Soviet Peace Efforts on the Eve of World War II (September 1938 - August 1939)

A book of 350 documents. The first is the Munich Agreement of 29 September 1938; the last is a Soviet communique of 1 September 1939. Between them lie eleven months of telegrams, embassy despatches, memoranda of conversations, military-intelligence reports and stenographic records of negotiation, many printed for the first time and drawn from archives no independent scholar could then enter.

The Soviet pursuit of collective security in the 1930s was a real policy, pursued for years at real cost, and this volume documents it better than any Western collection of its date. Litvinov's League of Nations statement of 30 September 1938; the March 1939 proposal for a six-power conference; the offer of 17 April 1939 of a mutual assistance treaty and military convention with Britain and France; the message of 10 May on assistance to Poland - all are here and are what they appear to be.

More valuable still are the stenographic records of the Anglo-French-Soviet military talks of 12-21 August 1939. Nothing else in print at the time gave the texture of that failure: the missions travelling to Moscow by slow steamer, the British delegation carrying no authority to sign, and neither mission able to answer the one question Voroshilov kept putting - whether Poland and Romania would let Soviet troops cross their territory to reach the Germans.

Compiled by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the USSR: the apparatus was both the actor and the archivist, and it decided what the record would consist of.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on the document the collection does not print.