Foreign Office. This was the beginning of the "Strang Mission". Special prominence was given to influential utterances in Britain in favour of a pact with the Soviet Union, notably to Churchill's article in the Daily Telegraph on June 9. Churchill even went so far as to advocate a joint guarantee to the Baltic States and Finland, and declared that such a pact was as much in the interests of the Soviet Union as it was in the interests of France and Britain. But, said Churchill, there was no time to lose.
At the same time, the Soviet papers continued to carry numerous stories about "German looting in Czechoslovakia" (Hubert Ripka in the Spectator quoted by Pravda on June 9),
"Austria under the heel of the Nazi invaders" ( Pravda June 16), "Executions in Spain"
{Pravda June 15), and so on. Alongside with this went accounts about growing German pressure on Poland, and reports of some of the more violent speeches by Nazi leaders—
such as Goebbels's attack on England in his Danzig speech at the end of June, with its
"hands off Eastern Europe! " slogan. Altogether the growing violence over Danzig was being fully reported, and in a tone very far from friendly to the Germans. These, the Soviet press kept on suggesting, were out for trouble:
Danzig is teeming with German military trucks that have come from Königsberg...
Danzig is being invaded by hordes of "tourists" and other highly suspect elements...
The German papers are continuing to carry screaming headlines about Poland's
"aggressiveness". The Völkischer Beobachter is screaming that the Poles want to invade East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and other German territories.
[ Pravda, July 2, 1939.]
Although, whenever there was any vitally important business to discuss with Hitler, the British Government would send him Eden, Simon, Halifax—or Chamberlain in person,
the British Prime Minister seemed to think that an experienced Foreign Office official, like Mr Strang, was more than good enough for Moscow. This choice had, indeed, been
severely criticised by the Opposition press and Opposition speakers, who had argued that at least somebody of Halifax's or Eden's stature should be sent there. But, in
Chamberlain's view Halifax had other things to do, while Eden was much too friendly to the Russians—he had already gone to Moscow in 1935— and Mr Strang would be better
suited to what Chamberlain wanted to be no more than an exploratory mission—or
merely a sop to the Opposition. He was determined to turn a deaf ear to all the warnings, coming from Churchill and others, that the time factor was of the utmost importance. It was indeed not surprising that the Strang appointment should have aroused little
enthusiasm in Moscow.
There is a remarkable passage in Maisky's reminiscences about the visit he paid Halifax on June 12, the day of Strang's departure for Moscow:
To get the three-power pact concluded with the utmost speed—for that was our
basic object—and to discover our British partners' real intentions, the Soviet
Government decided to invite Lord Halifax to Moscow... On June 12 I was
instructed to call on Halifax in a personal capacity, and to urge him in a friendly but pressing way to go to Moscow without delay to complete the negotiations and to sign the pact.
[I. Maisky, Kto pomogal Hitlern? (Who Helped Hitler?), Moscow, 1962. English translation, London, 1964.]
After pointing out to Halifax the extreme urgency of the problem, Maisky said, "'If you can go to Moscow right away, Lord Halifax, I shall ask my Government to send you an
official invitation.' A hard and mysterious look came over Halifax's face. He looked at the ceiling, then rubbed the bridge of his nose, and then solemnly declared: 'I shall bear it in mind.' I realised of course that he could not decide on this visit to Moscow without referring the matter to the Cabinet... After a week, there was still no reply."
[In conclusion, Maisky writes that he had an important postscript to make to this account of his meeting with Halifax on June 12. In the Documents of British Foreign Policy
published later by the British Government, there was Halifax's own account of this
meeting. According to this, Maisky had suggested that Halifax should go to Moscow
"when things had calmed down", to which Halifax had replied that nothing would please him better, but that at the present moment it would be impossible for him to leave
London.
Maisky then proceeds to demonstrate that, in Halifax's account of the same meeting, the Foreign Secretary had told "two untruths", both showing that, like Chamberlain, he was less than lukewarm about coming to a quick agreement with Moscow. This lack of
enthusiasm, on both Halifax's and Chamberlain's part, is, of course, fully borne out by Churchill in what he said at the time and wrote later.
"It was decided to send a special envoy to Moscow. Mr Eden, who had made useful contacts with Stalin (in 1935) volunteered to go. This generous offer was declined by the Prime Minister. Instead, on June 12, Mr Strang, an able official, but without any standing outside the Foreign Office, was entrusted with this momentous mission.
This was another mistake. The sending of so subordinate a figure gave actual offence."
(Churchill, op. cit., vol. I, p. 346.)
It should, of course, be remembered throughout that Maisky, a "Litvinov man" at heart, was more enthusiastic about the Tripartite Alliance as "the only way of stopping Hitler"
than were either Stalin or Molotov.]
Strang arrived in Moscow in the middle of June and had, together with the British
Ambassador, Sir William Seeds, and the French Ambassador, M. Naggiar, a number of
meetings with Mr Molotov. The first meeting on June 16, lasted an hour; another meeting on July 1 lasted an hour and a half; and still another, on July 8, two hours.
Let us remember that these discussions arose from the diplomatic exchanges that had
gone on since April. After rejecting the "Litvinov Plan" on April 17, the British Government had asked the Soviet Union to enter into a number of unilateral
commitments; in its Note of May 14—this was already after Molotov had taken over—
the Soviet Government declared that the latest British proposals did not contain the principle of reciprocity, and put the Soviet Union in a position of inequality; the absence of these guarantees to the Soviet Union in case of aggression on the one hand, and the
"unprotected position" of its North-Western frontiers, on the other, might well act as an incentive for the aggressors to attack Russia. It therefore proposed a more detailed version of the "Litvinov Plan" of April 17:
An effective Anglo-Franco-Soviet mutual assistance pact, complete with (1) a three-power guarantee to the countries of Eastern and Central Europe exposed to
aggression, these countries to include Latvia, Estonia and Finland, and with (2) a
"concrete agreement" among the three powers as to the nature and the volume of the help they would render each other and to the guaranteed states. "Without such an agreement", the Note concluded, "the mutual assistance pacts may well remain suspended in mid-air, as we know from the experience of Czechoslovakia".