I. K. Koblyakov's The USSR for Peace Against Aggression is a book with a very exact subject and a very large claim. The exact subject is eight years: the volume opens in 1933, with Hitler's arrival in power and the Soviet turn toward the League of Nations, and closes in June 1941, when the German army crossed the border the book had spent two hundred pages insisting was safe. The large claim is that across those eight years the Soviet Union did only one thing in the world — struggle for peace — and that everyone else, the "aggressive powers" and the "Western powers" alike, did the opposite. The Russian original and this Progress translation both carry 1976. The latest events it cites are the Helsinki Final Act of August 1975 and the "Peace Programme" of the Party's 24th Congress; there is no sign of the 25th Congress of February–March 1976. So this is a book finished in 1975, at the high-water mark of détente, looking back forty years to argue that détente is not a new departure but the oldest thing the Soviet state does. The history of 1933–1941 is offered as the proof.
That is worth stating plainly at the start, because it tells you what the book is for. Koblyakov was a Soviet diplomatic historian who worked from the official documentary series — 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 or a scholar's private argument; it is a synthesis of the state's own account of itself, written to a settled brief. In 1975 the brief was to give détente a pedigree. The Foreword sets the frame in Brezhnev's own voice, quoting his June 1973 broadcast "over American television," and the Conclusion is not a conclusion about 1941 at all but a restatement of the current Peace Programme — the Middle East, the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, "long-term mutually-advantageous co-operation" with the United States, France, the FRG and the rest. The pre-war years are the long runway; Helsinki is the takeoff. A reader who wants to understand the book should read the Conclusion first and then watch the history being bent to reach it.
The load-bearing sentence is in the Foreword, and it is a metaphysical one. The Second World War, Koblyakov writes, "was unleashed by Hitler Germany" but "the ground had been prepared by the forces of international imperialist reaction: imperialism was the true culprit." Then the pivot: "Wars are alien to the very social nature of the Soviet socialist state." This is the doctrine on which the whole book rests. Soviet foreign policy is not to be judged act by act, because its character is fixed in advance by the character of Soviet society. A socialist state cannot be an aggressor, in the way that a triangle cannot have four sides. What remains for the historian is to show the theorem worked out across the events.
Everything follows from this. Because aggression is by definition what imperialism does, the word "aggression" in this book has a wiring diagram: it points outward, and it can only point outward. The book's title is the doctrine in miniature. "The USSR for peace" and "against aggression" are not two findings that happened to line up; they are the same proposition said twice, because in this system the second is contained in the first. And this is where the argument has to be tested, not admired — because a category that can point in only one direction is not a historical finding. It is a rule about what may be seen.
The vocabulary of the doctrine is Leninist, and here the book meets a test this series has now applied to several Soviet foreign-policy volumes. The phrase that carries the modern weight is "peaceful coexistence." Koblyakov calls it, four times, "the Leninist principle of peaceful coexistence," and the Conclusion promises to pursue détente "in line with the principles of peaceful co-existence." The claim is that the doctrine descends directly from Lenin. But in a book that quotes Lenin some seventy times, the phrase "peaceful coexistence" never once appears inside a quotation from Lenin. It is always asserted in Koblyakov's own voice and attached to Lenin by adjective. What Lenin is actually quoted saying is something narrower and harder: that one must "take political advantage of the differences among our opponents," that the task is "to use the discord between the imperialist bandits," that a given retreat "was indeed a compromise with the imperialists, but... a compromise which, under the circumstances, had to be made." That is a doctrine of manoeuvre among enemies, not of coexistence with them. The gap between the two is exactly the gap this series keeps finding: the pedigree is asserted where the citation is missing. Tomashevsky's Lenin's Ideas and Modern International Relations (1974) did the same thing with the same phrase, and honestly recorded elsewhere that the earliest attested use of "peaceful coexistence" is Chicherin's, in June 1920 — the Commissar, not Lenin. Koblyakov offers no such honesty; he simply lets the adjective do the work.
The doctrine has a cost, and the cost is the last third of the book. So long as Koblyakov is describing 1933–1938 — the years when the Soviet Union genuinely was the loudest voice in Geneva for collective security, and the Western powers genuinely were appeasing Hitler — the doctrine and the evidence pull the same way, and the book is at its strongest. The trouble begins in August 1939, when the peace state signs a pact with the aggressor, and then in September, when it marches into Poland, and then in November, when it attacks Finland. A history organised around the axiom that the USSR is peace and imperialism is aggression must now narrate three Soviet uses of force. Watch what the axiom does to them.
The Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 23 August 1939 is defended, at length and with some skill, as a forced last resort: after the Anglo-French negotiations in Moscow had failed and the danger of a united capitalist front against the USSR was real, "it was necessary to conclude a treaty with Germany. Only in this way was it possible to prolong the peace period, to delay the imminent war with Germany, gain time to prepare for defence and to remove the danger of a war on two fronts." As an argument about Soviet security interests in the summer of 1939 this is not frivolous, and honest historians outside the Soviet tradition have made versions of it. But notice two things the book cannot say. It cannot say what was actually signed. The Secret Additional Protocol of the night of 23 August 1939 — which divided Poland along the Narew–Vistula–San line, assigned Finland, Estonia and Latvia to the Soviet "sphere of influence," and is the document that turned a non-aggression treaty into a partition agreement — does not appear in this book at all. It is not denied; it is absent. (Its existence was Soviet state secret until 1989, when the Congress of People's Deputies at last acknowledged the protocol on the report of the Yakovlev commission; the German copy had been in the published Western record since 1948. Koblyakov, writing in 1975, was working within the denial, not around a fact he weighed and rejected.) And so the demarcation line drawn by the protocol is presented in the book with its purpose reversed: the Soviet Government, we are told, "obtained agreement that Hitler's army would not go further East" — the line that partitioned Poland becomes a shield the USSR wrested from Hitler.
The entry into Poland on 17 September 1939 is the clearest case of the wiring. Seventeen days after the German invasion, the Red Army crossed into a state that still existed and was still fighting. Koblyakov's sentence: "The Red Army moved 250–350 km westwards and liberated the whole of Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia." Liberated. The territories "had belonged to Russia from time immemorial"; "democratic elections were held and popular assemblies formed"; the assemblies "proclaimed Soviet power." There is no invasion in this book, because by the axiom there cannot be one. The same act performed by Germany two weeks earlier is aggression; performed by the USSR it is liberation, and the difference is not in anything that happened on the ground but in the identity of the actor. This is the doctrine showing its hand.
The Winter War is handled the same way, and here the reversal is starkest, because the Soviet Union was the state that opened fire. The book gives the conflict a whole passage under the neutral heading "The Soviet–Finnish Conflict 1939–1940," and its account of the origins is entirely about Finnish intransigence and foreign incitement: Finland rejecting Soviet offers of a mutual-assistance pact and of island leases, rearming with "American loans and Anglo-French deliveries," building the "Mannerheim line" under German engineers. The Soviet attack of 30 November 1939 — the bombing of Helsinki, the invasion across the whole frontier, the puppet "Democratic Republic of Finland" set up at Terijoki under Otto Kuusinen, the expulsion of the USSR from the League of Nations that December for waging aggressive war — none of this is in the passage. Instead the entire conflict is laid at another door: "the Finnish Government was incited by Western diplomacy to provoke armed conflict between Finland and the USSR." Finland provoked; the West incited; the state whose army crossed the border is the one thing the sentence cannot name. And the peace of March 1940, which took the Karelian Isthmus and a thirty-year lease on the Hanko peninsula, is pronounced to have "contained nothing incompatible with Finland's honour and independence."
There is a silence inside this passage that is worth isolating, because it is the kind of omission that gives the game away. Koblyakov's book treats the Soviet entry into the League of Nations in 1934 as a summit of the peace policy — the moment the USSR carried the banner of collective security onto the world's central stage. He does not mention that on 14 December 1939 the League expelled the Soviet Union, for the attack on Finland, as an aggressor state. That is the one League verdict a book about Soviet policy at the League could not afford to print, because it is the League — Koblyakov's own witness for the prosecution against everybody else — turning the word "aggression" back on Moscow. The membership is a triumph; the expulsion has vanished. A reader is told the court exists and is told its judgements of Germany, Italy and Japan; the single judgement it passed on the USSR is the one the book omits. The same asymmetry governs the disappearance of Litvinov himself. His removal as Foreign Commissar on 3 May 1939 — the sacking of the man who was the collective-security policy, three months before the Pact — is recorded in the book as a bare date, with no word of why the architect of the peace line was dropped at the exact moment the line reversed. The fact is admitted; its meaning is not.
This is the finding, and it is not that Koblyakov lies about particular facts — many of his facts about Finnish rearmament and Anglo-French intrigue are real. It is that the book is structurally incapable of registering a Soviet act of force as one. A history of peace initiatives that cannot see its own three interventions of 1939–40 has not proved that the USSR was a peace power; it has defined "aggression" so that the question can never come up. (The two later interventions this series routinely tests — Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968 — fall outside the book's 1933–1941 frame, and their absence here is chronology, not concealment. Koblyakov's Czechoslovakia is Munich's Czechoslovakia, named more than a hundred times as the victim of Western betrayal in 1938. It is the same wiring: Czechoslovakia can be seen when it is imperialism's victim, and would vanish were it the USSR's.)
None of this means the book is worthless, and to say so would be to make the opposite error to Koblyakov's. The great merit of The USSR for Peace Against Aggression is that for the years 1933 to 1938 the record it defends is largely a true one, and it is a record too often forgotten by readers who know only 1939. The Soviet Union did join the League of Nations in 1934 and did make it, for a few years, a genuine platform for collective security against Germany and Italy. Litvinov's diplomacy — the Convention on the Definition of Aggression of 1933, the doctrine that "peace is indivisible," the mutual-assistance pacts with France and Czechoslovakia in 1935, the consistent Soviet vote at Geneva for sanctions and for arms embargoes on the aggressor — was real, and it was, for that stretch, more far-sighted than the appeasement being conducted from London and Paris. Koblyakov's chapters on 1938 are a serious indictment of Munich, and they are right that the Western powers spent those years hoping to turn Hitler eastward. Where the book documents the diplomacy of collective security from the Soviet side, it is a usable source, and a reader should take that documentation seriously. The failure of collective security in the 1930s was a real catastrophe, and the Soviet Union was not its principal author.
The distortion is not in the facts of 1933–1938; it is in what the book makes them mean. It presents that half-decade of collective-security diplomacy as the eternal, Leninist essence of Soviet policy, briefly interrupted by a tactical pact. The truth is closer to the reverse, and the sharpest statement of it was already in print before the events the book narrates had finished happening.
This series can answer Koblyakov from his own decade, in the words of the man the book never names. Leon Trotsky wrote about Soviet foreign policy continuously from Turkish and Mexican exile through the whole period Koblyakov covers, and two of his judgements go to the root of the book.
The first is on the meaning of the collective-security turn itself. In The Revolution Betrayed, finished in 1936 — at the very peak of Litvinov's Geneva years — Trotsky argued that the embrace of the League was not the flowering of a Leninist peace principle but its abandonment: a conservative bureaucracy insuring itself by joining the international status quo. "The leaders of those days," he wrote of the Bolsheviks under Lenin, "were especially implacable in relation to all kinds of pacifist illusions — League of Nations, collective security, courts of arbitration, disarmament, etc." — seeing in them "only a method of lulling the toiling masses." The bureaucracy of the 1930s, he wrote, had come to seek "the inviolability of the Soviet Union" by folding it into the European status quo: "What could be finer, when all is said and done, than an eternal pact of non-aggression between socialism and capitalism?" That is precisely the "Leninist principle" Koblyakov derives; Trotsky's point is that Lenin's party held the opposite, and that the substitution of collective security for world revolution was the measure of how far the state had travelled from October. Of Litvinov himself, embodiment of the whole "peace policy," Trotsky wrote that at Geneva he was "a shadow of Laval" — a witness that the policy Koblyakov celebrates looked, to a contemporary Marxist, like subordination to the French right, not independence from imperialism. A reader need not accept Trotsky's every judgement to see that he has named the real question the book suppresses: whether "peace policy" was a principle or a retreat.
The second judgement is on the Pact, and it is the more devastating because it is a prediction on the record. Koblyakov's whole case is that the agreement with Hitler was forced on the USSR only in the last days of August 1939, after every alternative had failed. Trotsky had been saying since Munich that Stalin was aiming at exactly such an agreement, and wanted it. On 1 October 1938, days after the Munich settlement, he wrote that "the collapse of Czechoslovakia is the collapse of Stalin's international policy of the last five years," that "Moscow's idea of 'an alliance of democracies'... is a lifeless fiction," and that Stalin would now seek an understanding with Berlin. The Pact came ten months later. Writing on 2 September 1939, the day after Germany invaded Poland, Trotsky set the record down himself: "From 1933 on I declared continually in the world press that the fundamental aim of Stalin's foreign policy was the reaching of an agreement with Hitler." Where Koblyakov presents the collective-security years and the Pact as opposites — the principle and its reluctant tactical suspension — Trotsky, watching in real time, saw one continuous line running toward Berlin, with the "struggle for democracy" as its cover. One of these two accounts was published as the events occurred and forecast the next one correctly. It was not the one printed in Moscow.
That is the honest use of this book. Read for its documents of 1933–1938, it preserves a real and creditable record of Soviet collective-security diplomacy that the West would prefer to forget. Read as what it claims to be — a demonstration that the Soviet state is peace by its nature, that "aggression" is a thing only imperialism can commit, that a straight Leninist line runs from the Decree on Peace through Litvinov to Helsinki — it is a period document of a different kind: the record of a state that had learned to describe its own uses of force in a vocabulary that made them, by construction, invisible. The most telling thing in The USSR for Peace Against Aggression is not any single sentence about Poland or Finland. It is the title, and the confidence that the two halves of it could never come apart.