The Origins of Detente

The Genoa Conference of April-May 1922 saw the first serious and sustained attempt to negotiate a modus vivendi between the newly established Soviet government in Moscow and the western capitalist countries that surrounded it. Drawing upon a wide range of archival and other sources, many of them unfamiliar or previously unexplored for this purpose, this study traces the evolution of Soviet-Western relations from the Revolution up to the autumn of 1921, when the proposal for a conference first began to emerge, and then considers in more detail the course of preconference diplomacy and the proceedings of the conference itself, up to the early summer of 1922. In his final chapter Dr White argues that the failure to resolve East-West differences at Genoa was attributable to a variety of circumstances, but above all to a failure of political will.