BRITAIN AND RUSSIA

Greymouth Evening Star, 30 November 1929, Page 4

BRITAIN AND RUSSIA

THE NEW AMBASSADOR

Mr G. Sokolnikoff, president of the Naptha Syndicate, who has been appointed Russian Ambassador in Britain, was born in 1888. He was brought up as one of the Russian “Intelligentsia,” but at an early age began to interest himself in the Labour movement, and thus became a political exile. During the 1905 revolution he returned to Russia for a

time and joined the Bolsheviks. Since the sixth congress he has been a member of , the centre committee of the party, and with Rykoff, Losovsky and others he tried to bring about a reunion of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1910. In 1918 he was on the staff of the Soviet organ “Pravda.” During the civil war he had a post at the front. Later he was a member of the executive of the Russian Communist Party and Commissar of Finance. In that capacity he was responsible for the attempt in 1922 to rehabilitate the Russian currency by the introduction of the chervonetz as a monetary unit. He was also a member of the Soviet delegation which attended the international congress at the Hague. I , At the beginning of October, 1925, Sokolnikoff the conclusion of an agreement for a loan to Russia by a group of German banks which were to supply 75,000,000 gold marks to finance exports of Russian agricultural produce 1 . A German industrial syndicate increased this loan to 100,000,000 marks, the entire sum to’be utilised foi* purchases in Germany. In December, 1925, the scheme broke down, for it was endangering the stability of Russian currency. It was also found impossible to find enough produce to export. At the Communist party congress in that month Sokolnikeff, who opposed the monopoly of foreign commerce, was not re-elected to the “Polit Bureau.” On January 18. 1926, he was relieved of his. post as Commissar of Finance, and as deputy chairman of the State Economic Commission was thrust into the background. In the autumn of 1926 the dissensions among the Russian leaders became acute and disciplinary measures were then first threatened against Zinovieff, Kameneff, Trotsky, Sokolnikoff and others. In October, however, an agreement was reached by which the Opposition adhered to the decisions of the 14th congress? and undertook to carry them out, while at the same time maintaining the opinions which they had expressed on various questions. They were, however, censured for* an “inadmissible violation of party discipline.” Sokblnikoff’s waitings include “State Capitalism and the new Financial Policy,” “The Aims of the Financial Policy” and “The Peace of 6rest-Litovsk.”