Russia at war 1941-1945

nothing to do with us, and we shall go on trading with both the aggressors and their victims." But in actual practice non-intervention means connivance in aggression, and encouragement to the aggressors to turn their aggression into a world war...

There is a clear desire there to let the aggressors do their dirty and criminal work—

to let Japan become involved in war with China or, better still, with the Soviet

Union, or to let Germany get bogged down in European affairs, and to get involved in a war against the Soviet Union... And not until all the belligerents have

thoroughly exhausted each other will the non-aggressive powers come forward—of

course "in the interests of peace"—with their own proposals, and dictate their terms to the powers that have frittered away their strength in making war on each other.

A nice and cheap way of doing things!

Was there not a hint that if "they" could play at this game of the fresh-and-bright neutrals dictating their terms to the exhausted belligerents, then why should not "we" play it, too?

Britain and France, Stalin went on to say, had clearly encouraged Nazi Germany to attack the Soviet Union:

They abandoned Austria, despite the obligations to protect her independence; they abandoned the Sudentenland, and threw Czecho-Slovakia to the wolves; in doing so, they broke every conceivable obligation; but after that, their press started its noisy campaign of lies about "the weakness of the Russian Army", the "breakdown of theRussian Air Force", the "disorders" in the Soviet Union... They kept on urging theGermans to go farther and farther east: "You just start a war against the

Bolsheviks, and all will be well."

He then referred to "all the hullabaloo in the French, British and American press about a German invasion of Soviet Ukraine":

They screamed, till they were hoarse, that since Germany was now in control of the so-called Carpathian Ukraine [The eastern tip of Czechoslovakia, also known as Ruthenia.], with about 700,000 people, the Germans would, not later than the spring of 1939, annex to it the Soviet Ukraine with a population of over thirty millions. It really looks as if the purpose of all this highly suspect screaming was to incense theSoviet Union against Germany, to poison the atmosphere, and provoke a conflict

between us and Germany without any obvious reasons. There may, of course, be

some lunatics in Germany who are thinking of marrying off the elephant (I mean

Soviet Ukraine) to the gnat—the so-called Carpathian Ukraine. But let them have