The Genoa conference has been postponed.
The Red Army and the Red Navy have followed with maximum attention all the preliminary negotiations in connection with the international conference. The workers and peasants in the army, like those outside the army, counted on the possibility of practical agreements with bourgeois states being achieved at Genoa, so that the Soviet frontiers could be secured and our forces concentrated on peaceful labour. In particular, the whole country, and along with it the Red Army, hoped that it would be possible to reduce still further the armed forces of the republic and release more of the older age-groups.
These calculations and hopes have now been dealt a new blow by the governments of the Entente. Those same governments which issued invitations to the conference and fixed the date for it to meet, are now starting openly to abort it.
At the same time, rumours and reports are coming from every direction to the effect that, in all corners of the world, the White Guards are stirring themselves at the prospect of the coming spring. There is again talk of invasion by bands, landings, the blowing up of storehouses, acts of incendiarism and assassinations.
Soviet diplomacy will, as before, make every effort to promote the holding of the conference, so that at the conference practical agreements may be reached, and so that, consequently, it may be possible to carry out a further decisive reduction in the arms burden. But in the situation created by the countries of the Entente we have not now, and cannot have, the slightest confidence regarding the actual security of our frontiers.
I hereby order:
Last updated on: 30.12.2006