The Soviet proposal of an alliance with Britain and France

On the evening of 17 April 1939 the Soviet People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, summoned the British ambassador in Moscow, Sir William Seeds – who was reportedly fetched from the theatre for the purpose – and handed him a draft agreement between Britain, France and the Soviet Union. It was a proposal for a full military alliance: the three powers were to undertake to give each other assistance, military assistance included, in the event of aggression in Europe against any one of them, and also to defend all the states of Eastern Europe lying between the Baltic and the Black Sea and bordering on the USSR. The text was passed to the French as well.

Some chronologies date the proposal to 18 April, when its contents reached London and Paris, and state that it was “rejected”. That is a simplification. Litvinov presented the draft on 17 April, and the British and French did not reject it outright. They replied evasively and after a long delay, and then for four months conducted negotiations with Moscow that ended in failure in August 1939. The April draft was the starting point of those talks, and its fate did much to determine the circumstances in which Europe went to war in September.

Moscow after Munich

The Soviet Union had been a member of the League of Nations since 1934, and Litvinov was the best-known advocate of collective security – joint resistance to aggressors. In 1935 the USSR concluded mutual assistance treaties with France and Czechoslovakia, but the Franco-Soviet military convention that was to give them real substance never materialised. In the autumn of 1938 Moscow was not invited to Munich, where Britain, France, Germany and Italy decided the fate of Czechoslovakia without its participation. For Joseph Stalin this was proof that the Western powers would gladly divert Hitler’s expansion eastwards. On 10 March 1939, in his report to the 18th Party Congress, he warned that the USSR would not allow itself to be drawn into conflicts by “warmongers who are accustomed to have others pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them”. The words could have been aimed at London and Paris as much as at Berlin.

Five days later Germany occupied Bohemia and Moravia. When a rumour of a German ultimatum to Romania spread in London, the British asked Moscow on 18 March how it would act if that country were attacked. Litvinov immediately proposed a conference of six states – the USSR, Britain, France, Poland, Romania and Turkey – but Neville Chamberlain considered it “premature”. Instead London proposed a joint declaration by Britain, France, the USSR and Poland on consultation in the event of a threat to the independence of any European state. The scheme collapsed because the Polish Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, would not sign anything together with Moscow. Poland pursued a policy of balance between its two great neighbours and feared that any rapprochement with the USSR would give Hitler a pretext to attack, and that the Red Army, once let onto Polish soil, would never leave. Britain therefore took a different path: on 31 March Chamberlain announced the guarantee to Poland, and on 13 April, after the Italian invasion of Albania, London and Paris announced guarantees for Romania and Greece.

The British nevertheless wanted to keep the Soviet Union in reserve as well. On 14 April the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, asked Moscow for a unilateral public declaration that, in the event of aggression against any of its European neighbours that chose to resist, the USSR would give it assistance if asked. France, for its part, proposed supplementing the 1935 treaty. Litvinov’s answer to both proposals was the draft of 17 April.

Litvinov’s eight points

The Soviet draft consisted of eight points:

1. Britain, France and the USSR conclude an agreement for five to ten years on the immediate provision of all mutual assistance, military assistance included, in the event of aggression in Europe against any one of them.
2. The three powers undertake to give all assistance, military assistance included, to the states of Eastern Europe lying between the Baltic and the Black Sea and bordering on the USSR, in the event of aggression against them.
3. As soon as possible the parties will settle the extent and forms of the military assistance each of them will provide under the first two points.
4. The British government will make clear that the assistance promised to Poland concerns only aggression by Germany.
5. The Polish–Romanian alliance is either to be declared valid in the event of any aggression against Poland and Romania, or revoked altogether as directed against the USSR.
6. Once hostilities have begun, none of the parties will enter into negotiations or conclude peace with the aggressor separately, without the consent of the others.
7. The agreement will be signed simultaneously with the military convention referred to in the third point.
8. The three powers will jointly open negotiations with Turkey on a separate mutual assistance treaty.

The draft went much further than London and Paris wanted. The British were looking for a gesture that would deter Hitler; Moscow demanded a binding alliance with a military convention, concluded before war broke out. The fourth and fifth points touched Poland directly. The Polish–Romanian alliance of 1921 was directed against the two countries’ eastern neighbour, and the USSR demanded that it either be turned against Germany or dissolved. The second point meant that the great powers would guarantee the security of Poland, Romania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland without asking their consent. All these states feared Soviet guarantees almost as much as German aggression.

A cool reception

In London the draft was received with reserve. As early as March Chamberlain had written privately of his “most profound distrust” of Russia, and he doubted whether, after the Great Purge, the Red Army was capable of offensive operations. The Foreign Office feared that an alliance with Moscow would alienate Poland and Romania, antagonise Italy, Spain and Portugal, and hand Hitler the argument that Germany was being encircled. Sir Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, regarded the proposal as an embarrassment. France, which in a war would have to fight on land and needed Soviet help more, was more inclined to talk but did not want to go further than the British. On 25 April Paris put forward a counter-proposal so one-sided that Litvinov called it humiliating. The British replied only on 8 May, essentially repeating their idea of a unilateral Soviet declaration.

At the same time Moscow was sounding out Berlin. On 17 April, the very day Litvinov presented his draft, the Soviet ambassador in Germany, Aleksei Merekalov, called on the State Secretary at the Auswärtiges Amt, Ernst von Weizsäcker. The formal subject was Soviet military orders placed with the Škoda works, which had come under German control after the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia. According to the German record, the ambassador remarked at the end that there was no reason why Soviet–German relations should not be normal and, in time, better and better. Historians argue over how much of this was a genuine signal and how much German interpretation, but the conversation is sometimes regarded as the first step on the road to the August pact.

Litvinov’s dismissal

On 3 May Stalin dismissed Litvinov – an advocate of cooperation with the West and a Jew by origin – and entrusted the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs to the head of government, Vyacheslav Molotov. The NKVD surrounded the commissariat building, and many of Litvinov’s associates were arrested. Berlin read the change as a sign that Moscow was open to an understanding with Germany. Molotov, however, continued the talks with the British and French, holding firmly to the principles of 17 April. On 10 May his deputy, Vladimir Potemkin, visited Warsaw. Beck assured him that Poland would not join any action directed against the USSR, but refused to accept any obligations towards Moscow. The Polish ambassador in Moscow at the time was Wacław Grzybowski.

The Moscow negotiations

At the end of May Chamberlain, under pressure from France, from part of his own Cabinet and from the opposition, at last agreed to discuss a mutual assistance pact. On 27 May the British and French presented a draft based on the Soviet proposals of April but making assistance dependent on League of Nations procedures. Moscow dismissed it as a “scrap of paper” and on 2 June presented its own text, naming the states to which the three powers were to extend guarantees: Belgium, Greece, Turkey, Romania, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Finland. On 7 June Estonia and Latvia signed non-aggression pacts with Germany, which only heightened Soviet fears of a German move into the Baltic states.

During the summer Molotov negotiated in Moscow with Seeds, the French ambassador Paul-Émile Naggiar, and William Strang, a Foreign Office official sent out from London. The positions gradually converged: the British agreed to guarantees for the Baltic states and to a ban on a separate peace, and on 23 July accepted the Soviet demand that the political agreement should come into force together with a military convention. To the end, however, no agreement could be reached on a definition of “indirect aggression”. The USSR wanted to be able to intervene even if one of the neighbouring states, “without threat of force”, agreed to actions serving the aggressor – that is, as London saw it, in practice on the strength of Moscow’s own assessment of the situation. The British feared they were handing Moscow a pretext to march into the Baltic states and Finland. On 29 June a member of the Politburo, Andrei Zhdanov, wrote in Pravda that the British and French “do not want an equal treaty with the USSR”.

The military missions

The British and French military missions sailed from Britain on 5 August aboard a slow merchant ship, the City of Exeter, and reached Moscow on 11 August. The British delegation was headed by Admiral Reginald Drax, who did not even have written credentials, the French by General Joseph Doumenc. The Soviet side was represented by the People’s Commissar for Defence, Kliment Voroshilov, who was authorised to sign a convention. The talks began on 12 August. As early as 14 August Voroshilov put the crucial question: in the event of German aggression, would the Red Army be allowed to pass through Polish territory – in the Wilno (Vilnius) area and through Galicia – and through Romania, so as to come into contact with the German forces at all? Without that, he said, cooperation made no sense.

Drax and Doumenc had no answer. The French pressed Warsaw, but Beck and the Inspector General of the Armed Forces, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, refused. On 19 August Beck told the French ambassador, Léon Noël, that Poland had no military agreement with the USSR and did not want one. Rydz-Śmigły is credited with saying that with the Germans Poland risked losing its liberty, and with the Russians its soul. Polish fears were well founded, as September 1939 would show, but the refusal handed Moscow a convenient argument. On 17 August Voroshilov adjourned the talks until 21 August, and when there was still no answer then, he broke them off indefinitely. Only on 23 August did Beck agree to a vague formula that the French could pass on to the Russians: that in the event of joint action against German aggression, Polish–Soviet cooperation was “not excluded”. It was too late. That day Joachim von Ribbentrop flew into Moscow.

Significance

The dispute over whether the April proposal was a sincere attempt to build a coalition against Hitler continues to this day. Some historians, notably Western scholars of Soviet foreign policy, believe that until the summer Moscow preferred an alliance with the West and was pushed towards an understanding with Germany by the distrust, dilatoriness and reluctance of London, which treated the talks as a means of putting pressure on Berlin rather than as the road to a genuine alliance. Others stress that Stalin played a double game from the outset, bargaining with both sides, and that guarantees for the neighbouring states and “indirect aggression” were his means of gaining a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. The very aims he had framed as security guarantees in the negotiations with the West he ultimately achieved through his agreement with Hitler. What is beyond dispute is that British distrust and sluggishness, the Polish and Romanian refusal to admit the Red Army, and the Soviet double game together produced one of the greatest diplomatic failures of the pre-war years.

On 23 August 1939 Molotov and Ribbentrop signed a non-aggression pact in Moscow and, in a secret protocol, divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. Hitler, certain that he would not have to fight the USSR, attacked Poland on 1 September, and on 17 September the Red Army crossed its eastern border. The states that were to have been covered by the three powers’ guarantees fell one after another: Poland was partitioned; Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were incorporated into the USSR in 1940; Romania gave up Bessarabia and northern Bukovina; and Finland had to defend itself in the Winter War. Britain and the Soviet Union became allies only in July 1941, after the German invasion of the USSR, and concluded the kind of mutual assistance treaty Litvinov had envisaged in April 1939 only in May 1942.