In December 1905, Russian revolutionaries published a warning to the bankers of Europe: do not lend to this government, because we will not pay you. Six months later Paris lent the Tsar 2.25 billion francs — the largest international loan in history — and roughly 1.6 million ordinary French families put their savings into Russian bonds.
Twelve years later, a single decree in Petrograd cancelled all of it.
By July 1914, French investors held an estimated 12.45 billion francs of Russian securities: about a third of every foreign bond held in France, and close to 4.5% of the entire wealth of the nation. Most of it belonged to schoolteachers, shopkeepers, widows and retired clerks — not financiers. When the Bolsheviks annulled the Tsarist debts in early 1918, France went from being a net creditor to a net debtor overnight, in what remains the largest sovereign default in history.
But the real question is why they bought at all. The answer was sitting in the tsarist archives the Bolsheviks seized in 1917 — and when it was published in 1923, it changed how France regulates journalism to this day.
You were taught the Russian Revolution happened because the workers rose up. They did. But by 1914 the Russian Empire was the largest sovereign debtor on earth, roughly 80% of its government debt was held in France, and the money that kept the autocracy alive through 1905 is the same money that funded the war that destroyed it.
Credit to : Uncover Empire History