Charter are accepted by Soviet Russia as giving meaning to her participation in the present war.
Part B contains a selection of treaties, pacts and conventions to which Russia is a party. It may be helpful to indicate briefly the trends of policy revealed in these agreements.
The first period from 1917 to 1921 was marked by the most intense civil war. In a sense it may be described as the time when the national aspirations of the many peoples of the former Russian Empire were realized in various degree. It was also the period when the limits within which the new Soviet system was to operate were determined. It is important to bear in mind that these two propositions do not come to the same thing. After a series of local revolutions, the independence of the following former parts of Czarist Russia was recognized: Finland, Ukraine, Georgia, Latvia, Esthonia, and Lithuania (B Nos. 1, 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 21). The inclusion of Western White Russia and Western Ukraine in the new Polish State was agreed to in the Treaty of Peace with that country. One very important feature of the treaty was the express grant of rights of cultural and religious autonomy to the Russian, Ukrainian, and White Russian minorities in the new Poland (Article 7). (B TO. 15). By the end of this first period the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic (R. S. F. S. R.), the members of which formed a kind of confederation and retained the power to maintain separate foreign relations and conclude separate treaties (B Nos. 16 and 17), had been replaced by the federal Soviet Union.
In the years 1922 and 1923 following The Hague and Genoa conferences (A No. 12), the quest for security against interruption of the task of internal consolidation of the results of the October Revolution began. Debarred from and at first hostile to a "united front" with the members of the League of Nations (A Nos. 11, 14, 15), the Soviet Union found an ally in Germany, like itself beyond the League pale and on the make, with which it concluded the Treaty of Rapallo. (B No. 18.)
A second expression of the quest for security is the series of treaties and exchanges of notes concerning the recognition of the Soviet Union. The most important was the de jure recognition of the U. S. S. R. by Great Britain on February 1 and 8, 1924 (B No. 19). Later in the same year, the Soviet Union was recognized by Italy, Norway, Austria, Albania, Sweden, Denmark, Mexico, Hedjaz, Hungary, and France. Recognition by the United States did not come until November 22, 1933 (B No. 28), and by Rumania and Czechoslovakia until June, 1934.
