government, caught quite unprepared by the appearance of Hitler, was slow to appreciate the new danger - in all fairness it should be added that other governments, although not handicapped by Marxist blinkers, were equally surprised and slow. Yet, once the handwriting on the wall became clear, the Bolshevik leadership did what it could to counteract the Fascist enemy, for that purpose mobilizing Communist parties all over the world as well as using orthodox diplomatic means. Hence the celebrated 'popular fronts' of the 1930's and the strange
As early as 1929 the Soviet Union used the occasion of the making of the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war to formulate the Litvinov Protocol, applying the pact on a regional basis. Poland, Rumania, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Turkey, Persia, and the Free City of Danzig proved willing to sign the Protocol with the U.S.S.R. In 1932 the Soviet Union concluded treaties of nonaggression with Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Finland, as well as with France. In 1933 the United States finally recognized the Soviet Union, obtaining from the Soviets the usual unreliable promise to desist from Communist propaganda in the U.S. In the spring of 1934 the nonaggression pacts with Poland and the Baltic states were expanded into
ten-year agreements. In the summer of that year the Soviet government signed treaties with Czechoslovakia and Rumania - the establishment of diplomatic relations with the latter country marked the long delayed, temporary Soviet reconciliation to the loss of Bessarabia. And in the autumn of 1934 the U.S.S.R. joined the League of Nations.
The following year witnessed the conclusion of the Soviet-French and the Soviet-Czech alliances. Both called for military aid in case of an unprovoked attack by a European state. The Soviet-Czech treaty, however, added the qualification that the U.S.S.R. was obliged to help Czechoslovakia only if France, which had concluded a mutual aid treaty with the Czechs, would come to their assistance. France, it is worth noting, failed to respond to Soviet pressure for a precise military convention, while neither Poland nor Rumania wanted to allow the passage of the Red Army to help the Czechs in case of need.
Also in 1935 the Third International, which had become somewhat less active as a revolutionary force in the course of the preceding years, at its Seventh Congress proclaimed the new policy of popular fronts: Communist parties, reversing themselves, were to co-operate in their respective countries with other political groups interested in checking Fascist aggression, and they were to support rearmament. In its turn the Soviet government demanded in the League of Nations and elsewhere that severe sanctions be applied to aggressors and that forces of peace be urgently mobilized to stop them. Yet both the League and the great powers individually accomplished little or nothing. Italy completed its conquest of Ethiopia, while Japan developed its aggression on the Asiatic mainland. In the summer of 1936 a great civil war broke out in Spain, pitting Franco's Fascist rebels and their allies against the democratic and Left-wing republican government. Once more, the Soviet Union proved eager to stop Fascism, while France and Great Britain hesitated, compromised, emphasized nonintervention, and let the Spanish republic go down. Whereas Italian divisions and German airmen and tankmen aided Franco, none but Soviet officers and technicians were sent to assist the Loyalists, while the international Communist movement mobilized its resources to obtain and ship volunteers who fought in the celebrated 'international brigades.' Although much in the Soviet intervention in Spain remains obscure and controversial, studies by Cattell and others demonstrate both the seriousness of the Soviet effort to defeat Franco and the remarkable way in which the Communists, including the secret police, proceeded to extend their hold on republican Spain and to dispose of their rivals. But,
with massive Italian and German backing, the insurgents won the bitter civil war in Spain, hostilities ending in the spring of 1939.
The position and prospects of the Soviet Union became graver and graver in the course of the '30's. In November 1936, Germany and Japan concluded the so-called Anti-Comintern Pact aimed specifically against the U.S.S.R. Italy joined the Pact in 1937 and Spain in 1939. In the Far East in 1935 the Soviet Union sold its dominant interest in the Chinese Eastern Railway to the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, thus eliminating one major source of conflict. But relations between Japan and the U.S.S.R. remained tense, as Japanese expansion and ambitions grew, while the Soviet leaders continued to send supplies to Chiang Kai-shek as well as to direct and support Communist movements in Asia. In fact, in 1938 and again in 1939 Japanese and Soviet troops fought actual battles on the Manchurian and Mongolian borders, the Red Army better than holding its own and hostilities being terminated as abruptly as they had begun. Hitler's Germany represented an even greater menace to the Soviet Union than Japan. The Fuhrer preached the destruction of communism and pointed to the lands east as the natural area of German expansion, its legitimate
The climax of appeasement came in September 1938 at Munich. Great Britain and France capitulated to Hitler's demand for Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland, a largely ethnically German area of Czechoslovakia; Chamberlain and Daladier flew to Munich and sealed the arrangement with Hitler and Mussolini. The unpreparedness and unwillingness of the Western democracies to fight, rather than any collusion of the West with Hitler against the U.S.S.R., motivated the Munich surrender. Still, the extreme Soviet suspicion of the settlement can well be understood, especially since the Soviet government was not invited to participate in it. Although it had expressed its readiness to defend Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union had been forced to remain a helpless bystander when France failed to come to the aid of the Czechs and Prague had to accept its
betrayal by the great powers. Moreover, after Munich the Franco-Russian alliance appeared to mean very little, and the U.S.S.R. found itself, in spite of all its efforts to promote collective security, in highly dangerous isolation.
His appetite whetted by appeasement, Hitler in the meantime developed further aggressive designs in eastern Europe. In March 1939 he disposed of what remained of Czechoslovakia, establishing the German protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and another one of Slovakia. This step both destroyed the Munich arrangement and made plain Nazi determination to expand beyond ethnic German boundaries. Next Hitler turned to Poland, demanding the cession of Danzig to Germany and the right of extraterritorial German transit across the Polish 'corridor' to East Prussia. The alternative was war.
Poland, however, did not stand alone against Germany in the summer of 1939. France and Great Britain finally saw the folly of appeasement after Germany had seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia. At the end of March they made clear their determination to fight if Poland were attacked. As war clouds gathered, the position of the Soviet Union became all the more significant. In May Molotov replaced Litvinov as commissar for foreign affairs, retaining at the same time his office of Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, equivalent to prime minister, as well as his membership in the Politburo. Thus for the first time since Trotsky in 1918 a Communist leader of the first rank took charge of Soviet foreign policy. Moreover, in contrast to his predecessor Litvinov, Molotov had not been personally committed to collective security and, therefore, could more easily undertake a fresh start. In retrospect commentators have also noted the fact that Molotov, again in contrast to Litvinov, was not Jewish. After an exchange of notes in the spring of 1939, Great Britain and France began in the summer to negotiate with the U.S.S.R concerning the formation of a joint front against aggression. But the Western powers failed to come to terms with the Soviet Union, or even to press the negotiations, sending a weak and low-ranking mission to Moscow. The Soviet government, on its side, remained extremely suspicious of the West, especially after the Munich settlement, and eagerly sought ways of diverting impending hostilities away from its borders. On August 23 a German-Russian agreement of strict neutrality was signed in Moscow - secret talks had begun as early as May - an event which produced surprise and shock in the world. Fortified by the pact, Hitler attacked Poland on the first of September. On the third, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. The Second World War became a reality.
The Bolsheviks and the Nazis hated each other and considered themselves to be irreconcilable enemies. That
