Russia at war 1941-1945

The gravest doubts about the success of Litvinov's collective security and League of Nations policy existed in Russia for a long time. In fact, it is wrong to describe this policy as "Litvinov's" policy. He was pursuing a policy laid down and approved by the Soviet Government and the Party, and the personal factor mattered only in so far as he pursued this policy with great conviction, enthusiasm and determination. But, all along, he had found the results deeply disappointing and frustrating. For only a short period in 1934 did the French think in terms of a Grand Alliance against Nazi Germany, comprising France's allies (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Yugoslavia), Britain and the Soviet Union.

This was when Louis Barthou was Foreign Minister. Britain was, however, less than

lukewarm towards the Barthou plan, and so was Poland.

After Barthou's assassination in October 1934 he was replaced at the Quai d'Orsay by Pierre Laval, whose greatest ambition was an alliance with Mussolini's Italy and some kind of agreement with Nazi Germany. If, in 1935, he signed a mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union, it was chiefly for tactical and domestic reasons, and the practical value of this pact was not rated highly either in France or in Russia. For one thing the French were reluctant to follow up the pact with a military convention.

In March 1936 came Hitler's reoccupation of the Rhineland; and France's failure to react clearly suggested to the Russians that France could scarcely be depended upon to abide by her alliances with Poland and the Little Entente countries. There was going to be a widening gulf between France's official foreign policy and her military possibilities once the Rhineland had been occupied and fortified by Hitler.

And who, during those years, had been the men in charge of British policy? Ramsay

MacDonald, Sir John Simon, who gave Mussolini a free hand in Abyssinia at the Stresa conference in 1935; then Baldwin and Simon who had discouraged any French action in

response to the Rhineland coup; then Samuel Hoare of the Hoare-Laval Plan; then Chamberlain and Halifax. Appeasement had, in varying degrees, become the official

policy of both Britain and France—appeasement over the Rhineland coup, appeasement over Spain, appeasement over Austria and Czechoslovakia. Munich had been the ultimate triumph of the appeasement policy. In Britain, the few sincere critics of this policy—

notably Anthony Eden—had been swept aside, and Churchill was little more than a voice crying in the wilderness. In France things were no better. At the end of 1937, the well-meaning but wholly ineffectual Yvon Delbos, who had been Foreign Minister since the

formation of Léon Blum's Popular Front Government in June 1936, went on a long tour

through Eastern Europe—he visited Warsaw, Belgrade, Bucharest and Prague—but only

to find that France's system of alliances had fallen to ruins since the Rhineland coup, with the Czechs alone still pathetically believing that France would come to their help if Germany attacked them. Significantly Delbos failed to include Moscow in his tour.

Before long the arch-appeaser Georges Bonnet became the head of French diplomacy.

When after Munich Bonnet welcomed Ribbentrop to Paris in December 1938, he did not

officially (as has sometimes erroneously been suggested) give Germany "a free hand in the East". Nevertheless the half-heartedness with which France's "special relations with third powers" were referred to, the extremely ambiguous statements Bonnet made a week later before the Foreign Affairs committee of the Chamber about France's commitments vis-à-vis Poland, Rumania or the Soviet Union, and above all, the press campaign launched with official blessing, in influential papers like Le Matin and Le Temps, in favour of lunatic schemes such as the formation of a "Greater Ukraine" under the rule of German stooges like Biskupsky and Skoropadsky, left very little doubt about the

overtones of the Bonnet-Ribbentrop "friendship talks".

[See the author's France and Munich: Before and After the Surrender (London, 1939), pp. 384-91.]

When, during the following summer, Bonnet proceeded to "warn" Germany, Ribbentrop did not fail to point out that in December 1938 Bonnet had shown no desire to interfere with either German designs on Danzig or with German interests in the East generally.

The idea of a "Greater Ukraine" had certainly not been a brainwave of the French or British "appeasers". Hitler had been playing with this idea for some weeks after Munich; soon, however, he realised that if his plans for a "Greater Ukraine" were to be pursued further at this stage it might result in a rapprochement between Russia, Poland and Rumania.

[Robert Coulondre, De Staline à Hitler (Paris, 1950), pp. 251-3.]