That the course of Soviet foreign policy could be tortuous and even paradoxical became clear in the case of China. There Stalin chose to support the Kuomintang, the nationalist movement of Sun Yat-sen and Sun's successor Chiang Kai-shek, sending hundreds of military specialists to help the Nationalists and directing the Chinese Communists to follow "united front" tactics. For a time Communist infiltration appeared successful, and Soviet position and prestige stood high in China. But in 1927 as soon as Chiang Kai-shek had assured himself of victory in the struggle for the control of the country, he turned against the Communists, massacring them in Shanghai and evicting Soviet advisers. When the Chinese Communists, on orders from Moscow, retaliated with a rebellion in Canton, they were bloodily crushed. Yet, although defeated in China, the Soviet Union managed to establish control over Outer Mongolia after several changes of fortune. Also, in the mid-twenties it concluded useful treaties of neutrality and friendship with Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan. It should be added that the Bolshevik regime renounced the concessions and special rights obtained by the tsarist government in such Asiatic countries as China and Persia. But it held on to the Chinese Eastern Railway, weathering a conflict over it with the Chinese in 1929.
Soviet Foreign Policy in the Thirties
Chicherin's efforts in the '20's to obtain recognition for his country and to stabilize Soviet diplomatic relations developed into a more ambitious
policy in the '30's. Devised apparently by Stalin and the Politburo and executed by Maxim Litvinov, who served as commissar for foreign affairs from 1930 until 1939, the new approach aimed at closer alliances with status quo powers in an effort to check the mounting aggression of the "have-nots." It culminated in the Soviet entrance into the League of Nations and Litvinov's emphasis on disarmament and collective security. To appreciate the shift in Soviet tactics, it should be realized that the Bolshevik leadership had for a long time regarded Great Britain and France as their main enemies and the League of Nations as the chief international agency of militant imperialism. Indeed, the Politburo placed its hopes, it would seem, in the expected quarrels among leading capitalist powers, and in particular in a war between Great Britain and the United States! Under the circumstances, the Japanese aggression that began on the Chinese mainland in 1931 and especially the rise of Hitler to power in Germany in January 1933, together with his subsequent policies, came as rude shocks. The Soviet government, caught quite unprepared by the appearance of Hitler, was slow to appreciate the new danger - in all fairness it should be added that other governments, although not handicapped by Marxist blinkers, were equally surprised and slow. Yet, once the handwriting on the wall became clear, the Bolshevik leadership did what it could to counteract the Fascist enemy, for that purpose mobilizing Communist parties all over the world as well as using orthodox diplomatic means. Hence the celebrated "popular fronts" of the 1930's and the strange rapprochement between the U.S.S.R. and Western democracies as well as a new cordiality between the U.S.S.R. and Chiang Kai-shek. Based on dire expediency rather than on understanding or trust and vitiated by mistakes of judgment on all sides, the rapprochement with the West collapsed in a catastrophic manner in 1938 and 1939 to set the stage for the Second World War.
As early as 1929 the Soviet Union used the occasion of the making of the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war to formulate the Litvinov Protocol, applying the pact on a regional basis. Poland, Rumania, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Turkey, Persia, and the Free City of Danzig proved willing to sign the Protocol with the U.S.S.R. In 1932 the Soviet Union concluded treaties of nonaggression with Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Finland, as well as with France. In 1933 the United States finally recognized the Soviet Union, obtaining from the Soviets the usual unreliable promise to desist from Communist propaganda in the U.S. In the spring of 1934 the nonaggression pacts with Poland and the Baltic states were expanded into
ten-year agreements. In the summer of that year the Soviet government signed treaties with Czechoslovakia and Rumania - the establishment of diplomatic relations with the latter country marked the long delayed, temporary Soviet reconciliation to the loss of Bessarabia. And in the autumn of 1934 the U.S.S.R. joined the League of Nations.
The following year witnessed the conclusion of the Soviet-French and the Soviet-Czech alliances. Both called for military aid in case of an unprovoked attack by a European state. The Soviet-Czech treaty, however, added the qualification that the U.S.S.R. was obliged to help Czechoslovakia only if France, which had concluded a mutual aid treaty with the Czechs, would come to their assistance. France, it is worth noting, failed to respond to Soviet pressure for a precise military convention, while neither Poland nor Rumania wanted to allow the passage of the Red Army to help the Czechs in case of need.
Also in 1935 the Third International, which had become somewhat less active as a revolutionary force in the course of the preceding years, at its Seventh Congress proclaimed the new policy of popular fronts: Communist parties, reversing themselves, were to co-operate in their respective countries with other political groups interested in checking Fascist aggression, and they were to support rearmament. In its turn the Soviet government demanded in the League of Nations and elsewhere that severe sanctions be applied to aggressors and that forces of peace be urgently mobilized to stop them. Yet both the League and the great powers individually accomplished little or nothing. Italy completed its conquest of Ethiopia, while Japan developed its aggression on the Asiatic mainland. In the summer of 1936 a great civil war broke out in Spain, pitting Franco's Fascist rebels and their allies against the democratic and Left-wing republican government. Once more, the Soviet Union proved eager to stop Fascism, while France and Great Britain hesitated, compromised, emphasized nonintervention, and let the Spanish republic go down. Whereas Italian divisions and German airmen and tankmen aided Franco, none but Soviet officers and technicians were sent to assist the Loyalists, while the international Communist movement mobilized its resources to obtain and ship volunteers who fought in the celebrated "international brigades." Although much in the Soviet intervention in Spain remains obscure and controversial, studies by Cattell and others demonstrate both the seriousness of the Soviet effort to defeat Franco and the remarkable way in which the Communists, including the secret police, proceeded to extend their hold on republican Spain and to dispose of their rivals. But,
with massive Italian and German backing, the insurgents won the bitter civil war in Spain, hostilities ending in the spring of 1939.
The position and prospects of the Soviet Union became graver and graver in the course of the '30's. In November 1936, Germany and Japan concluded the so-called Anti-Comintern Pact aimed specifically against the U.S.S.R. Italy joined the Pact in 1937 and Spain in 1939. In the Far East in 1935 the Soviet Union sold its dominant interest in the Chinese Eastern Railway to the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, thus eliminating one major source of conflict. But relations between Japan and the U.S.S.R. remained tense, as Japanese expansion and ambitions grew, while the Soviet leaders continued to send supplies to Chiang Kai-shek as well as to direct and support Communist movements in Asia. In fact, in 1938 and again in 1939 Japanese and Soviet troops fought actual battles on the Manchurian and Mongolian borders, the Red Army better than holding its own and hostilities being terminated as abruptly as they had begun. Hitler's Germany represented an even greater menace to the Soviet Union than Japan. The Fuhrer preached the destruction of communism and pointed to the lands east as the natural area of German expansion, its legitimate Lebensraum. Again, as in the cases of Japan and Italy, the Western powers failed to check the aggressor. Following the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, Hitler annexed Austria to the Third Reich in March 1938, making a shambles of the Treaty of Versailles.