ABSTRACT
When Stalin entered upon the crucial period of the Second World War he was handicapped by the manifold results of the peculiarities of his intellectual and political training. Stalin has seldom been out of Russia, and only for very brief periods. He was different from the other Bolshevik leaders of the internationalist period. The activities of the Soviet diplomatists were dominated by a veritable documentary fetichism. Treaties, conventions and agreements were for Stalin the only positive basis of his relations with the world, whose psychology remained a mystery to him. Year after year Stalin repeated the sentence pronounced by Lenin in the Second Congress of the Communist International in Moscow: 'The day when Germany becomes Soviet the knell of the capitalist world will sound'. The international situation seemed to justify the pessimism of the USSR, which foresaw an alliance of the entire bourgeois world against the State which Stalin had solemnly proclaimed was 'the first Socialist State in the world'.
