119. FRUS, The Soviet Union, 1933–1939, 53–4 (Bullitt, Dec. 24, 1933), 60–1 (Jan. 4).
120. Costiliogla, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances, 268.
121. Bullitt returned the kiss. Bullitt, For the President, 68–9 (Jan. 1, 1934); FRUS, The Soviet Union, 1933–1939, 59–61 (Bullitt to Phillips, Jan. 4, 1934); Farnsworth, Bullitt and the Soviet Union, 109–14; and Tucker, Stalin in Power, 224. Soviet counterintelligence used the ballerina Irena Charnodskaya, who made the rounds of Bullitt and his bachelor aides, Chip Bohlen and Charles Thayer. “We simply cannot keep our hands off her,” Thayer wrote. “She has become an acquisition of the Embassy and . . . sleep[s] in some vacant room which the three of us carefully lock together and then fight violently as to who will keep the key . . . What an embassy!” The exuberance would end quickly for all. Costiliogla, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances, 263–70 (citing Thayer diary, April 14–May 20, 1934, box 6, Thayer papers; Bohlen to Mother, April 15–May 15, 1934, box 36, Bohlen papers); George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1950–1963, 126; “Fair Day, Adieu!,” p. 18, box 240, Kennan papers; Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950, 190; Kennan, “Flashbacks,” in At a Century’s Ending, 31.
122. The text also noted that the situation in the United States “is most favorable for the establishment of socialism.” Eudin and Slusser, Soviet Foreign Policy, II: 577–85; Theses and Decisions, 20–47.
123. “Stalin to Duranty,” Time, Jan. 8, 1934: 26. See also Sochineniia, XIII: 276–81, and the slightly longer Soviet transcript: RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 374, l. 1–6; Na prieme, 118. Duranty had been allowed to accompany Litvinov to Washington in Nov., and returned to Moscow with Bullitt in Dec. See also Duranty, I Write as I Please, 166–7; and Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 190–2. Thayer, the U.S. embassy official, wrote of Duranty, “Always witty, always ready to take any side in an argument, he usually kept every party he was at in an uproar of argument and vituperation.” Thayer, Bears in the Caviar, 60.
124. DVP SSSR, XVI: 772–4 (Dovgalevsky, Dec. 29, 1933), 876–7n321. The politburo had resolved (Dec. 19, 1933) to join the League and enter a regional pact in the framework of the League, in the face of Nazi aggression, under certain conditions. Adibekov et al., Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i Evropa, 305–6 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 15, l. 154–5: Dec. 19, 1933). A possible new “collective security” policy was also discussed by the Central Committee (Dec. 29, 1933), among the last prewar instances when the Central Committee was tasked with discussing Soviet foreign policy. On Dovgalevsky (who had become ambassador to France in Jan. 1928), see Barmine, One Who Survived, 178.
125. At a Dec. 9, 1933, Kremlin meeting Stalin gave the go-ahead for formal negotiations with France. “We have adopted a firm course of closer relations with France,” Litvinov overly enthused in a telegram to Dovgalevsky. Soviet proposals did go far beyond the original French idea, insisting that holdout League members had to extend diplomatic recognition to the USSR, colonial mandates had to be revised (a major plank of Soviet propaganda), and a regional pact had to include not only Poland but also the Baltic states, Finland, and Czechoslovakia, as well as security assistance if Japan attacked the USSR in Asia. Borisov, Sovetsko-frantsuzskie otnosheniia, 202 (AVP RF, f. 0136, op. 17, pap. 159, d. 778, l. 79), 204; DVP SSSR, XVI: 576–8 (Oct. 20, 1933), 773, 735–6 (Dec. 11, 1933); 876–7 n321; DDF, 1e série, IV: 160–1, 165; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 15; Paul-Boncour, Entre deux guerres, I: 363–4; Dullin, “La rôle de l’Allemagne,” 245–62. Litvinov also urged the signing of a trade pact, however modest. DVP SSSR, XVIII: 752. Even if the Soviet Union represented an important market, the two countries could not get beyond the Soviets’ repudiation of tsarist-era debt. French elite circles also remained embittered at the confiscation without compensation of some 13 billion gold rubles in investments from tsarist times. Some private French arms dealers refused to sell to the Communists for fear of reverse engineering or because the orders were too small for the bother. Dullin, Men of Influence, 100.
