The USSR joins the League of Nations

On 18 September 1934, in Geneva, the Assembly of the League of Nations admitted the Soviet Union as a member. Thirty-nine states voted in favour and three against – Switzerland, the Netherlands and Portugal – while seven abstained. The Assembly also agreed that the USSR should receive a permanent seat on the League Council, alongside Britain, France and Italy. That same day the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, took his place at the head of the Soviet delegation and made his first speech. A state that for fifteen years had called the League a tool of the victorious imperialist powers became one of its pillars, and Litvinov became, for a few years, the face of the policy of collective security.

A League without Russia

The League of Nations was founded in 1920 under a covenant incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles and the other peace treaties. Soviet Russia was not invited to join, and the Bolsheviks regarded the League as a compact of the victors, designed to entrench the Versailles order and stifle the revolution. Soviet commentators called it a “league of robbers”. Under Georgy Chicherin, Soviet diplomacy relied on cooperation with the system’s other outcast, Germany, with which it concluded the Treaty of Rapallo and the Treaty of Berlin. When Germany joined the League in 1926, Moscow viewed the move with suspicion.

The Soviet Union did not, however, boycott Geneva entirely. From 1927 its delegates took part in the work of the commission preparing the disarmament conference, where Litvinov surprised everyone with proposals for total disarmament, and in the 1930s in the conference itself. Moscow also took part in some economic and technical conferences. It had no diplomatic relations with Switzerland, the League’s host country, and the hostility between them deepened in 1923, when the Soviet diplomat Vatslav Vorovsky was shot dead in Lausanne and a Swiss court acquitted his killer.

The turn of 1933

Everything changed after Adolf Hitler came to power. The new Germany crushed the Communist Party, openly proclaimed its aim of winning “living space” in the east and broke off its existing military cooperation with the Red Army. In the Far East, Japan, after occupying Manchuria and proclaiming Manchukuo, now bordered the USSR directly. In 1933 both these powers left the League: Japan in March and Germany in October. An organisation that the leading revisionist powers had abandoned looked different from Moscow than before.

Litvinov argued to Joseph Stalin that Germany and Japan were the greatest threat to the USSR and that it must seek agreement with the states that feared them too. At the end of 1933 the Politburo agreed to consider joining the League and concluding regional mutual assistance pacts. In December Stalin told the American journalist Walter Duranty that, for all its weaknesses, the League might make the outbreak of war more difficult and that the USSR did not rule out supporting it. This had been preceded in November 1933 by the establishment of relations with the United States.

France looks for an ally

France was the leading advocate of admitting the USSR. Its Foreign Minister, Louis Barthou, who took office in February 1934, wanted to surround Germany with a network of agreements and bring Russia back into the European balance. In the spring of 1934, together with Litvinov, he drew up a draft Eastern Pact, a regional mutual assistance treaty that was to include Germany, the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic states. The precondition was Soviet membership of the League.

Admitting a new member required a two-thirds majority in the Assembly, and a permanent Council seat also needed the consent of the Council itself. Moscow did not want to apply and risk a public rebuff, so Barthou arranged an invitation. On 15 September 1934 thirty member states, among them France, Britain, Italy and Czechoslovakia, sent the Soviet government an invitation to join the League. Litvinov accepted.

The vote in Geneva

The opposition was smaller than feared, but vocal. The Swiss Foreign Minister, Giuseppe Motta, made a sharp speech against admitting a state that persecuted religion, attacked property and, through the Communist International, supported revolution in other countries. Switzerland, the Netherlands and Portugal voted against. Seven delegations abstained.

Poland’s stance mattered. Warsaw was bound to Moscow by a non-aggression pact, extended in May 1934, but feared that the Soviet Union, once on the Council, would exploit complaints by the Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities against Poland. On 13 September 1934 the Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, announced to the Assembly that until a general system of minority protection binding on all states was created, Poland would refuse to cooperate with international bodies in supervising the implementation of the Minorities Treaty of 1919. The declaration provoked protests from the great powers, but Poland voted to admit the USSR.

On 18 September the Assembly adopted the resolution admitting the USSR by 39 votes to 3, with 7 abstentions. According to Russian studies, no one voted against granting it a permanent seat on the Council, although several delegations abstained. In his first speech Litvinov said that the Soviet Union was joining the League in order to work for peace, and that in the new circumstances the League could be an obstacle to war.

Significance

Joining the League symbolised a turn in Soviet foreign policy. Moscow abandoned isolation and proclaimed itself a defender of the existing order against the revisionists, and in 1935 the Communist International replaced its struggle against social democracy with the policy of popular fronts. In Geneva Litvinov became the spokesman for the principle that “peace is indivisible” and that aggression in one place threatened everyone. On this basis the Soviet Union concluded mutual assistance treaties with France and Czechoslovakia in May 1935, supported sanctions against Italy after its attack on Ethiopia, and called for firm action against Japan and Germany.

Not everyone believed the turn was sincere. Poland and the Baltic states feared that a system of mutual assistance would give the Red Army a pretext to enter their territory. The Eastern Pact never came into being, and its author, Barthou, was killed three weeks after the vote in Geneva. The British and French treated the USSR with mistrust, and the Soviet internal terror, the Moscow trials and the Great Purge, which soon decimated the Red Army’s high command, reduced its value as an ally. The League itself failed to stop Italy in Ethiopia, the German and Italian intervention in Spain, or Japan in China. The Soviet Union was not invited to the Munich conference in September 1938.

In May 1939 Stalin dismissed Litvinov and entrusted foreign policy to Vyacheslav Molotov, who on 23 August signed a pact with Germany dividing Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. On 17 September 1939 the USSR invaded Poland, and on 30 November Finland, starting the Winter War. On 14 December 1939 the League Council declared that the Soviet Union had placed itself outside the organisation and expelled it. Seven states voted in favour, four Council members abstained and three did not attend the meeting. It was the only expulsion of a member in the League’s history and one of its last significant acts. Five years after its ceremonial admission in Geneva, the state that was to have been a pillar of collective security was thrown out for attacking a smaller neighbour.