ALTHOUGH STALIN HAD SUCCESSFULLY stood up to the Japanese at Lake Khasan in summer 1938, that border war had exposed Soviet military weaknesses, which were aired at a meeting of the Main Military Council on August 31. Stalin had reduced Soviet involvement in the Spanish civil war, but he had ramped up military involvement on behalf of China and remained deeply preoccupied with shoring up defenses in the Soviet Far East while, paradoxically, continuing to massacre his own military personnel there.43 He was also preoccupied with Polish-German collusion. Poland’s leadership had been among the first to recognize the March 1938 German takeover of Austria. A few days after that, Poland itself took advantage, compelling independent Lithuania, in an ultimatum, to recognize Poland’s annexation of Wilno (which the Poles had occupied militarily back in 1920–22). Lithuania had no defenders, west or east, but whereas Poland’s power play did not turn Western opinion definitively against Warsaw, it reconfirmed Stalin’s ingrained suspicions of likely German-Polish revisionist collaboration.44 Potyomkin, under a pseudonym, had publicly mocked Polish fantasies of annexing all of Lithuania and predicted a coming German-inspired Polish invasion of the USSR. “Hitler wants to let Poland loose against the Soviet Union,” he wrote, adding that the Führer “only wants [the Poles] to clear the road for Germany. . . . He is preparing Poland’s fourth partition.”45
Moscow’s assistance to Prague faced formidable logistical challenges: Soviet territory was not contiguous with Czechoslovakia. Four of the five partially mobilized Soviet army groups were on the border with Poland, the best transit route, but Poland adamantly refused to permit a military crossing. Some contemporaries speculated that the Soviets could still have gone through Poland on a contrived League of Nations authorization.46 Romania, also a Soviet enemy, provided a less advantageous but still valuable land route, along with overflight options, but discussions with Bucharest were inconclusive, partly because of Soviet claims to Romania-controlled Bessarabia and partly because of King Carol II’s objections.47 Even though Romania did not shut the door entirely to passage, the rail gauge differed, so the Red Army would have needed to change the undermount wheels at the border or obtain substantial European rolling stock from someone.48
London, Paris, and Berlin all judged the Red Army incapable of decisive intervention abroad—after all, Stalin had decapitated his own officer corps.49 A Soviet spy secretly transmitted to Stalin the brutal internal intelligence assessment of his French ally to the effect that Soviet armed forces “were not capable of conducting an offensive war” and that the USSR had been “weakened by an internal crisis.”50 Officials in France and Britain began spreading self-exculpatory rumors that the Soviets would do nothing in defense of Czechoslovakia.51 Stalin again had Kalinin publicly reaffirm that Moscow would honor its treaty obligations “to the last letter”—that is, take action provided France did so, a position that was announced on public radio loudspeakers throughout the Soviet Union. France had secretly warned the Czechoslovak government in July 1938 that it would not take up arms over the Sudeten issue under any circumstances.52 In trying to back off their treaty obligations, the French grasped a convenient pretext: they knew that Germany had broken some British codes and that, therefore, thanks to telegrams out of Prague by the British special envoy Viscount Walter Runciman, Hitler could see how far—very far, indeed—the British would go to avert war.53