Stalin полностью

NEGOTIATIONS, OF A SORT

On May 8, Molotov received British ambassador Seeds, a lifelong Russophile, as well as French ambassador Paul-Émile Naggiar, in his Kremlin office and assured them that the Soviet offer of an alliance conveyed by Litvinov still stood and that “collective security” negotiations would continue. The government chairman/foreign affairs commissar also bluntly accused the Western governments of wanting to talk “ad infinitum” and insisted that any political agreement had to be coupled with a formal military alliance. Seeds requested a public declaration of support for Britain and France in their guarantees to Poland and Romania, in a form agreeable to them, but said nothing of British and French military aid if the Soviet Union were attacked. “As you see,” Molotov wrote in a telegram to Surits (Paris) and Maisky (London), “the English and French are demanding of us unilateral and gratuitous assistance with no intention of rendering us equivalent assistance.” Maisky responded that a “relapse to the Munich policy” of capitulation to Hitler was evident in London. On May 11, as Molotov again received Seeds and Naggiar, Halifax told the Soviet ambassador in London that no three-way “guarantees” could be offered to the three Baltic states against an aggression, a central Soviet demand to remove these potential attack platforms.²⁹⁶

On May 10 at the Berghof, Hitler, with Ribbentrop in tow, received Gustav Hilger, from the Moscow embassy staff (resident in Moscow since June 1920), and Schnurre, the Soviet trade expert in the German foreign ministry, posing many questions and listening. “Will Stalin be prepared under well-known circumstances to come to an agreement with Germany?” Hitler asked, according to Schnurre.²⁹⁷ Within a week, on the initiative of General Keitel, Hitler would also meet with his German military attaché to Moscow, General Ernst Köstring, who, like Hilger, had been born in Russia (1876) and knew the language, and who, no softy on Bolshevism, confirmed the positive interpretations of German-Soviet relations that Hilger and German ambassador Schulenburg had presented.²⁹⁸ Perhaps Hitler relished an approach to Moscow as a way to upset and apply pressure against Poland and Britain, but he loathed the idea of sacrificing any war production to Stalin, which was what a deal with Moscow would have to entail. Ribbentrop was assiduously seeking Japan’s signature to the military Pact of Steel, offering to allow the Japanese to publicly portray the expansive agreement as if it were directed only at the USSR.²⁹⁹

Poland’s tensions with Germany had even pushed the Warsaw leadership into wary discussions with the USSR. Also on May 10, deputy foreign affairs commissar Potyomkin met in Warsaw with Beck, at the latter’s request. Haughty and deceitful as he might be, Beck had turned out not to be the Nazi stooge that Soviet stooges had portrayed him to be. “Peace is a thing precious and desirable,” he had declared in a speech in the Polish parliament on May 5, carried live on radio, explaining his rejection of Hitler’s demands. “Our generation, bloodied in wars, certainly deserves peace. But peace, like almost all things of this world, has its price, a high but a measurable one. We in Poland do not know the concept of peace at any price. There is only one thing in the lives of men, nations, and states that is without price—honor.” An eyewitness recalled, in relation to the otherwise deeply unpopular foreign minister, “I saw women throwing flowers into Beck’s car as he was returning from parliament”—testimony, perhaps, to the limits of Poland’s room to have cut a deal.³⁰⁰ Now, five days later, when Potyomkin hinted that Moscow would support Poland against Germany if the Poles so desired, Beck, in a rambling discourse on the “correlation of forces” in Europe and the lack of Anglo-French resolve, was said to have conceded that “Poland could not stand up to Germany without Soviet support.”³⁰¹

But the Poles backtracked immediately. On May 11, Molotov received the Polish ambassador, Wacław Grzybowski, who “clarified” his government’s official response: Poland could not accept even a guarantee of its borders by Moscow, let alone a possible alliance treaty.³⁰² The next day, Poland signed a mutual assistance pact with France that, within a mere week, would produce written pledges of mutual military aid in the event of war.