[AVP SSR (Soviet Foreign Policy Archives) Anglo-Franco-Soviet talks, vol. III, f. 39, quoted in Istoriya velikoi otechestvennoi voiny Sovietskogo Soyuza (History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union), vol. I (Moscow, 1960). Referred to in future as
IVOVSS.]
The joint Anglo-French proposals of May 27, in reply to this Note, were a marked
improvement on earlier efforts; they provided for direct Anglo-French aid to the Soviet Union in the event of a "direct attack", but left the question of the Baltic States still unresolved. Molotov's new Note of June 2 now stressed the need for "all-round, effective and immediate" mutual aid, and proposed to cover Belgium, Greece, Turkey, Rumania, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Finland in the joint guarantees. It even provided that the mutual assistance would apply in cases when one of the signatories had become involved in war by helping a neutral European country that had applied for such help.
[AVP SSR, vol. III, ff. 46-47.]
What Molotov was in fact suggesting was a mutual assistance pact covering practically the whole of Europe.
The talks were becoming increasingly complicated. The Russians raised the question of
"indirect aggression". This meant in the first place, the use by Germany of the Baltic States as a base for aggression "with the connivance" of the governments of those countries. The possibility of Russian preventive action here could, in the British view, not be ruled out. The Russians also wanted to know if their troops could have access to
Polish territory in case of need. They wanted a concrete agreement on the precise military contribution the Soviet Union, Britain and France would make to the "common effort".
Looking back on these crucial days Grigore Gafencu, the Rumanian Foreign Minister,
wrote: "The Western Powers were seeking for a psychological effect (they did not hide this fact). They wished to create a solidarity between the West and the East which would prevent Hitler from starting his war. This plan was perfectly justified ... and any delay in its realisation seemed intolerable. The Soviet view was equally tenable: Moscow did not want to engage itself lightly. If despite agreement in principle, war broke out, the greatest German effort might be made against the USSR."
[The trouble is that, as Stalin was to say to Churchill in 1942, he (Stalin) knew perfectly well that such a "psychological effect" was totally insufficient to restrain Hitler.]
Anyway, the Strang-Molotov talks were leading nowhere, and, on July 23 Molotov
finally proposed that France and Britain send a military mission to Moscow.
The manner and motions of this mission were to show before long how "intolerable" Mr Chamberlain thought "any delay". What he still wanted "without delay" was a
"psychological effect"; on the other hand a military convention—to the Russians "the only real test of Western sincerity"—was precisely what he was not in a hurry to sign.
But were the Russians wholehearted about an alliance with Britain and France? On June 29 Zhdanov published in Pravda a sharply critical article on the Western Powers, almost suggesting that an alliance with the "Munichites" would be a doubtful asset. References to the Siegfried Line also appeared in the Soviet press from time to time, suggesting that France's striking power against Germany might be insufficient. And among the Soviet
hierarchy there might well have been the lingering thought that, so soon after the Army Purges, the Red Army had better not take on a powerful enemy like Nazi Germany,
unless some definite military convention could be reached with Biritain and France. Short of this, it might (as Stalin had already suggested on March 10) be preferable to remain
"neutral". But how?
Nor did it escape the Russians' notice that since Munich, and indeed to the very moment the war broke out, there were important people in power or near the levers of power in Britain and elsewhere who in their frantic efforts to appease Hitler, were prepared to go to almost any lengths.
[The list of appeasers—Mr Hudson, Sir Horace Wilson, Lord Kemsley, etc.—which
emerges from the Dirksen archives, that is the papers of the German Ambassador in
London until the outbreak of the war, captured by the Russians and published
subsequently, Dokumenty i materialy kanuna vtoroi mirovoi voiny. T.II Arkhiv Dirksena (1938-39), (Moscow, 1948), even allowing for a good deal of selective editing, certainly bears out what every experienced and sober observer of the political scene must have known or strongly suspected at the time.]
In all circumstances the Russians had to prepare themselves for an imminent Nazi thrust eastwards against Poland and the not unlikely event that such an offensive might
encompass the Baltic States and possibly Rumania, that is, a front extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Even if the German offensive stopped in the face of the Russian winter, the Russians must have feared a German invasion in the spring of 1940 with the West taking a ringside seat behind the Maginot Line, unless of course definite guarantees of co-ordinated military action were mutually provided.
On August 4, Pravda reported from London that Britain and France had agreed to send a military mission to Moscow. This report was accompanied by an account of the House of Commons debate, in the course of which Eden welcomed the decision. He thought that
this would "resolve distrust", and hoped that these talks would soon lead to an agreement.
He proposed, however, that, in addition to admirals and generals, the British Government should send "a representative political leader" to Moscow, "so that all the talks could be concluded within a week". There was no time to lose, Eden said, since Poland was now being threatened, as Czechoslovakia had been, and it was essential to create a peace front with the utmost speed, so as to discourage aggression. To these warnings Chamberlain turned a deaf ear.
But for several days after that very little more was said in the Soviet press about this military mission. For over a week a carefree holiday mood seems to have reigned in
Moscow. On August 1, indeed, a monumental Agricultural Exhibition opened in the
capital, with Molotov presiding over the opening ceremony. Stalin was represented by a colossal statue at the entrance of the Exhibition. Although, only a fortnight before, the Soviet press had reported a highly critical speech by Khrushchev on the state of stock-breeding in the Ukraine—a speech in which he castigated the half-heartedness of so
many kolkhozniki who wholly lacked the proper collectivist spirit, and were, in fact, enemies of the collective sector of the kolkhozes—the opening of the Agricultural Exhibition gave rise to rapturous eulogies on the state of Soviet Agriculture.
With this exhibition [Pravda wrote on August 1] we are celebrating a glorious victory of socialism. This is the tenth birthday of the kolkhoz system, and a report on its achievements. It was in the autumn of 1929 that the peasants started entering the
kolkhozes by whole villages and districts. It was the year of the Great Change. The incantations of the Trotskyite and Bukharinite agents of Fascism about the
inevitable clash between the workers and the peasants, and about the impossibility of building socialism in one country have been thrown into the dustbin of history.
New machinery has taken the place of the individual peasant's plough, wooden
harrow, sickle and scythe.
These raptures continued for several days, and 20,000 to 30,000 people a day visited the exhibition, with its ornate domes, Stalin-Gothic spires and its orgy of fountains, colossal statues of Lenin and Stalin, and with Vera Mukhina's giant silver statue of the worker with the hammer and the kolkhoznitsa with the sickle sweeping into a glorious future above the main entrance. The opulent and luscious exhibits in all the various palaces and pavilions were there to show that agriculture under the kolkhoz system had become a magnificently going concern, whereas, according to Pravda, the peasantry in Nazi Germany was "undergoing a process of continuous pauperisation".