Georgii Chicherin

Born Nov. 12 (24), 1872, in the village of Karaul, in Kirsanov District, Tambov Province; died July 7, 1936, in Moscow. Soviet state figure and diplomat. Joined the revolutionary movement in 1904. Member of the Communist Party from 1918. Nephew of B. N. Chicherin.

Of noble birth, G. V. Chicherin graduated from the faculty of history and philology at the University of St. Petersburg in 1896 and took up a position in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1897. In 1904 he emigrated to Germany, where the following year he joined the RSDLP. After the Fourth Congress of the RSDLP in 1906 he joined the Mensheviks. In 1908 he began working with the French Socialist Party.

During World War I, Chicherin was an internationalist. In 1917 he was arrested in Great Britain as the secretary of a “delegate commission” dealing with the return of political exiles to Russia; the Soviet government obtained his release from prison. In 1918, on returning to Soviet Russia, he was appointed deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs.

On Mar. 3, 1918, as part of the Soviet delegation, Chicherin signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918 with Germany. He became acting people’s commissar for foreign affairs of the RSFSR on March 13, people’s commissar for foreign affairs on May 30, and people’s commissar for foreign affairs of the USSR in 1923, a post he held until 1930. In 1921 he signed Soviet-Iranian, Soviet-Afghan, and Soviet-Turkish treaties of friendship, the first treaties, signed on an equitable basis, between the countries of the East and Soviet Russia.

Chicherin led the Soviet delegation at the Genoa Conference of 1922 and the Lausanne Conference of 1922–23; he signed the Treaty of Rapallo with Germany in 1922 and treaties of neutrality with Turkey in 1925 and Iran in 1927. At the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Congresses of the ACP(B) he was elected a member of the Central Committee. Chicherin was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. He became a personal pensioner in 1930.

Chicherin made an important contribution to the protection of Soviet interests, and his work was highly regarded by V. I. Lenin (see Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 50, p. 111). Chicherin was the author of numerous works on a variety of subjects, including international relations, culture, and the history of the revolutionary movement.