was perceived by them as a manifestation and confirmation of the new Bolshevik course, in which they saw an orientation towards restoring the positions of private capital within Russia itself and towards subordination to world capital on an international scale. Planned or real concessions on the part of the Soviet delegation at the Conference and repression of Russian anarchists and socialists were, in their eyes, two sides of the “Bolshevik counter-revolution”. The criticism of Bolshevism mounted by the anarchist emigration in connection with and after the Genoa Conference contributed to the demarcation in the international trade union revolutionary-syndicalist movement and the founding of the anarcho-syndicalist International.