185. Pravda, Sept. 1, 1939; Naumov, 1941 god, II: 581–3 (at 582); Mirovoe khoziaistvo i miroavaia politika, no. 9 (1939): 3; Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, III: 363–71. In connection with the Pact, the Soviets talked out of both sides of their mouths, allowing subsequent scholars on opposite sides to find quotes supporting their arguments about whether or not Stalin ever wanted a deal with the West. For example, Voroshilov said, via the Soviet press, that “military negotiations with England and France were not broken off because the Soviet Union concluded a nonaggression pact with Germany. On the contrary, the Soviet Union concluded a nonaggression pact with Germany because, among other reasons, the military negotiations with France and England had run into a blind alley because of insuperable differences.” (Those differences, he said, came down to a failure to guarantee western transit rights to Germany for the USSR in the event of an aggression.) But to the Germans, Stalin said that “the Soviet government”—i.e., himself—“never had sympathies toward England.” Stalin told Dimtrov, “We preferred agreements with the so-called democratic countries and therefore conducted negotiations. But the English and the French wanted us for farmhands and at no cost! We, of course, would not go for being farmhands, still less for getting nothing in return.” Of course, these words on the Pact were precisely what the staunch antifascist Dimitrov would have wanted to hear. Izvestiia, Aug. 27, 1939, and Pravda, Aug. 27, 1939, in Tisminets, Vneshniaia politika SSSR, IV: 444–5; Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, III: 361–2; DVP SSSR, XXII/ii: 606–17 (at 609, Schulenburg’s papers); Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 115–6 (Sept. 7, 1939). See also Nekrich, Pariahs, 137; Roberts, “Pact with Nazi Germany,” 94–5; and Fischer, Life and Death of Stalin, 162.
186. Fel’shtinskii, Oglasheniiu podlezhit, 92.
187. Seraphim, Das politische Tagebuch Rosenbergs, 89–90 (Aug. 22, 1939); Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, VI: 985–8; Hoffman, Hitler Was My Friend, 103.
188. D’iakov and Bushueva, Fashistskii mech kovalsia v SSSR, 364–5 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 1237, l. 413). Maisky fell into shock upon word of the Pact: “Our policy is clearly making a sharp turnabout, the sense and consequences of which are so far not entirely clear to me” (Aug. 24, 1939). DVP SSSR, XXII/i: 647 (AVP RF, f. 017a, op. 1, pap. 1, d. 6, l. 223: Aug. 24, 1939); Maiskii, Dnevnik diplomata, I: 441.
189. Neilson, Britain, Soviet Russia, 314 (citing Chamberlain Papers, NC 18/1/1115).
190. Read and Fisher, Deadly Embrace, 147.
191. Bell, France and Britain, 224–5; Adamthwaite, France, 49–50. Toward the end of 1939, a falsified “transcript” of a supposed politburo meeting would be published in France depicting a devious Stalin, an effort to discredit him in Hitler’s eyes, and depicting the French Communist party as treasonous. Sluch, “Rech’ Stalina,” 113–39.
192. Just such a one-sided view of Chamberlain can be found in the once pro-appeasement foreign office official turned scholar E. H. Carr: German-Soviet Relations, 135–6. Carr’s influential history of international relations since 1919 mocked “the notion that the maintenance of British supremacy is the performance of a duty to mankind.” He sent his completed manuscript to the press in July 1939, and the book came out that Sept., when Nazism and Communism were together annihilating Poland. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, 72.
193. This priority on Chamberlain’s part, however self-serving, had a strategic dimension: British success in maintaining the Commonwealth and empire in the interwar period would prove to be of considerable significance in the Allied victory over the Axis. Clayton, British Empire as Superpower, 517.
194. Neville Chamberlain Papers, University of Birmingham Library, 18/1/1091 (Chamberlain to Ida, March 26, 1939).
195. Chamberlain, according to Eden, had feared that “Communism would get its clutches into Western Europe” via the Spanish civil war. Smyth, “Soviet Policy,” 105. It has been asserted that Chamberlain should have accepted Soviet expansionism into Central Europe if that could have avoided a war on the scale of World War II. Shaw, British Political Elite.
196. Overy, 1939: Countdown, 15 (citing Magdalene College, Cambridge, Inge papers, vol. 36, diary 1938–9, March 16, 1939).
