ABSTRACT
The signature of the Nazi-Soviet pact on 23 August 1939 was one of the most dramatic diplomatic coups of the inter-war years, signifying a rapprochement between bitter ideological enemies who had rained invective and scorn upon each other for years. Where the Soviet Union was concerned, the pact raised fundamental questions about the nature of General Secretary Josef Stalin’s foreign policy. Since the mid-1930s, with the indefatigable Litvinov to the fore, the Soviets had been ardent advocates of collective security, pursuing a Popular Front policy to concert all anti-fascist elements in Europe against Nazism. Now, Stalin and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop clinked glasses of vodka and Crimean champagne to toast their non-aggression treaty and the incipient partition of Poland, joking cynically about the Soviet Union joining the Anti-Comintern pact. In Britain, the Labour Party Daily Herald encapsulated the dismay of the left as it damned Stalin for ‘one of the most indefensible and shocking reversals of policy in history’; in the Soviet Union itself, there was equal bewilderment: ‘we felt that we did not understand something as we should have … Yesterday, we were taught to hate fascism but today to take it for a friend’.2
