Diplomatic Battles Before World War II

A continuous narrative by a single author, running from Hitler's arrival in power in 1933 to the outbreak of war, on the diplomacy of the years between.

Its subject is the negotiation: collective security and the League, the Franco-Soviet and Czechoslovak-Soviet pacts, the Rhineland, Spain, the Anschluss, Munich, the guarantees to Poland, the Anglo-French-Soviet talks of the summer of 1939, and the approach to war. Vilnis Sipols was a Soviet diplomatic historian working from the published documentary record, and as a sustained account of the period from the Soviet side, in one voice and at book length, it is the fullest available in English.

It is also the volume in this group that had nowhere to hide. A document collection can print what it prints; a polemic can choose its ground. A narrative history whose declared subject is precisely the negotiation has to reach the Treaty of Non-Aggression of 23 August 1939, and Sipols does, describing the instrument clause by clause - the commitments of non-aggression, the refusal of assistance to a power attacking either party, the undertaking to consult, the ten-year term.

The Secret Additional Protocol signed the same night is not there. It is not called a forgery, which had been the standing Soviet line since 1948 and would at least have been an argument a reader could weigh. It is simply not mentioned. In a book that enumerates three articles and a term of years, that is not an absence but an act.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.