This is the third book in this series on the same eleven months, and it is the one that had nowhere to hide.
The first, Soviet Peace Efforts on the Eve of World War II, was a collection of 350 documents that stopped on 1 September 1939, so that the Treaty of Non-Aggression signed in Moscow on 23 August survived only at second hand — in a telegram from Tokyo reporting the Japanese reaction, and in a reassurance to the Chinese ambassador. A document collection can do that; it prints what it prints. The second, Oleg Rzheshevsky's World War II: Myths and the Realities of 1984, was a polemic against Western historiography in which the word protocol does not occur once in some ninety-two thousand words.
Sipols has neither escape available. Diplomatic Battles Before World War II is a continuous narrative by a single author, running from 1933 to the outbreak of war, and its declared subject is precisely the negotiation. The Pact gets its own section, under its own heading — "Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact" — with four subheadings. He has to reach it, and he does, and he describes the treaty clause by clause:
The Treaty, signed in the small hours of August 24, contained the commitments of non-aggression (Article I) and a statement on refusing assistance to a power attacking one of the contracting parties (Article II). Both parties undertook to inform one another on matters involving their common interests (Article III) and to stay out of any group of powers, directly or indirectly spearheaded against the other party. The Treaty was concluded for a term of 10 years.
That is the whole instrument, itemised. And the Secret Additional Protocol signed the same night — dividing Poland along the Narew, Vistula and San, assigning Finland, Estonia and Latvia to the Soviet sphere and Lithuania to the German, and noting Soviet interest in Bessarabia — 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 the reader could weigh. It is not mentioned. In a book that enumerates three articles and a term of years, the omission is not an absence. It is an act.
Four years after this book appeared, Ernest Mandel gave the practice its name. In The Meaning of the Second World War (Verso, 1986), a full-length treatment of the war from the tradition this series writes from, Mandel observes in chapter 2, "The Immediate Causes", that "the Hitler-Stalin pact contained a secret protocol which, even before that conquest had commenced, implemented a fourth partition of Poland," and adds the flat sentence: "Russian historiography continues to deny this — by keeping silent about the secret protocol." He goes on: "Likewise, it draws a veil over Stalin's formal opposition to the survival of any Polish state." (Mandel's own text misdates the signature by four days; the protocol was signed on the night of 23 August 1939.)
Sipols shows us how the silence was actually operated, and it is stranger than Mandel could have known. The word protocol does occur in this book — fourteen times, across nine passages — and every occurrence is an instrument the USSR proposed or signed openly: the 1933 protocol on the definition of aggression, the Soviet draft protocol on economic non-aggression, the Soviet-French protocol of 5 December 1934, the protocol to the mutual assistance treaty of 2 May 1935, the mutual assistance protocol with the Mongolian People's Republic of March 1936. The phrase "secret additional" occurs zero times. So the word is not avoided; it is worked hard, in one direction only, until it means the opposite of what it means in the one place it is missing.
The ninth occurrence is the sharpest. On 1 July 1939, Sipols records, Britain and France finally agreed to extend the three-power guarantee to the Baltic states, but proposed that the states concerned "should be listed not in the treaty itself but in a protocol which was not subject to publication." He offers this as evidence of Anglo-French bad faith. Seven weeks later his own government listed those same states in a protocol which was not subject to publication, and he does not say so. This is not a veil drawn over a fact. It is the fact turned round and fired at the other side.
Sipols was Latvian, and a professional historian of Soviet diplomacy rather than a propagandist drafted in for the occasion. The book's own footnotes show the trade: he had co-authored, with M. Pankrashova, Why the War Could Not Be Prevented: The Moscow Talks of the USSR, Britain and France in 1939 (Moscow, 1970), the standard Soviet monograph on the military negotiations. He works from the USSR Foreign Policy Archives, from the Central State History Archives of the Latvian SSR, from the Public Record Office by Cabinet and Foreign Office file number, from the German, French and American published series, from the Potsdam Zentrales Staatsarchiv, and from West German and British monographs he reads in the original. This is not a hack's apparatus.
The date is 1982 — Brezhnev's last year, the year the first Pershing II and cruise missile deployments were being fought over across Western Europe, and the year the Fourth International's International Viewpoint began publishing. Progress Publishers pushed out a wave of English-language titles in these years for the same audience Rzheshevsky would address two years later: the Western peace movement, the Western Communist Party lecturer, and the diplomatic historian who could be trusted to weigh a footnote. The conclusion states the thesis without ornament: "The Soviet Union was the only country to have done whatever it could throughout the prewar years towards a collective effort by a number of nations to keep the peace." The argument runs from there to the present of 1982 by implication only, which is why it works better than Rzheshevsky's, who spelled it out.
A reader who takes this as a tissue of lies will be badly served, because a great deal of it is right, and some of it is better documented here than in most Western books of its date.
The Soviet pursuit of collective security between 1933 and 1938 was real. The convention on the definition of aggression signed with Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan on 3 July 1933; the Eastern Pact negotiations; the Soviet-French protocol of December 1934, acceded to by Czechoslovakia days later; the mutual assistance treaty of 2 May 1935 — these happened, they were pursued for years at cost, and Sipols traces them with archival detail. His account of Soviet-French military staff contacts, including the 1937 Soviet document offering "petrol, fuel oil, lubricants, manganese, foodstuffs, armaments, engines, tanks, aircraft" and raising even then the "cardinal question" of transit through the states between the USSR and Germany, is a genuine contribution: it shows that the problem which wrecked August 1939 had been on the table for two years.
Munich is a betrayal, and he is entitled to say so. His set piece — Horace Wilson entering the room where the Czechoslovak representatives had been kept waiting, announcing "It is almost over. You will be glad to know that we have reached agreement on practically everything," being asked "And what is to be our fate?", answering "It is not as bad as it might have been," and closing the exchange with "I am sorry. It is no use arguing" — is drawn from the Czechoslovak record and it is not softened by any subsequent scholarship. Nor does he rest the anti-Soviet reading of Munich on assertion. He quotes the West German historian B. Celovsky that "Chamberlain and Bonnett did all they could to keep the Soviet Union out," and Wheeler-Bennett on the "secret hope" in London that German expansion turned eastward would exhaust itself on the Russian steppes. Serious historians who share none of his politics — Michael Jabara Carley in 1939: The Alliance That Never Was (1999), Geoffrey Roberts across his work on Soviet foreign policy — have argued much the same.
The chapter on the military talks of 12–21 August 1939 is the strongest thing in the book. The British and French missions took seventeen days to reach Moscow. The British delegation was led by Admiral Drax and, as Sipols shows from Strang's memoirs, was of "inadequate standing" with instructions of a "limiting character." Ambassador Seeds warned London on 13 August that the talks would produce nothing beyond confirming that the British "are not trying to conclude a concrete and definite agreement." Most damningly, the Foreign Office told the American embassy in London that the British mission "has been told to make every effort to prolong its discussions until October 1." Voroshilov put the transit question on 13 August and pressed it on 14 August, naming the two corridors he wanted — "the Vilno Corridor in the north and Galicia in the south" — and warning that "without a positive solution to this issue, the whole of the enterprise undertaken with a view to concluding a military convention between Britain, France and the USSR is doomed to failure in advance." Drax noted after that session: "I think our mission is finished." When Doumenc returned on 22 August claiming French authority to answer yes, he could not say whether Warsaw had been consulted. It had not been. The Polish refusal was real, it was rooted in the Polish government's own hope of a bargain with Berlin — Sipols documents Lipski's proposed mission of 18–20 August from Lipski's own memoirs — and it was fatal.
None of that is invented, and a reader who dismisses it will be defenceless when they find it in Carley. They will also find it in Mandel, who is no friend of the case Sipols is building. In chapter 10, "The Opening Gambit in Europe", Mandel writes that "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." And in chapter 2 he grants the premise on which Sipols's whole defence of August 1939 rests: "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."
That sentence is worth pausing on. It is written by a leading figure of the Fourth International, an organisation founded in opposition to Stalin and hunted by his police, and it concedes without hedging the ground Sipols occupies most strongly. What Mandel will not concede is the next step, and neither should the reader.
The trouble is not with the pieces. It is with what the pieces are made to carry.
Sipols argues that the Pact was forced, and that "there had been no chance of ever creating an Anglo-Franco-Soviet coalition" — a defensible reading, and one held by non-Soviet historians. But he then argues something else. He contrasts German conduct favourably with Anglo-French conduct: while the Soviet government "had spent months on end for inconclusive negotiations with Britain and France, it took but one day to draw up the text" of the treaty with Germany. He offers this as proof of German sincerity. It is in fact the strongest available evidence that the substance had been settled in advance — because what took one day to draft was not one document but two, and the second was the one that mattered.
Mandel names the consequence Sipols cannot: the protocol, he writes in chapter 2, meant that "Stalin gave the green light to Hitler's aggression, temporarily saving the Third Reich from the nightmare of a prolonged war on two fronts." Note that this is not the Cold War thesis of equivalent guilt. Mandel is emphatic in the same chapter that "there cannot be the slightest doubt that German imperialism deliberately and brazenly unleashed the war against Poland, and therewith the Second World War, on 1 September 1939," and he is scathing about A.J.P. Taylor's attempt to spread the responsibility around. He is equally unsentimental about Chamberlain, though not in the direction Sipols wants: appeasement, in Mandel's reading, was "an illusory and foolhardy attempt to outmanoeuvre Hitler, not an acceptance of a Europe dominated by Berlin," and while "some of the 'appeasers' played with the idea of diverting the aggressive dynamic of German imperialism against the USSR," after Prague they understood that a Hitler in possession of Eastern Europe would come for the Empire next. That is a real disagreement with Sipols, and it is the more useful for coming from someone with no stake in exonerating London.
Then comes the sentence that gives the game away entirely. The German government, in signing, was to relinquish "the plans for its domination of the Baltic states including the idea of turning them into a springboard from which to attack the USSR." The Pact, that is, saved the Baltic states. This is written by a Latvian, in 1982, about an agreement whose unpublished half consigned Latvia, Estonia and Finland to the Soviet sphere, and which was followed within fourteen months by the extinction of Latvian statehood.
Mandel, who had no reason to give the Baltics more than a line, gives them several, and they read now like a direct answer. In chapter 17, "The Aftermath", he lists what Stalin spent the first eighteen months of the German-Soviet war trying to get Churchill to recognise: "the Soviet frontiers of 1941, i.e. 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." Later in the same chapter he sets 1939–41 alongside 1944–48 as two instances of one method: "Already in 1939–41, the opportunity to seize the Baltic states, the Western Ukraine and Belorussia, and Bessarabia as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact had presented itself." Sipols's springboard sentence and Mandel's list describe the same document. One of them names what it did.
And in chapter 3, "The Social Forces", Mandel writes about what that did to the people living there. In "certain areas like the Baltic republics and the Ukraine, where national oppression had been combined with the large-scale terror and famine of the collectivization period, hostility to Stalin among large sectors of the peasantry, the professional classes and layers of the working class had turned into outright hatred." He notes at once that the Nazi occupation's crimes exceeded anything Stalin's people had done and turned that tide. But the observation stands, and it was made in 1986 by a Belgian Marxist in a book for a British publisher — three years before it could be made in Riga.
Because the book stops on 1 September 1939 — the same terminus as the 1973 document collection, arrived at by a different route — none of what followed is in it. There is no 17 September, no entry into eastern Poland, no Boundary and Friendship Treaty of 28 September with its further secret protocols, no Winter War, no ultimata of June 1940, no single-list elections of July 1940, no accession of August 1940. The words Bessarabia, Katyn and deportation do not appear in the book at all. Neither does Trotsky. Neither does any account of the destruction of the Soviet officer corps in 1937–38 or of the diplomats — Litvinov's colleagues, many of them — who were shot in those same years. A book about the diplomatic balance of forces in 1939 that cannot mention what happened to the Red Army's command in 1938 is missing a variable. Mandel supplies it in a single clause of chapter 2: the purges "decapitated the Red Army, disorganised the defences of the country, delivered Poland and Europe to Hitler, and facilitated the Nazi attack on the USSR."
Two smaller silences are worth naming because they fall inside the declared period. The Soviet-German trade and credit agreement was signed in Berlin on 19 August 1939 and began the flow of Soviet grain, oil and manganese into the German war economy. Sipols's only entry for 19 August is that Schulenburg pressed for Ribbentrop's visit and was "refused once again." And the removal of Litvinov on 3 May 1939, read in Berlin at the time as a signal, is not treated as an event with meaning.
Yet the terminus leaks, and it leaks in the most revealing way in the book. Note 198, attached to the Pact chapter, reaches past 1 September into the Latvian archive to cite a conversation between Stalin and the Latvian foreign minister Vilhelms Munters on 2 October 1939, in which Stalin observed that a German attack could not be ruled out and that "you had to get ready for any eventuality in good time." Sipols uses this to prove Soviet vigilance. He does not say what Munters was doing in Moscow. He was there under duress, negotiating the mutual assistance pact that admitted Soviet garrisons to Latvia, signed on 5 October 1939 — the instrument by which the secret protocol was executed. Sipols had the file. He cited the file. He printed the sentence about vigilance and left the room it was spoken in unfurnished.
Trotsky wrote against the Pact within weeks, most fully in "The USSR in War" of 25 September 1939, collected in In Defense of Marxism, and the Fourth International argued the question in public through the split it caused in its own ranks.
Mandel's book of 1986 is the mature form of that reply, and the reason to set it beside this one is that the two are so nearly commensurable. Both are single-author syntheses working from the published diplomatic series and the secondary literature; both hold that German imperialism bore the decisive responsibility for the war; both are unsparing about Chamberlain, Daladier and the Polish colonels. Where they part is on one document and everything downstream of it. Mandel's judgement in chapter 10 — "Stalin preferred to ally himself with the likely victor rather than with the probable victim" — is a political charge that a reader may weigh and reject. Sipols's method makes weighing impossible, because the evidence has been removed from the scale.
It is worth adding, since Sipols's Soviet readers were taught the opposite, that Mandel does not treat the postwar settlement as a diplomatic betrayal by anybody. In chapter 16, "The Outcome", he insists that the shape of Europe after 1945 was "to a large extent" determined "on the battlefield," not at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam, and that the Western powers were in no position in 1945 to alter the position of the Red Army. That is a refusal of the émigré legend as much as of the official one, and it is why the criticism of Sipols is not a Cold War criticism.
The reply that speaks most directly to this book, though, came from Latvians. In 1988–89 the Soviet admission finally arrived; the Congress of People's Deputies condemned the protocols on 24 December 1989. International Viewpoint no. 169 (September 1989) devoted much of an issue to it. The piece headed "The secret protocols of the 'Hitler-Stalin pact'" noted, 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. Gerry Foley reported that the Soviet authorities "were obliged to acknowledge that the way was opened for occupying these countries by the secret protocols." The Estonian historian Herbert Lindmäe, writing in the same issue on the postwar armed resistance, began from the flat statement that his republic "was occupied by the Red Army on June 17, 1940," and that this "ensued from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939 and the secret protocols appended."
And the same issue printed the programme of the Popular Front of Latvia — Latvijas Tautas Fronte — in translation. Its fourth section, on the national question, contains the sentence this book was written to prevent: "It must be officially recognized that the incorporation of the Latvian republic into the USSR was accomplished by force and in disregard of what the Latvian people thought." The programme also demands recognition of "the deportations in Latvia's twentieth century history" and that the Stalinist regime's crimes against the inhabitants of Latvia in the 1940s and 1950s be declared crimes against humanity. It was written by people who still called themselves socialists and invoked Lenin on self-determination, seven years after this book appeared, in the republic Sipols came from.
Take the middle of this book as scholarship and the seam at 23 August as an object lesson. Chapters III and IV, on Munich and on the three-power talks, are a well-sourced account of a failure that was mostly the West's, and the archival work behind them is sound. The section on the Pact is something else: a professional historian, working from the files, describing an instrument article by article while suppressing the annex that determined the fate of his own nation.
Read it against Mandel, and the demonstration completes itself. Mandel had less archive than Sipols and reached the harder conclusion; Sipols had the archive and could not print one page of it. The difference is not scholarship and it is not politics in any sense a reader would recognise from the footnotes. It is that one of them was writing where the answer had been decided in advance.
It is worth holding both facts at once. Sipols was not a liar about the Anglo-French record, and the reader who dismisses him there will simply be wrong. He was a man permitted to publish everything he found except one document, and he wrote the book that permission allowed. What that cost, in a Latvian writing about Latvia's last year of independence, is not recorded in the text. It is only visible in the shape of it.