This is a book of 350 documents. The first is the Munich Agreement of 29 September 1938. The last, numbered 350, is a Soviet press communiqué of 1 September 1939 reporting the destruction of Japanese and Manchurian forces on the Khalkhin Gol. Between them lie eleven months of telegrams, embassy despatches, memoranda of conversations, military-intelligence reports and stenographic records of negotiation, most of them printed for the first time, many of them drawn from archives no independent scholar could then enter. The foreword states the scope plainly: "The documents included in this book cover the period from September 1938 to August 1939."
Read that sentence again and the whole volume comes into focus. A collection about the eve of the Second World War stops on the day the Second World War began. And within its own declared span — September 1938 to August 1939 — it omits the single Soviet document of that period which redrew the map of Europe. The Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union, signed in Moscow by Molotov and Ribbentrop on 23 August 1939, is not printed here. Neither is the Secret Additional Protocol signed the same night, which divided Poland along the Narew, Vistula and San, assigned Finland, Estonia and Latvia to the Soviet sphere and Lithuania to the German, and noted Soviet interest in Bessarabia.
The book is not a forgery. Almost nothing in it is untrue. That is precisely what makes it worth republishing, and precisely how it works.
The title page carries no editor and no institute, only "Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the USSR." This is a state document about the state's own conduct, compiled by the ministry whose predecessor generated most of the papers, from archives the ministry controlled. The apparatus was both the actor and the archivist, and it decided what the record would consist of.
The occasion is visible in the foreword, which opens on the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the war — placing the composition of this English text in the mid-1970s, some years after the Russian original, whatever the date on the spine — and quotes Brezhnev speaking over American television that "more than 20 million Soviet citizens died in that war, 70,000 of our towns and villages were razed to the ground." That was the language of détente: the Soviet Union as the power that had bled most and therefore wanted peace most. The volume belongs to the Progress series "soviet foreign policy and international relations," and its target was the educated Western reader, the Western Communist Party lecturer, and the diplomatic historian who could be trusted to weigh documents and would find, on weighing these, that the Western democracies had wrecked the last chance to stop Hitler. It was ammunition in a real argument, and the ammunition was largely live.
A reader who takes this book only as a fraud will be misled, and will miss its use.
The Soviet pursuit of collective security in the 1930s was not a fabrication invented later to cover the Pact. It 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 of the USSR, Britain, France, Poland, Romania and Turkey; the offer of 17 April 1939 of a mutual assistance treaty and a military convention with Britain and France; the message of 10 May that the "USSR would not refuse assistance to Poland if she desired it" — these are documents 3, 109, 110, 171 and 210, and they 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, documents 314 to 342. Nothing else in print at the time gave the reader the texture of that failure. The British and French missions travelled to Moscow by slow steamer, arriving on 11 August after the British government had accepted talks on 25 July. The British delegation carried no authority to sign. Neither mission could answer the one question Voroshilov kept putting: would Poland and Romania permit Soviet troops to cross their territory to reach the Germans? On 22 August, in document 342, Voroshilov tells General Doumenc: "We have at present no subject for conversation. Until we receive a reply, all conversation is useless." He was not being obstructive. He was right that without transit the Soviet Union, having no common frontier with Germany, could not fight her.
And the volume proves the point from the other side. Document 335, a telegram from the French military attaché in Warsaw dated 19 August, records three hours spent with the Polish chief of staff searching "in vain for a compromise formula," and concludes: "Finally, upon agreeing it with Beck, we acknowledged that our delegation in Moscow could manoeuvre as if no question had ever been put to the Poles." The French had decided to bluff. That document is genuine, it comes from German archives, and it is damning.
So is the material on the parallel Anglo-German conversations of summer 1939 — the Wilson and Hudson soundings, and Ambassador Dirksen's report of 3 August, document 302, that for the British ruling circles "the ties that had been formed in the last few months with other Powers were only a subsidiary means which would cease to be operative as soon as agreement with Germany, the all-important objective worth striving for, had been really attained." Chamberlain's government was negotiating in Moscow while probing in Berlin. The foreword's charge that the Western powers hoped to turn German expansion eastward is not paranoia; it is a fair reading of a good deal of the evidence assembled here, and serious historians who share none of the compilers' politics — Michael Jabara Carley in 1939: The Alliance That Never Was (1999), Geoffrey Roberts in his work on Soviet foreign policy — have argued that Anglo-French reluctance was decisive.
It is worth saying that the sharpest hostile witness available concedes most of this. Ernest Mandel's The Meaning of the Second World War (Verso, 1986) is the Fourth International's own full-length account of the war, written by a man who had spent it in the Belgian resistance and in a German camp, and who owed the Kremlin nothing. In chapter 2, "The Immediate Causes," Mandel grants the ground on which this volume stands: "Considering the wavering (to say the least) of the French and British governments over military collaboration in the event of a German aggression against Poland, the Soviet government had every right to ensure its immediate safety in case of a German conquest of that country" (p. 34). In chapter 10, "The Opening Gambit in Europe," he goes further than the compilers dared, and locates the failure squarely in Warsaw: "The refusal of the Polish regime to accept direct Soviet military assistance transformed the military negotiations between the Western allied general staffs and the Soviet government in the summer of 1939 into a farce" (p. 100). Documents 314 to 342 are the record of that farce, and the reader now has both the transcript and an independent judgement of what it means.
Mandel also complicates the foreword's central charge, which is a service. He does not think appeasement was an attempt to purchase German expansion eastward at Soviet expense. Chamberlain's policy, he argues in chapter 2, was "essentially a function of London's judgement of the time necessary to overcome Germany's lead in rearmament" — "an illusory and foolhardy attempt to outmanoeuvre Hitler, not an acceptance of a Europe dominated by Berlin" (p. 30). He concedes that "for a short time, some of the 'appeasers' played with the idea of diverting the aggressive dynamic of German imperialism against the USSR," but holds that after the occupation of Prague in March 1939 that idea was abandoned as suicidal for the British Empire. The reader should weigh this against Dirksen. The documents here are real; the inference the foreword draws from them is contested from the left as well as the right.
None of this is discredited by what follows. It is what makes what follows worth naming.
Falsification by selection leaves a distinctive trace: an event that everything in the book points toward, and that the book will not reach.
The Pact is not absent from the volume in the sense of being unmentioned. It is present three times, each time at one remove, and never as a document.
It appears in the editorial notes, at note 33, which quotes the Izvestia communiqué of 22 August 1939 announcing that Ribbentrop "will arrive in Moscow in a few days for talks." That is the announcement, not the treaty.
It appears in document 344, a telegram from the Soviet chargé d'affaires in Tokyo dated 24 August, reporting that news of the Pact "has made a strong impression here." The reader learns of the Pact through Japanese newspapers.
And it appears in document 347, a conversation of 26 August in which Lozovsky reassures the Chinese ambassador that the treaty "created an element of stability in the present unstable international situation."
Then, in document 348, Voroshilov's Izvestia interview of 27 August, comes the volume's real climax — and its most exposed moment. Asked about a Reuters report that he had told the missions the Pact ended the talks, Voroshilov replies that the causation ran the other way: "the USSR concluded the non-aggression pact with Germany because, amongst other things, the military negotiations with France and England had reached a deadlock as a result of insurmountable differences of opinion." The foreword builds its entire case on that sentence.
But look at the question immediately before it. Voroshilov is asked about a Daily Herald report that the Soviet mission had proposed to occupy, on the outbreak of war, "Wilno and Novogrudek on the northeast and the Provinces of Lwow, Tarnopol and Stanislav on the southeast." He answers: "That report is false from start to finish, its author is an insolent liar, and the paper which published this deceitful report by its diplomatic correspondent is a libelous paper."
Three weeks later the Red Army crossed into Poland and took, among other places, Wilno, Nowogródek, Lwów, Tarnopol and Stanisławów. The compilers of 1973 printed that denial without comment. They could do so only because the volume stops before the refutation arrives.
Mandel supplies, in one sentence, the answer that document 348 was constructed to make unavailable. In chapter 2 he writes: "But the Hitler-Stalin pact contained a secret protocol which, even before that conquest had commenced, implemented a fourth partition of Poland. Therewith Stalin gave the green light to Hitler's aggression, temporarily saving the Third Reich from the nightmare of a prolonged war on two fronts" (p. 34). A fourth partition: the phrase is exact, and it is what Voroshilov called an insolent lie. The proposal reported in the Daily Herald was not, so far as anyone has shown, ever put to the Anglo-French missions in those terms — the correspondent may well have been wrong about the meeting. But the substance of the report, that the Soviet Union intended to take those territories when war came, was true, had already been agreed in writing four days before Voroshilov spoke, and was executed on 17 September. The denial is not evasive. It is a flat statement of the opposite of the fact, made by the man who had signed nothing but who knew what had been signed.
(A note on dates, because they are easily confused here. Mandel misdates the Secret Additional Protocol to 27 August 1939. It was signed on the night of 23 August, with the treaty itself. The 27th is the date of the Voroshilov interview, and of the Izvestia issue that carried it. Mandel's substance is right and his date is wrong; readers should not carry the error forward.)
Mandel also names the technique in general, and this volume is one of its most accomplished instances. "Russian historiography continues to deny this," he writes of the fourth partition, "by keeping silent about the secret protocol... Likewise, it draws a veil over Stalin's formal opposition to the survival of any Polish state" (p. 34). Writing in 1986, Mandel had in view a whole genre — the textbooks, the official chronologies, the multi-volume institute histories. What he describes as silence, this book performs as chronology. It does not assert that there was no protocol; assertion can be refuted. It fixes a terminus one day past the outbreak of war and lets the calendar do the concealing. That is the particular contribution of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs to the genre Mandel is describing, and it is more durable than a lie, because every individual page can be defended.
Note too how the second half of Mandel's sentence lands. This volume prints, as document 210, the message of 10 May 1939 that the "USSR would not refuse assistance to Poland if she desired it." The veil drawn over Stalin's opposition to the survival of any Polish state — a position that took written form in the German-Soviet negotiations of late September 1939 — is drawn by the same terminus that leaves document 210 standing as the last word.
What the terminus of 1 September 1939 excludes is therefore not incidental. It excludes the Soviet entry into eastern Poland on 17 September; the joint German-Soviet communiqué and the Boundary and Friendship Treaty of 28 September, with its further secret protocols; the ultimata to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that autumn and their annexation in the summer of 1940; the war with Finland; the annexation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina; the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Balts, Ukrainians and Jews to Kazakhstan and Siberia in four waves between February 1940 and June 1941; and the shooting of some 21,857 Polish officers, police and officials at Katyn and elsewhere in the spring of 1940. Search the text and you will not find "September 17," or "Boundary and Friendship," or "deportation," or "Katyn." They are not denied. They are outside the frame.
Two smaller silences show the same method. The Soviet-German trade and credit agreement of 19 August 1939, which preceded the Pact by four days and began supplying the German war economy with Soviet grain, oil and manganese, is not among the documents; the only trace of it is the phrase "After the conclusion of the Soviet-German trade and credit agreement" inside the Izvestia announcement quoted in note 33. And Litvinov — the architect of collective security, a Jew, whose removal on 3 May 1939 was correctly read in Berlin as a signal — simply stops signing telegrams. His fall enters the book once, obliquely, in document 204 of 8 May, when the British ambassador asks "whether Litvinov's resignation from the post of People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs implied any change in the Soviet Union's foreign policy" and is told that nothing has changed.
The foreword supplies its own epitaph. Explaining the editorial conventions, it says of the passages cut from individual documents: "The omitted parts either have no bearing on the subject of the book or else are devoted to inconsequential matters." The principle governs the volume as a whole. What has no bearing on the subject is decided by the party that chose the subject.
The Secret Protocol was not a secret in 1973. Photographic copies of the German foreign ministry files had been captured in 1945 and the text published in English by the US State Department in Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941 (1948), edited by Raymond Sontag and James Beddie — twenty-five years before this book. Moscow's position throughout was that the protocol was a Western forgery. That position was maintained until the commission chaired by Alexander Yakovlev reported and the Congress of People's Deputies condemned the protocols on 24 December 1989.
Honesty requires distinguishing the concealment, which is not arguable, from the interpretation, which is.
Whether the Pact was defensive is genuinely contested, and remains so. One tradition — Geoffrey Roberts is its most careful representative, and Carley supports much of its groundwork — holds that Soviet collective security was pursued in good faith into August 1939, that the German option was a late improvisation forced by Anglo-French evasion and the Polish veto on transit, and that Stalin took the deal on offer when no other was. Against it, historians including Robert C. Tucker (Stalin in Power, 1990) and Zara Steiner (The Triumph of the Dark, 2011) argue that Stalin kept a German understanding in view for years and held both files open until one paid. The documents in this volume genuinely support the first reading of the period up to mid-August. They cannot settle the question, because the compilers withheld the file that would bear on it.
Mandel's own answer is a third thing, and it is worth stating because it is neither the volume's nor the Cold War historians'. He accepts that Soviet security was a real interest and that the Polish veto was real. He denies that this made the Pact defensive. "In these circumstances," he writes in chapter 10, "Stalin preferred to ally himself with the likely victor rather than with the probable victim" (p. 100) — a calculation, not an improvisation, resting on contempt for French and British fighting capacity and on being "fascinated and awestruck by the power of the German military machine." That preference, on his account, hardened after August into something worse than a manoeuvre: "the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 appeared increasingly as a strategic orientation rather than a tactical move" (ch. 2, p. 33). The volume in your hands documents the deadlock. It cannot tell you whether the deadlock produced the decision or ratified one already taken, and the compilers made sure of that.
The "breathing space" argument is likewise real but not free. The Soviet Union gained twenty-two months. So did Germany, which used them to take Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries and France, and arrived in June 1941 with the resources of a continent. The new frontier was 200 miles further west, but the fortified line behind it had been dismantled and the new one was unfinished. The Red Army that met the invasion had been decapitated in 1937–38 — and Mandel's summary of the Terror's foreign-policy cost is the harshest sentence in his book: it "decapitated the Red Army, disorganised the defences of the country, delivered Poland and Europe to Hitler, and facilitated the Nazi attack on the USSR" (ch. 2, p. 33). And the Comintern's turn after August 1939 — Communist parties instructed to treat the war as an inter-imperialist quarrel, in France and Britain to oppose their own governments' war effort — cost the anti-fascist movement dearly at the moment fascism was winning. A respite is only worth what is done with it.
There is a further reason the terminus matters, which becomes visible only in Mandel's later chapters. The territories acquired under the protocol did not remain an embarrassment to be forgotten; they became the Soviet war aim. In chapter 17, "The Aftermath," Mandel notes that for the first eighteen months of the German-Soviet war, Stalin's diplomacy amounted to seeking from Churchill "recognition of what had been obtained through the Hitler-Stalin pact: the Baltic States, the Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia as well as Bessarabia and the Northern Bukovina" (p. 165). The Curzon line that Poland's government-in-exile spent two years refusing, and finally accepted, ran close to the line the protocol had drawn. The month this book will not print is the month that fixed the eastern frontier of post-war Europe. Mandel is not sentimental about the other party to that quarrel either: the Polish ruling class, he writes in chapter 16, "The Outcome," showed a "complete lack of realism, its chief characteristic ever since the formation of an independent Poland after WWI" (p. 153), and would have done better to deal with Moscow in 1942 — "not to mention prior to the war." He is describing the same refusal of transit that this volume documents. He simply does not think it absolves the other side.
The anti-Stalinist left did not wait for 1989. Trotsky wrote on the Pact within weeks, most substantially in "The USSR in War" of 25 September 1939, collected in In Defense of Marxism; he argued that the Kremlin had entered the war on Hitler's side of the ledger while claiming neutrality, and that the annexations were the bureaucracy's expansion, not the revolution's. The argument split his own American organisation — Max Shachtman and James Burnham drew the conclusion that the USSR was no longer a workers' state, Trotsky did not — and the Manifesto of the Fourth International's emergency conference of May 1940, "The Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution," was written into that quarrel. It is a mark of the seriousness of the tradition that the Pact was the hardest question it ever faced, and that it argued the question in public while it was happening.
Mandel's book of 1986 is the mature form of that answer, written with the archives and the historiography of forty years in front of him, and it is the natural companion volume to this one. It concedes what the compilers are right about — the Anglo-French wavering, the Polish veto, the Soviet Union's entitlement to secure itself, the fact that the war's shape was settled on battlefields and not at Yalta. It refuses what they conceal. And in chapter 10 it states, in a single clause, the fact that stands on the far side of this book's last page: "Stalin too lent a helping hand by cutting off the retreat road for the Polish army when it finally decided to withdraw, and by occupying the Polish Ukraine, thereby adding fuel to Polish anti-Russian sentiment" (p. 100). Mandel's verdict on the consequences is not triumphal. "The consequences of this cynical realpolitik for the Polish people's attitude towards the USSR remain disastrous to this day," he writes at the close of chapter 2. "It was certainly a concomitant cause of the unleashing of World War II."
The argument continued in the periodicals collected in this project's sibling archives. Mandel's "A new stage of de-Stalinization in the USSR" (International Viewpoint no. 143, June 1988) catalogues the indictments of Stalin then breaking into the Soviet press, including Moskovskaya Pravda of 18 May 1988 stating that the Pact "was a crime against the USSR." A year later, International Viewpoint no. 169 of 18 September 1989 carried "The secret protocols of the 'Hitler-Stalin pact'," noting that Moscow had at last conceded the protocols' existence and observing, correctly and without triumph, that "all the documents concerning the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact have been known in the West since the end of the Second World War and the Soviet press has revealed nothing new." What was new was the admission. The same issue carried reports from Estonia and the Baltic republics, where the anniversary of the Pact had just brought a million people into a human chain, on what the protocols had meant to the people living under them.
Take this book as two things at once. It is a real archive of the diplomacy of 1938–39, and on the Anglo-French side of that diplomacy it is often the best evidence in one volume; the compilers were not lying about Munich, or about the slow boat to Leningrad, or about Dirksen's despatches. It is also a demonstration of how a state falsifies without stating a falsehood — by fixing the terminus, choosing the subject, and letting the reader infer that what has not been printed did not happen.
The men whose telegrams fill these pages were not free agents. Litvinov was dismissed and survived; a great many of his colleagues in the diplomatic service did not survive the years just before this correspondence opens. They wrote under a discipline that later reached back and edited them. The volume they were made into thirty-five years afterwards is worth having, and worth reading with the missing month in front of you.