USSR: For Peace Against Aggression

A book with a very exact subject: eight years, from Hitler's arrival in power in 1933 and the Soviet turn toward the League of Nations, to June 1941.

I. K. Koblyakov was a Soviet diplomatic historian working from the official documentary series, and his footnotes lean throughout on the multi-volume History of Soviet Foreign Policy produced under the Foreign Ministry and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. This is not a maverick's book but a synthesis of the state's own account of itself, which is what makes it worth having: it sets out, in one continuous narrative and at length, the case Moscow made about the diplomacy of the 1930s.

That case has real substance in places. The Soviet pursuit of collective security through the League, the proposals for mutual assistance, the attempts at an Eastern pact, the response to the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, to Spain, to Austria and to Munich - all are documented from the published record, and the indictment of British and French policy in those years is not a Soviet invention.

Its organising premise is stated in the foreword and is worth seeing plainly, because everything follows from it: that war is alien to the very social nature of the Soviet state. Soviet foreign policy is therefore not to be judged act by act, its character being fixed in advance by the character of Soviet society.

Written in 1975 at the high-water mark of detente, it closes not on 1941 but on a restatement of the current Peace Programme. The pre-war years are the runway; Helsinki is the takeoff.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.