For Peace and Money: French and British Finance in the Service of Tsars and Commissars

325 Pages·2014·3.204 MB·English

by  Jennifer Siegel

For Peace and Money
Oxford Studies in International History
James J. Sheehan, series advisor
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of Anticolonial Nationalism
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Grounds of Judgment:
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China and Japan
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Gordian Knot:
Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order
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The Global Offensive:
The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization,
and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order
Paul Thomas Chamberlin
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An International History
Paula A. Michaels
Unwanted Visionaries:
The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War
Sergey Radchenko
For Peace and Money:
French and British Finance in the Service of Tsars and Commissars
Jennifer Siegel
For Peace
and Money
French and British Finance
in the Service of
Tsars and Commissars
• •
•
Jennifer Siegel
1
1
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To the Segal Sisters

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
A Note on Dates and Transliterations xv
Introduction 1
1. The Rise of the Franco-Russian Financial Alliance, 1894–1903 12
2. The International Financial Challenges of War and Revolution,
1904–1906 50
3. The Changing Face of Russia’s Financiers, 1907–1913 86
4. The Costs of War, 1914–1917 125
5. Revolution, Repudiation, and Recriminations, 1917–1922 168
Epilogue 210
Notes 217
Bibliography 283
Index 301
vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In June of 1986, I began the first of three summers spent working on Wall
Street. My father was at Drexel Burnham Lambert, and summer jobs for his
college-aged girls were part of the territory. I spent one summer mastering
Lotus spreadsheets in corporate finance and two summers mastering “prai-
rie fires” and unprintable language on the international trading desk. But,
after college, while friends of mine competed for analyst positions at all the
major houses, I heeded the call of graduate school and European history.
I had no inkling at that point that my interest in international finance
would resurface. In fact, it was not until many years later, as I commuted in
London from St. Margarets to The City with all the merchant bankers,
heading off for another day of work in the Baring Brothers archive at ING,
that I made the somewhat obvious connection between my upbringing and
early work experiences and my research interests.
My immediate motivations for pursuing this topic were driven by differ-
ent interests. The idea for this book first came to me while I was sitting in
the reading room of the Arkhiv Vneshnei Politiki Rossiiskoi Imperii in
Moscow, finishing up my dissertation research. At a positive point in my
love/hate relationship with life in Russia (it had been a good summer, I was
only there for five weeks, and there had been hot water the entire time), I
allowed myself to imagine doing another project with a heavy Russian
archival- based component. Of course, given my love for London, my home
away from home, I would obviously do an Anglo-Russian topic. And then it
came to me. Paris. I had never lived in Paris. What could I work on that
would take me to Paris?
The rest, as they say, is history. But it is a long history that has been
many years in the making. Along the way, many, many debts, both personal
and professional, have been accrued. Countless archives and archivists
opened up their collections to me. Sincere appreciation must be extended
to the hard-working and dedicated staffs at the National Archives of the
United Kingdom in Kew; the Bank of England in London (in particular,
Sarah Millard, Hayley Whiting, and Jenny Ulph); the Centre des Archives
ix