systematic agitation against tsarism itself. In 1917, he was arrested by the British government for his antiwar writings, and he spent a few months in Brixton Prison. Bolshevik government The Bolsheviks had come to power in Russia after the October Revolution of 1917. The first head of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, which had replaced the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Leon Trotsky, secured Chicherin's release and safe passage to Russia in exchange for British subjects who were being held in Russia, including George Buchanan, the British ambassador. Chicherin had now started to be in poor health and overweight. Upon his return to Russia in early 1918, Chicherin formally joined the Bolsheviks, and was appointed as Trotsky's deputy during the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. After the treaty was signed in late February 1918, Trotsky, who had advocated a different policy, resigned his position in early March. Chicherin became the acting head of the Commissariat and was appointed Commissar for Foreign Affairs on 30 May. On 2 March 1919, he was one of five men chairing the First Congress of the Comintern. Chicherin followed a pro-German foreign policy in line with his anti-British attitudes, which he had developed during his time in the Foreign Ministry, when Britain was blocking Russian expansion in Asia. In 1920, he even suggested to Lenin, who agreed, that English workers should be formed into volunteer units. Soviet armies were nearing Warsaw, but nothing came of the idea. In July 1918, his close friend, Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, became the new German ambassador after his predecessor, Count Wilhelm Mirbach, was shot in the Left SR uprising. In 1922, Chicherin participated in the Genoa Conference and signed the Treaty of Rapallo with Germany. He begged Lenin to avoid wrecking the Genoa Conference since he believed that would make it easier to get foreign loans. Chicherin pursued a policy of collaboration with Germany and developed a closer working relationship with Brockdorff-Rantzau. Chicherin also held diplomatic negotiations with the papal nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, on the status of the Roman Catholic Church in the newly formed Soviet Union. On 10 April 1923, Chicherin wrote a letter to fellow Politburo member Joseph Stalin, in which he described the international political fallout from the recent show trial and execution in the Lubyanka Prison on Easter Sunday of Monsignor Konstanty Budkiewicz. In America, France, and the United