Western nonchalance toward treaty obligations went beyond simple defiance of international law or fear of exercising the statutes. As Litvinov observed before the League's 1937 Assembly:
".. however diversified the regimes' [Italy, Germany, and Japan] ideology, the material and cultural level of the objects of the attacks, all three States advance one and the same motive to justify aggression: the struggie against Communism. The rulers of these States naively think, or rather pretend to think, that they have only to pronounce the word ,,anti-Communism" and all their international wrongdoings and crimes will be forgiyen."
Litvinov's fears were confirmed. During the 1930s, anti-Communism licensed the waiving of treaty obligations by Western States and the demolition of international law.
Events now moved very quickly. "Appeasement"
of Nazi and Italian encroachments became the order of the day Germany became "Greater Germany" with the incorporauon, by force, of Austria in 1938. Hitler's demand for the Sudetenland sectors of Czechoslovakia ended with that nation's dismemberment at Munich in 1938; British Prime Minister Chamberlain and French Premier Daladier acquiesced, preserving "peace" in Europe.
The USSR was excluded from the deliberations on the future of Europe. Small wonder then that Litvinov would rise before the League for the last time to remark: "... I must plainly declare here that theSoviet Government bears no responsibility whatsoever Ior we events now taking place, and for the fatal consequences which may inexorably ensue.
Still another Soviet attempt was made to conclude a mutual support agreement with Britain and France. The USSR pledged to uphold its mutual assistance pact with Czechoslovakia in the event of a German invasion, but with the Nazi entry into Prague in March, 1939, the Soviets found the other powers quite unwilling to join in defense of that country; the USSR was in no position to confront the onrushing Nazis alone- In March, April, June, and August, the Soviet Union reiterated the appeal for a mutual aid pact with Britain and France. Prime Minister Chamberlain termed the proposal "premature" in March and confided a "most profound distrust of Russia." In response to the concept of joint defense of Poland and other states on the German border from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, French and British leaders agreed to defend the border states and welcomed Soviet aid in case of Nazi assaults upon France and Britain, but refused to promise assistance to the Soviets if Germany attacked the USSR. Polls showed that 90 percent of the British people dissented from the Chamberlain-Daladier stance, preferriing instead a solid mutual aid treaty Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, David Lloyd George and other statesmen found the British government's outlook shortsighted: they, too, demanded an equitable French-Soviet-British alliance against the Nazis. An accord that bound the Soviets to defend the others! , but not vice-versa, was unacceptable. The USSR, declared a Soviet representative, refused "to become a plaything in the hands of people who like others to pull chestnuts out of the fire for them.''
Not until August, 1939, did British and French delegations arrive in Moscow--supposedly to negotiate an alliance. They had traveled by boat, taking their time. It was known then, and British documents have since con-timed, that these delegations consisted entirely of subordinate officials who had no mandate to reach an accord. German troops massed on the Polish border; invasion plans had been conceived as early as the previous spring. Nazi Field Marshal Keitel would later remember that the September 1 invasion date had been set in May. Poland's leaders, themselves anti-Communist, rebuffed a mutual aid pact with the USSR that would have placed Soviet troops in Poland in advance of the looming Nazi aggression. Instead, Poland concluded a defense agreement with Britain, supported by France; but an accord without Soviet participation assured Poland of no viable security against the Nazis? The USSR was faced with mounting evidence of the slippery world of European diplomacy. The Germans were heading East; Nazi and Fascist actions in Spain, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Albania (seized by Italy in April) had been appeased; all sense of mutuality and joint anti-Nazi action to stave off war had been thrown to the winds by Western leaders; anti-Com-munist Polish leaders appeared to fear Soviet defense aid more than Nazi attack. On the eve of Nazi invasion, the bulk of the Polish armed forces were deployed on the Polish-Soviet border. To protect itself, the USSR signed the famous non-aggression treaty with Germany on August 23, 1939. No Soviet treaty experience has been more discussed or distorted. It has been characterized as a supreme example of unscrupulous, unprincipled, self-serving Communist power politics.
The non-aggression treaty bound the two sides to "refrain from any act of force" against each other; to join no hostile action against either country by a third party; to settle any disputes between them "exclusively by peaceful means.'35 As planned since May, German troops invaded Poland on September 1, hindered mildly by the defenses now offered the victims by France and Britain. With Polish troops concentrated on the Soviet border, the Nazi juggernaut sped quickly across the country. It has been charged that the Soviet Union at that point fulfilled its end of the bargain and, with Polish democracy drowning, sent its troops into Poland. But there was no Nazi-Soviet "alliance." Soviet, opposition to Nazism had been manifested without parallel during the 1930s, consecrated in blood on the fields of Spain. Non-aggression was just that, born of the West-em appeasement of fascism which the Soviet Union had resisted every tragic step of the way. The treaty supplied the Soviets with the oxygen of time before the inevitable Nazi invasion of the USSR, about which Hitler had long. raved. The facts indicate that a persisting German-Soviet antipathy made the non-aggression treaty increasingly shaky. When Soviet troops entered Poland three weeks after the Nazi invasion, they did so, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov explained, to protect Soviet borders from the onrushing Germans: "Poland has become a fertile field for any accidental and unexpected contingency that may create a menace to the Soviet Union." MoreoverPolish lands the Soviet troops occupied as Nazi forces sped east--for that section of Eastern Poland had been taken from Russia by the Treaty of Riga (1921). The USSR went into Poland only up to the Curzon Line, the Polish-Russian border set by the Treaty of Versailles (1919).
Winston Churchill, soon to be Prime Minister of Great Britain, cut to the nub of the matter of Soviet "complicity" with Nazi aggression:". · - That the Russians should stand on this line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace. At any rate, the line is there, and an Eastern front has been created which Nazi Germany dare not assail." He felt the Western leaders had imperiled their own nations by giving Hitler and Mussolini far too much rope, allowing the fascists to work up a head of steam that rendered the British-French support for Poland, when it finally came, almost useless. Despite his antipathy to socialism, Churchill had argued long and hard for a mutual aid treaty with the USSR. He was none too impressed with the sympathy expressed for Poland as a victim of Soviet duplicity. Afterward he recalled that every Soviet plea for anti-Nazi defense had been spurned, and now, Churchill stated:
When every one of these aids and advantages has been squandered and thrown away, Great Britain advances, leading France by the hand to guarantee the integrity of Poland--of that very Poland which with hyena appetite had only six months before joined in the pillage and destruction of the Czechoslovak State. There was sense in fighting for Czechoslovakia in 1938, when the German Army could scarcely put up a half a dozen trained divisions on the Western Front, when the French with nearly sixty or seventy divisions could most certainly have rolled forward across the Rhine or into the Ruhr. But this had been judged ~nable, rash, below the level of mod-
em intellectual thought and morality. Yet now at last the two Western democracies declared themselves ready to stake their lives upon the territorial integrity of Poland. History... may be scoured and ransacked to find a parallel to this sudden and complete reversal of five or six years' policy of easy-going placatory appeasement, and its fransformation almost over-night into a readiness to accept an obviously imminent war on far worse conditions and on the greatest scale?
Finally, there is evidence of Nazi puzzlement or dismay at the Soviet entry into Poland.
General Nicolans yon Vormann recalled rage in Hitler's headquarte~ at the news of the Soviet move; a decision to confront the Soviets then and there was debated, then tabled. Nazi troops in fact then retreated from their positions in Eastern PolandY Even as France and Britain "opposed" German and Italian forces in the famous '~p..ho.~.y," quiet stage of the war (1939-1941), Sovie'f~relations with Germany went downhill. A month after Hitler's takeover of Poland, the USSR moved to fortify itself against Nazi attack. It asked Finland for a naval base and for a section of land across the Gulf of Finland from highly vulnerable Leningrad, offering twice as much territory in return. Military historian B. H. Liddell Hart, not one to conceal his anti-Soviet proclivities, found the Soviet proposal "rational" and unthreatening "to the security of Finland," intended in fact to hinder "the use of Finland as a jumping-offpoint for any German attack on Russia." The Finnish leaders, headed by the openly pro-Nazi Man-nerheim, demurred, and the two sides went to war in late 1939.
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