major European powers. The conference broke down when France insisted that Germany pay more in reparations, and demanded in Moscow start paying off the czarist era debts that it had repudiated. The Soviet Union and Germany were both pariah countries, deeply distrusted. The solution was to get together at the nearby city of Rapallo, Italy, where they quickly negotiated the Treaty of Rapallo. In a friendly agreement, they made a clean break with the past, repudiating all old financial and territorial obligations and agreeing to normalize diplomatic and economic relations. Secretly, the two sides established elaborate military cooperation, while publicly denying it. This enabled Germany to rebuild its army and air force secretly at camps in the Soviet Union, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Great Britain Trade and recognition At the direction of the Comintern, by 1937, 10% of Communist Party of Great Britain members were operating secretly inside the British Labour Party, campaigning to change its policy on affiliation and engineer a Popular Front. The Labour leadership fought back and became bitter enemies of Communism. When Labour came to power in the 1945 general election, it was increasingly hostile to the Soviet Union and supported the Cold War. Zinoviev letter The Zinoviev letter was a document published by the London Daily Mail newspaper four days before the British general election in 1924. It purported to be a directive from Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International in Moscow, to the Communist Party of Great Britain, ordering it to engage in seditious activities. It said the resumption of diplomatic relations (by a Labour government) would hasten the radicalization of the British working class. This would have constituted a significant interference in British politics, and as a result, it was deeply offensive to British voters, turning them against the Labour Party. The letter seemed authentic at the time, but historians now agree it was a forgery. The letter aided the Conservative Party under Stanley Baldwin, by hastening the collapse of the Liberal Party vote that produced a Conservative landslide against Ramsay MacDonald's Labour Party. A. J. P. Taylor argued that the most important impact was on the psychology of Labourites, who for years afterward blamed their defeat on foul play, thereby misunderstanding the political forces at work and postponing necessary reforms in the Labour Party. United States In the 1920s, the Republican governments in Washington refused to recognize