ABSTRACT
In line with the traditions from tsarist Russia, the Soviets did what they could to limit the access of nonlittoral navies to the Baltic in the 1920s. In spite of their minimal trust in the surrounding world and their exclusion from the League of Nations, they tried to achieve this by way of international treaties. As early as June 1920, before they even had diplomatic relations with the West, the Soviet government proposed to the British that only littoral powers should be allowed to station warships in the Baltic and the Black Sea. The proposal was repeated during the Turkish peace conference in Lausanne in 1922, as well as during the League of Nations’ naval disarmament conference in Rome in 1924. Provided that the Baltic and Black Seas were closed to the navies of nonlittoral powers, the Soviet representative Berendt declared, his country was willing to reduce its claims for battleship tonnage from 400,000 to 280,000 tons. In the Washington Treaty, the first-rank naval powers, Britain and the United States, had settled for 525,000 tons each and consequently could not take this offer seriously from a – momentarily – nonexistent naval power.1
