The first real test of the Soviet Union's commitment to collective security came in the summer of 1938. The issue was the fate of Czechoslovakia. At a secret meeting in November 1937 Hitler had told his military and foreign policy leaders of his short-term plans for German expansion. They included the incorporation of Austria into the German Reich and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, where three million German speakers lived under Czech rule in the Sudetenland. In March 1938 Austria was occupied by German forces and incorporated into the Reich. In May 1938 Hitler ordered his armed forces to prepare for a brief war to eliminate the Czech state in the autumn. He did not expect a general confrontation, but it proved impossible to avoid, because Czechoslovakia had treaty agreements with both France and the Soviet Union. If Czech territory were attacked by another state, French and Soviet forces were pledged to her defence.
When the promises were made neither power expected them to be called in so soon, if at all. Britain and France put pressure on the Czechs during the summer months to make concessions to the German position, because neither was willing to risk war if the Sudeten question could be solved by negotiation. By September the crisis was as dangerous as that earlier crisis, in July 1914, which had plunged all Europe into war. The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, flew to see Hitler to persuade him to agree to negotiation. When on his second visit, on September 22, Hitler raised the stakes by demanding the immediate German occupation of the Sudeten area, the crisis reached boiling point. Both Britain and France began frantic preparations for mobilization. Neither wanted war, but neither could accept the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The question that has always hung over the final crisis was the attitude of Stalin. Was the Soviet Union prepared to go to war with Germany in 1938 to defend its Czech ally?
The formal position taken by the Soviet Union was to stand by collective security. As early as March 17, well before it was clear that Hitler wanted war with the Czechs, Molotov publicly stated his country's commitment to collective action to deter aggression against Czechoslovakia, though he did not specifically promise military intervention. Shortly afterwards the Czech President, Edvard Benes, was privately assured that Moscow would honour its treaty obligation to protect his country as long as France participated as well.8 As the crisis unfolded over the summer, this remained the Soviet position. Ever since the crisis Western opinion has seen in this simply a gesture, designed to salve the Soviet conscience: words rather than deeds.
Fresh evidence has altered the picture substantially. The memoirs of a senior Soviet staff officer, released finally in 1989, seem to make it clear that Stalin was prepared to offer more than a gesture. On September 20 Benes was given a firmer indication of Soviet military support. Two days later both the Kiev and the Belorussian military districts facing the long Polish border were put on alert, and troops were redeployed westward. On September 28, the day that Hitler finally backed down and agreed to Mussolini's suggestion of a conference at Munich, all the military districts west of the Urals were ordered to stop releasing men for leave. The following day reservists were called to the colours throughout the western Soviet Union, 330,000 in all. The Czech Government was offered 700 fighter aircraft if room could be found on Czech airfields. The most significant revelation was that Romania, the Red Army's only possible route into Central Europe (given the strong hostility of the Polish Government to any transfer of Soviet forces through its territory, half of which had belonged to the former Tsarist empire), had agreed under pressure to allow 100,000 Soviet soldiers to cross to Czechoslovakia, as long as it was done quickly.9
Clearly Stalin had something in mind. When Maxim Litvinov met Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to Britain, in Geneva on September 24, he told him privately that Moscow had decided ‘in earnest’ on war, even if France and Britain did not fight. The critical factor for Litvinov was Czech resistance: ‘If they fight, we'll fight alongside them.’10 The following day Paris was finally informed of Soviet military preparations. On September 28 all three states, Britain, France and the Soviet Union, were poised to fight, though not in concert. Their questionable resolve was never tested. Hitler accepted negotiation; the Czech records now show that Benes was in the end not prepared to fight, even with Soviet assistance, if Hitler could not be restrained by the other powers.11
The new evidence is open to a number of interpretations. The Soviet Union might well have used the crisis to intimidate Poland, a state loathed by the Soviet leadership. On the same day that Soviet forces were put on alert an ultimatum was sent to Warsaw warning the Poles that any move against the Czechs on their part would be regarded as unprovoked aggression. No ultimatum was ever sent to Germany. German intelligence was unimpressed by Soviet military movements and did not interpret the Soviet position as a threat of war.12 War with Germany would have meant more serious evidence of large-scale mobilization. It is not improbable, given that military preparations were kept secret from the Germans, that they were for domestic consumption – an elaborate military exercise or another war scare like 1927, designed to keep the system on its toes. The most likely answer is that Stalin was keeping his options open. The one option he did not want was to be left fighting Germany alone. Soviet intervention, if it came, was always dependent on the willingness of the ‘imperialist states’ to fight first.
The Czech crisis forced the Soviet Union to rethink its position in Europe. Stalin's distrust of the Western powers intensified. The Soviet Union had been deliberately kept at arm's length in the Czech negotiations, and, despite its status as one of the major powers, was not invited to the Munich conference. Soviet leaders could not be sure that Britain and France did not intend to divert German ambitions eastward towards them (or Japanese ambitions westward), the very opposite of what they had expected by joining the League. Joseph Davies reported to President Roosevelt the evident mood of ‘hostility to England and indifference to France’.13 It is tempting to see this as the point where Stalin decided to try the German gambit once again, to win a peace from Hitler rather than fight a war allied with the West. The Soviet Union appeared to be in a strong position. Both sides, Hitler and the West, stood to gain by having Stalin on their side. Stalin stood to gain from whichever side could offer him immunity from war. The Nazi-Soviet Pact, concluded in August 1939, can, on this account, be regarded as the logical conclusion of the Munich crisis.
Here again new evidence has overturned the established picture. The wealth of new documentation on Soviet foreign policy in 1939 paints a picture of uncertainty and vacillation. Far from being the arbiter of Europe, the Soviet Union saw itself as isolated and vulnerable; Soviet leaders did not believe that an agreement with Germany was possible, but they had no confidence that an agreement with Britain and France was worth very much. The fresh crisis in Soviet security was intensified by the toll of experienced diplomats and officials taken by the terror. In the spring of 1939 a further wave of sackings and arrests hit the Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. On May 3 Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet architect of the policy of collective security, was removed as Foreign Minister. Perhaps because of his links with the West, where he was respected more than most Soviet negotiators, he did not go through the usual horrors but ended up as ambassador in Washington. The rest of his staff was not so lucky. Their punishment for allowing the Soviet Union to drift again into a dangerous isolation was demotion, prison or death. At just the point where the Soviet Union needed all the diplomatic talent she could muster, it was squandered by the regime's lust for scapegoats.14
Litvinov's successor was Molotov, the Soviet premier, and one of the few men to keep high office throughout the dictatorship. Like Stalin, whose name means ‘steel’ in Russian, he adopted a revolutionary pseudonym. From his reputed skill in forcing through an argument he chose the Russian word for hammer. He was an intelligent and shrewd organizer, promoted to premier at the age of forty in 1929. He was entirely Stalin's man, and remained loyal to him even when, after the war, his Jewish wife was arrested and exiled. A secon
d key appointment was made after Munich. On 8 November 1938 the sadistic Yezhov was replaced as head of the NKVD by a young Georgian, Lavrenti Beria. Ambitious, fawning, vicious, depraved, Beria had all the qualifications for the job. Born in 1899, the son of a poor Georgian peasant, he was a student in Baku when the Revolution broke out. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917, and became an official of the Azerbaijan Cheka in the early 1920s. He made his reputation slaughtering enemies of Stalin in Transcaucasia, where he rose to be the local Party leader in the mid-1930s; he embellished it relentlessly in Moscow when he became master of the Lubyanka. His sadism was notorious. His bodyguards seized young girls off the streets of the capital for him to molest and rape at leisure. He combined grotesque coarseness and lust for cruelty with a slavish obeisance. He survived the death of Stalin in 1953, if only briefly.15
The search for greater security occasioned by the failure of collective action over the Czech crisis was renewed in the spring of 1939. The German occupation of the rest of the Czech state on March 15 provoked from Stalin a public condemnation of the Western states. At the 18th Party Congress he chided Britain and France for ‘conniving at aggression, giving free rein to war’. He thought he could detect ‘an eagerness, a desire' on their part to push Japan and Germany into a war with the Soviet Union.16 Since this was regarded as a very real threat, Stalin did not close the door on co-operation with the Western states in restraining Hitler. This was not an attractive option, given the Soviet Union's deep distrust of Western motives, but in the spring of 1939 it was still preferable to isolation. The British and French realized at almost exactly the same time that if they wanted to deter or restrain Hitler in 1939, they would have to move closer to the Soviet Union. On March 1 Neville Chamberlain paid the first official visit by any British Prime Minister to the Soviet embassy in London. Chamberlain did not like Stalin or Communism, but he bowed to the wisdom of Britain's military leaders and the French Government, who argued that Hitler would only listen to superior military force.17 By the beginning of April Britain had guaranteed Poland and Romania against German aggression, and contacts were pursued with the Soviet Union to see if a wider coalition of anti-Hitler states could be created to encircle Germany.
The Soviet answer was so straightforward that neither of the two Western states (nor a great many historians since) was willing to take it at face value. On April 17 the Soviet Union offered Britain and France an alliance that would guarantee the integrity of every state from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and bring all three powers into war if any of the states was attacked by Germany. The offer now seems to have been genuine enough. In his speech in March Stalin reminded his listeners – and foreign opinion – that the three of them combined were ‘unquestionably stronger than the fascist states’.18 This was almost certainly true in a material sense, even allowing for the fact that Stalin had an exaggerated respect for the military power of the Western democracies. There remained considerable doubts in Moscow about Western goodwill. Litvinov did not believe that the West was serious about facing up to Hitler, and was sacked in May for his lack of enthusiasm. His replacement, Molotov, was faced with the problem of how to persuade the West that the Soviet Union meant business. Here he ran up against an accumulation of profound mistrust and hostility whose depths constantly frustrated and disconcerted Soviet negotiators.
The first indication of how difficult it was going to be to get the Western states to accept the Soviet offer came with the long delay in the British reply. Not until May 25, six weeks later, did the British agree, not to an alliance, but to the opening of preliminary discussions. Those talks dragged out over the summer. The British and French found endless stumbling blocks. Their guarantee for Poland brought into the equation a state whose leaders were inveterately anti-Soviet; Polish generals made it clear that they would rather fight Germany alone, if they had to, than with Soviet assistance. The British were not prepared to guarantee the Baltic states, where they suspected the Moscow regime had ulterior motives. The NKVD furnished Stalin with regular high-level intelligence, supplied by spies in the heart of the British establishment, about the twists and turns of British policy. Molotov privately fumed about the ‘crooks and cheats’ he had to deal with, ‘resorting to all kinds of trickery and dreadful subterfuge’. As tension between Germany and Poland deepened over the summer months, the talks deadlocked.19 Finally an exasperated Molotov announced on July 17 that the talks should consider a military pact if they were to have any worth at all. This ambition exposed the difference between the two sides: the Soviet Union wanted an alliance to fight Hitler, the West wanted a diplomatic front to deter him.
The military talks marked the final step in the Soviet effort to establish a common bloc – the diplomatic equivalent of the Popular Front – to encircle Hitler. They ended any illusion that Soviet leaders might have clung to that an alliance with the West on equal terms was possible. Instead of treating the military talks with the seriousness they deserved in view of the imminent German–Polish conflict, the Western states added insult to injury. Their negotiators travelled, not by airliner, but by sea. The British liner City of Exeter did not dock at Leningrad until August 10, twenty-five days after Molotov's invitation to talks was issued. The British and French delegations were met by senior Soviet military men and whisked by night train to Moscow. Neither delegation was headed by anyone senior enough for the immense task of forging a military alliance. Soviet leaders drew the obvious conclusion: the West did not regard the Soviet Union as an equal. Even Poland had been more favourably treated.
On August 12 the drama unfolded. The two Western delegations met the Soviet side around a table in a room in the Spiridonovka Palace. The room was crowded with interpreters and stenographers. It was an unusually sultry day. The room filled with the smoke of Soviet cigarettes.20 The Soviet team was led by Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, Commissar for Defence since 1934, and one of Stalin's closest circle. All the Soviet military chiefs were present, primed to give a full account of the Soviet contribution to the alliance. In only a matter of minutes the whole enterprise was damaged almost beyond repair. Voroshilov announced that he was empowered by Stalin to sign any military agreement then and there. He asked the heads of the French and British delegations for their credentials. General Joseph Doumenc, the French Commander of the 1st Military Region, bent his instructions sufficiently to persuade Voroshilov that he had the same power. But Britain's chief negotiator, Admiral Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, the naval aide to King George VI, did not even have a page of written instructions. He could at best report back to London. He had no power to agree to anything. Voroshilov was visibly surprised. This revelation might have ended the talks at once, but after conferring with his colleagues Voroshilov agreed to continue them. The group reassembled after a cold lunch. The answer to his next question was even more dismaying. He asked whether either Government had made firm arrangements with the other states of Eastern Europe, principally Poland, for the movement of Soviet forces towards Germany. Drax spluttered about principles, but had nothing concrete to offer. Doumenc could make no commitment, for the Poles had refused point-blank to have the Red Army on Polish soil. Voroshilov was now ill-tempered: ‘Principles? We don't want principles, we want facts!’21
The facts, when they came, killed off the conference. When the British negotiators were asked how many army divisions Britain could field, Voroshilov was told the figure was sixteen. The Soviet team was so astonished they asked for the figure to be retranslated. When pressed for details, the hapless British had to admit that only four were actually ready to fight. When Stalin later asked the British ambassador for the figure, he finally got the truth: two divisions immediately and two later. Stalin simply shook his head in disbelief. The French had more to offer – 110 divisions and 4,000 tanks. Voroshilov then turned to Soviet strengths. In addition to 120 divisions (out of approximately 300), the Soviet Union could field 5,000 heavy guns, 9,000 to 10,000 tanks and 5,000 combat aircraft.22 The talks were cont
inued by both sides with little enthusiasm. Stalin now realized, if he had not already done so, that the Western imperialist states he had feared so much were considerably weaker than the Soviet Union. The alliance would still have been a formidable bloc and might well have deterred Hitler from war on Poland. But the evident reluctance of the Western states to rise to Stalin's offer and the constant slights and checks directed at Soviet efforts would have tried the patience of the most diffident ally. The failure to secure the alliance ended the search for collective security.
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