The Litvinov Protocol

On 9 February 1929 representatives of five states met in Moscow and signed a protocol that brought the Kellogg–Briand Pact – the Paris treaty renouncing war as an instrument of national policy – into force among themselves, without waiting for all the great powers to ratify it. The Soviet Union was represented by the acting People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, whose name the document has borne ever since. Poland’s signatory was its envoy in Moscow, Stanisław Patek; Estonia and Latvia were represented by their envoys in Moscow, Julius Seljamaa and Kārlis Ozols; and Romania, which had no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, by its envoy in Warsaw, Carol Davila. The document’s official title was the “Protocol for the immediate entry into force of the Treaty of Paris of 27 August 1928 on the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy”, and it was also known as the “Moscow Protocol”. It contained no new obligations. It was, however, the first multilateral agreement in which the Soviet state and its western neighbours, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, jointly renounced war against one another.

A pact that would not come into force

On 27 August 1928 in Paris fifteen states, among them the United States, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan and Poland, signed a treaty drawn up by the US Secretary of State, Frank Kellogg, and the French Foreign Minister, Aristide Briand. The signatories condemned recourse to war for the solution of international disputes and undertook to settle them by peaceful means alone. The treaty provided for no sanctions and no mechanism to enforce compliance; in their notes the great powers reserved the right of self-defence, and Great Britain also kept a free hand in the regions of its “special interest”. Under its third article it was to come into force only once all the original signatories had ratified it, and the other states of the world were invited to accede.

The Soviet Union was not among those invited to Paris, and Moscow received the pact with suspicion. The People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Georgy Chicherin, regarded it as a manoeuvre by the capitalist powers, and the Soviet press reproached Kellogg for the fact that the United States had no intention of giving up intervention in Latin America. In the end, however, the view of his deputy Litvinov prevailed: it was better to be inside than outside. At the end of August 1928 Moscow announced its accession to the pact, with the reservation that it considered the pact inadequate without disarmament, and promptly ratified it. According to Russian studies, it was the only country to have done so by the end of 1928. The others were in no hurry. The United States Senate consented to ratification only on 15 January 1929, and the pact’s entry into force depended on the parliaments of all fifteen states.

The initiative of 29 December

The Kremlin needed calm on its western border. The year 1927 had brought a breach of relations by Great Britain, the assassination of Pyotr Voykov in Warsaw and a wave of propaganda about an allegedly imminent war of the capitalist world against the USSR. Joseph Stalin, who had just crushed the opposition and expelled Trotsky from the party, was launching the first Five-Year Plan and the forced collectivisation of the countryside. A transformation on that scale required several years without conflict with the neighbours, and the most dangerous of them, in Moscow’s eyes, was the Poland of Józef Piłsudski, allied with France and Romania.

From the autumn of 1928 Chicherin was undergoing medical treatment in Germany, and Litvinov ran the commissariat. On 29 December 1928 he sent notes to Poland and Lithuania proposing a protocol under which the Paris pact would bind them immediately upon ratification, regardless of what other states did. The choice of addressees was telling. Lithuania, bound to the USSR by a non-aggression treaty of 1926 and at odds with Poland over Wilno (Vilnius) since Żeligowski’s mutiny, was welcome in Moscow. Poland had been negotiating a non-aggression pact with the USSR since 1926 but had set a condition Moscow would not accept: the Baltic states and Romania must also be included. Soviet diplomacy preferred bilateral agreements, which prevented the neighbours from acting together, while Warsaw feared that separate treaties would break the solidarity of the states lying between Germany and Russia.

Warsaw’s reply

In January 1929 the Foreign Minister, August Zaleski, replied that Poland accepted the proposal in principle, but that the protocol should also cover the Baltic states and Romania, to which Poland was bound by an alliance and a treaty of guarantee of 1926. At the same time Warsaw sounded out the other signatories of the Paris pact and agreed to negotiate only after receiving mostly favourable replies.

Romania was the most difficult question. The Soviet Union did not recognise its annexation of Bessarabia in 1918 and had no diplomatic relations with Bucharest. Litvinov nevertheless agreed to Romania’s participation, with the reservation that signing the protocol did not settle the existing disputes between the two states. Latvia made its decision dependent on Poland’s position. Finland, which Moscow had also invited, declined. Lithuania, which had no diplomatic relations with Poland, agreed in principle but asked for time and in the end was not among the signatories. Within a few weeks the text was agreed, and on 9 February 1929 five signatures were set to it in Moscow.

What was agreed

The protocol, drawn up in a single copy in French, had seven articles. The first provided that the Paris treaty, a copy of which was attached, would enter into force between the parties once their parliaments had ratified it. The second, and most important, stated that it would bind them regardless of whether it came into force under the terms of the Paris treaty itself. The protocol required ratification, and the instruments were to be deposited in Moscow, which acted as depositary. Between any two states it came into force on the day both had deposited their instruments. It was open to all the states of the world.

Ratifications followed quickly. Latvia deposited its instruments on 5 March, Estonia on 16 March, and Poland, where ratification had taken place on 25 March, and Romania on 30 March 1929. Turkey then acceded (1 April), followed by Persia (3 April) and Lithuania (5 April). Some Russian studies also list among the participants the Free City of Danzig, whose foreign affairs were conducted by Poland, although the text of the protocol names only the five signatory states. On 3 June 1929 the protocol was registered with the Secretariat of the League of Nations.

The protocol is sometimes described as an agreement that, on the model of the Kellogg–Briand Pact, outlawed wars of aggression. That is accurate, with one reservation: the document contained nothing beyond the content of the Paris pact. It did not define aggression, provided for neither sanctions nor arbitration, and did not confirm any borders. Poland and Romania nevertheless understood it as Moscow’s renunciation of force over the border fixed by the Peace of Riga and over Bessarabia. Moscow stressed that it did not regard the Bessarabian question as closed.

Whose success?

Both sides claimed victory. For the Soviet Union the protocol was proof that it pursued a “policy of peace” and could break out of the isolation in which it had found itself in 1927. Polish diplomats believed that they had imposed the form of the agreement: instead of the bilateral arrangements with which Moscow had hoped to play the neighbours off one by one, there was a multilateral document that also covered Romania and the Baltic states. The Russian historians Oleg Ken and Aleksandr Rupasov gave their study of it the provocative title “The Moscow Protocol or a ‘Warsaw Pact’?”. For Moscow it was also a signal that its rapprochement with Germany, opened by the Treaty of Rapallo and the Treaty of Berlin, did not rule out agreements with Germany’s eastern neighbours.

The protocol’s practical significance proved short-lived. On 24 July 1929 the Kellogg–Briand Pact, now ratified by all the original signatories, came into force for every state that had acceded to it, and the Moscow Protocol became redundant. It nevertheless left its mark on the Soviet Union’s relations with its neighbours.

Significance

The Litvinov Protocol opened the way to the bilateral non-aggression pacts that the Soviet Union concluded in 1932 with Finland (21 January), Latvia (5 February), Estonia (4 May) and Poland (25 July). All of them invoked the Paris pact. A year later Litvinov brought about the signing in London of the Convention for the Definition of Aggression, accepted by, among others, Poland, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Turkey and Persia. It listed what constituted aggression and stated that no political, military or economic considerations could justify it. The Soviet Union established diplomatic relations with Romania only in 1934, without giving up its claim to Bessarabia.

Ten years after the signing, the protocol’s Soviet author was no longer in office. In May 1939 Stalin replaced Litvinov with Vyacheslav Molotov, and on 23 August 1939 Molotov signed with Joachim von Ribbentrop the pact whose secret protocol divided Poland, the Baltic states, Finland and Bessarabia between Germany and the USSR – almost every state with which Moscow had renounced war in 1929. On 17 September 1939 the Red Army invaded Poland, breaking the Treaty of Riga, the Moscow Protocol, the non-aggression pact of 1932 and the Convention for the Definition of Aggression. In the autumn of 1939 Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were forced to accept Soviet garrisons, and in June 1940 they were occupied and annexed to the USSR. Finland, which refused to make concessions, was attacked by the Soviet Union on 30 November 1939, starting the Winter War, for which the USSR was expelled from the League of Nations in December. In June 1940 an ultimatum forced Romania to cede Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Of the protocol’s five signatories, two – Estonia and Latvia – vanished from the map for half a century, while Poland and Romania lost to the Soviet Union the eastern lands whose security the protocol had been meant to protect.