Offering an Alliance to Germany

On what could Soviet security depend at a time when international capitalism was stabilized and when the march of proletarian revolution had come to a halt in Europe? If the USSR was to provide for its own security, as well as its own economic development, what resources were available?

The army of 5.3 million men that had fought and won the Civil War was demobilized beginning in 1922; by December 1924 its size had been set at 562,000 troops, and a series of reforms had been proposed to reorganize it on a permanent peacetime basis. The central purpose of these reforms, which were formulated by a special military commission headed by Mikhail Frunze and composed largely of veteran Civil War commanders, was to resolve the problems of organization and supply that had plagued the Soviet effort during the Civil War and to establish the basis for a modern army that could contend with those of the nations of Europe.^[1] The army the commission refounded was headed by a Red Army Staff designed to become the "military brain" of the Soviet state and was composed of both regular army divisions made up of men serving two-year terms of duty, who were kept combat-ready, and an army three times larger made up of less well-equipped, less highly trained, and less costly territorial militia divisions. The conscripts enrolled in the latter served three months of active duty and then five years in a reserve mobilized for exercises one month each year This "mixed system" of military organization, which was abandoned only in 1935, was designed to enable the Red Army Staff to mobilize the extensive manpower resources both of Russia and the entire USSR, while limiting military expenditures at a time when reconstruction of the civilian economy was the national priority. However, the "Frunze reforms" did not immediately resolve Russia's military predicament; the

problems of technological inferiority, inadequate training, and inefficient supply persisted. Nor did the reforms create an army capable of launching a strategic offensive against a well-equipped foreign enemy or conducting bold operations in support of revolutionary movements beyond the borders of the USSR.

Soviet military doctrine in the 1920s was debated between those military intellectuals who "wanted to take the combat realities of World War I and the Civil War and codify them into military doctrine" and those who "sought to envision a future 'class war' that negated the more mundane concerns of the military art."^[2] Among those at the Military Academy and on the General Staff of the Red Army who took seriously the study of strategy and tactics, the relative merit of war of attrition and war of annihilation were considered. From the studies of the latter emerged a distinctively Soviet contribution to military science, the concept of the "operational art" of conducting successive operations combining breakthrough and deep pursuit and aimed at the total destruction of the forces of the enemy. What united the advocates of both annihilation and attrition, however, was the assumption that the future war would be fought against a coalition of East European successor states made up wholly or in part of the former Tsarist Empire and sponsored by one or more of the great capitalist powers. The most plausible scenario for a Soviet national security emergency between 1921 and 1933 began with an alliance of Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states, perhaps joined by Finland, and supported by France and/or England. For this reason, Soviet security depended on knowing what encouragement London and Paris might give to an anti-Soviet coalition of East-Central European states, and what Germany would do in the event of a crisis in the region. The answers to these questions were by no means obvious at a time when the Dawes déente attracted Germany westward and when a peace settlement with England had been aborted by the electoral victory of the Conservatives. Dealing with this situation became the first task of Soviet diplomacy during the years of "socialism in one country." How it did so forms the subject matter of this chapter.

With Germany the NKID made use of two strategies in 1923-25. One was intended to keep Germany out of any possible anti-Soviet coalition by concluding a well-defined and well-publicized political treaty with Berlin and thereby fortifying the Rapallo "special relationship." The other was intended to encourage a German rapprochement with France as a way of limiting British influence in Berlin and Britain's position on the Continent in general. It was in execution of this latter strategy that the NKID attempted to mediate the Ruhr conflict. In his conversations with German

diplomats and politicians during the summer of 1923, Chicherin gave strong support to the idea of collaboration between French and German industry as a way of ending the long postwar struggle between the two nations. He rationalized his support for the advance of capitalism in Europe in Marxist terms: Only when the bourgeoisie had accomplished its historic task, he told them, would it give way to the proletariat.^[3] Nevertheless, it is hard not to see the contradictions within the dual policy operating in fully developed form in the summer of 1923. The NKID worked to stabilize capitalism in Germany while the Politburo made preparations to overthrow it.

A stabilized Germany in rapprochement with France could serve more effectively as Soviet Russia's bridge to Europe. And to this end, Chicherin welcomed the Western European détente that developed in late 1923 and early 1924 with the liquidation of the Ruhr invasion and the settlement of the reparations problem. He calculated that the Soviet-German Rapallo relationship combined with the German rapprochement with France could be fashioned into a "continental bloc" that would constitute a counter-British coalition of European states. This alignment would also reinsure Moscow's relationship with Berlin as Germany turned westward and possibly reduce the likelihood that France would support Poland against the USSR, either militarily or diplomatically. Occasionally, over the next two years, Chicherin, Rakovskii, and Litvinov pushed the "continental bloc" idea in Paris and in Berlin. They met with no success; neither France nor Germany was available for a counter-British coalition.

To the contrary, the German government committed itself in principle to joining the League of Nations in December 1924, and the German Foreign Ministry in January-February 1925 proposed to London and Paris what came to be called the Treaties of Locarno. These treaties were concluded the following October at a celebratory and celebrated conference in Switzerland, and they were formally signed in London in December. The Locarno Treaties included a multilateral regional security agreement comprising both a nonaggression pact and a treaty of mutual guarantee. Germany, France, and Belgium promised not to attack, invade, or conduct warfare against each other and to respect the demilitarized status of the Rhineland. Britain and Italy agreed to render military assistance to any one of the three powers in the event that it became the victim of aggression and to keep the Rhineland demilitarized. As similar guarantees were not issued in Eastern Europe, the security of France's allies there, Poland and Czechoslovakia, accordingly suffered by neglect. In the years that followed, Gustav Stresemann, the German foreign minister (1923-29), and his British and French counterparts, Austen Chamberlain (1924-29) and Aristide

Briand (1925-32), held regular summit conferences as they attended meetings of the League of Nations Council or Assembly in Geneva four times each year In these meetings Stresemann aimed at realizing what he maintained constituted the political consequences of Germany's promise of nonaggression and international good citizenship, that is, a negotiated revision of the Treaty of Versailles, including further reductions of Germany's reparations obligations, a quick end to the Franco-British-Belgian military occupation of the German Rhineland, a lenient settlement of the matter of German disarmament, and the return of territories ceded to Poland after the World War. The success of his policy depended on the willingness of Britain to mediate Germany's relations with France and to bring Paris around to accepting German recovery.^[4] Developments in Russia rarely entered into their discussions. They made no effort to turn their post-Locarno cooperation into an anti-Soviet coalition, but neither did they consider involving the USSR in their deliberations.

Largely uninformed about the content of the negotiations between Berlin, London, and Paris, the NKID became concerned that Germany was being drawn into an English-led, anti-Soviet coalition. From late 1924 until mid-1926, it repeatedly presented the same argument both in discussions with German diplomats and in public statements: A Germany that joined the League of Nations would become subject to the decisions of a British-dominated League majority and no longer able to pursue an independent policy toward the USSR. By concluding a security pact with Britain and France—a pact Chicherin believed had been instigated by England—Germany would become the tool of British efforts to undermine the military and political power of France on the Continent, to attain predominance in Europe, and to lead Europe to a confrontation with the USSR—one that would be surely diplomatic and economic, and potentially military. Thus the German rapprochement with France and Britain appeared to be a direct challenge to Soviet security.

How might this come about? As viewed from Moscow, it would happen as a Russo-Polish border dispute escalated into a threatening international crisis.^[5] The League of Nations Council would declare the USSR the aggressor and call upon its members to impose economic and even military sanctions. At this point, German League membership would have direct implications for Soviet security. If Germany were not a League member, Berlin could remain neutral, abstain from action, and continue commercial relations with the Soviet Union. Most significantly, Berlin would not be called upon to allow France and other League members to transport their troops across German territory to the aid of Poland. During the Soviet-Polish War of 1920, German neutrality had provided an element of protec-

tion for Soviet Russia, and the capability to transfer troops and supplies from Western Europe via Germany remained crucial to the success of any second Allied intervention. If, however, Germany joined the League and took on the obligations of the League Covenant, the power to decide whether Germany would be neutral or engaged would be taken over by the member states of the League Council. Germany would be transformed from a protective shield against a hostile coalition to a vital element in a League-gathered, anti-Soviet Europe. And this would occur despite any intention Berlin might have of preserving its ties to Moscow. Objective circumstances, the logic of the League and Locarno, would compel it. When Chicherin stated, as he did repeatedly in 1925, that Germany's policy of understanding with Britain and France was incompatible with the Rapallo relationship with the USSR, he had in mind a scenario such as this.

The NKID's initial response to MacDonald's proposal that Germany join the League of Nations was to propose an agreement between Berlin and Moscow by which neither party would enter the League without the agreement of the other. When Stresemann rejected this, Chicherin proposed to Brockdorff-Rantzau that Germany join in a Franco-Soviet alignment against England, the "continental bloc"; the German ambassador rejected this proposal out of hand. The NKID then responded with what has been called its "December initiative." In a series of conversations with Brockdorff-Rantzau, beginning in December 1924 and continuing until early March 1925, Chicherin proposed and elaborated on what amounted to a Soviet-German alliance, a comprehensive political agreement that would extend far beyond the relationship defined in Rapallo and that would be embodied in a formal treaty.^[6] Both countries would refrain from military, political, or economic coalitions directed at the other; they would coordinate their policies toward the League of Nations; neither would guarantee or recognize the present borders of Poland. These proposals were obviously aimed at preventing any reinforcement of the League of Nations, at keeping Germany diplomatically, militarily, and economically neutral in any future conflict, and at not releasing Poland from the pressures of joint Soviet-German hostility. The treaty offer was serious, made with the approval of the Politburo, and had the support of the collective leadership as a whole.^[7]

West German historians, writing during the years 1955-1965, and attempting to discern the goals of Chicherin's German policy from the papers of Gustav Stresemann and from the records of the German Foreign Ministry, concluded that Chicherin's objectives were to prevent Germany from joining the League of Nations and from concluding the Locarno agreements, and to draw Berlin into an offensive alliance, the objective of

which was to partition Poland—a suggestion to which German diplomats reacted with great reservation.^[8] The research of the 1970s, however, suggests that Chicherin was too cautious to propose a military alliance— although Rykov, chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and a member of the Politburo, urged one on Brockdorff-Rantzau in February^[9] —and that he was too realistic to expect Germany to break off negotiations aimed at concluding a Western European security pact and at joining the League of Nations once Berlin had become committed to both.

Did Chicherin want the USSR and Germany to divide Poland via some sort of proto-Molotov-Ribbentrop pact? The idea of an agreement directed specifically against Poland was first broached in December 1924 by Soviet diplomat Victor Kopp, who suggested somewhat vaguely to Brockdorff-Rantzau that Berlin and Moscow together could exert pressure on Poland, provided that in joining the League of Nations Germany did not guarantee Poland's territorial status quo. The German Foreign Ministry may have calculated that a trial balloon such as this must have had the considered consent of the NKID Collegium, of which Kopp was a member, and it jumped at the prospect of a joint anti-Polish policy. Ago von Maltzan, state secretary at the German Foreign Ministry—seemingly with the knowledge of both Carl von Schubert, his soon-to-be successor, and Stresemann— authorized Brockdorff-Rantzau to tell Chicherin that the solution to the Polish question for both Germany and the USSR lay in "forcing Poland back to its ethnographic borders." In this way, Berlin extended Moscow's proposal considerably, made it more precise, gave it a clearly military purport, and put it at the center of the negotiations. Chicherin, however, repudiated Kopp's suggestion during his famous Christmas Eve discussion with Brockdorff-Rantzau, and in subsequent conversations he showed no interest in an aggressive military alliance against Poland or in putting the Polish question at the center of the discussions with Berlin.^[10] The explanation? The objective of the NKID in the period 1924-1926 was not to partition Poland but to make the frontiers of the USSR secure from an attack launched from Poland. This security was to be attained by coming to an agreement with Warsaw—but only after having first done so with Germany. In the meantime, Narkomindel's objective was to keep Poland in an unsecured situation between Germany and the Soviet Union and therefore unable to concentrate its forces against the USSR.

The key to the NKID's German policy is to be found, I think, in Chicherin's repeated statements that the Treaty of Rapallo must remain the basis of Soviet-German relations. On this he insisted because the Rapallo relationship served two essential functions in Soviet foreign relations: It constituted the main component of the Soviet Union's security system and

it was at the same time the USSR's bridge to Europe. Chicherin aimed to preserve both functions of Rapallo. His effort to maintain the German bridge is evident in his proposal that Berlin and Moscow coordinate their policies toward the League of Nations.^[11] His endeavor to prevent Soviet security from being undermined—his central concern in 1925—is revealed, first, in the treaty he proposed to Germany and, second, in his demand that Berlin give binding guarantees that Germany would not participate in League sanctions against the USSR and that it would not guarantee the German-Polish border Rapallo was to be reaffirmed and sustained as the basis of Soviet-German relations and not altered by Germany's détente with the Western powers. To ensure this, Chicherin demanded that the new Soviet-German neutrality treaty be concluded simultaneously with, or preferably before, the Locarno Treaties and Germany's entrance into the League of Nations. In Chicherin's foreign policy conception, it would form the basis for German agreements with France and Britain and not be merely an amendment to them.

The issue that Chicherin and the NKID strove to place at the center of the discussions with Berlin was not the partition of Poland but the larger question—the orientation of German foreign policy and the effect a German rapprochement with France and Britain would have on it. Brockdorff-Rantzau regarded such discussions as an opening for his personal grand strategy of building a Soviet-German political agreement that could be utilized to compel the French to revise the settlement of 1919. The Wilhelmstrasse, on the other hand, was exceedingly hesitant about such discussions and adopted a strategy of procrastination. By using a series of pretexts—first a cabinet crisis, then the ill health of President Friedrich Ebert (1919-25), then Ebert's death and the election of his successor, Paul von Hindenburg (1925-34)—Schubert and Stresemann delayed any serious discussion of Chicherin's treaty proposal until June. None of this, however, prevented the Wilhelmstrasse from dispatching a lengthy and complicated note to Geneva expressing Germany's willingness to enter the League of Nations (December 12), from preparing a proposal for what were to become the Locarno Treaties, and from dispatching and explaining it to London (January 20) and Paris (February 9). Meanwhile, none of these steps were explained to the German embassy in Moscow until March 19, or to the NKID officially until Brockdorff-Rantzau's talks with Litvinov and Chicherin on 7-8 April. From this, the priorities of German foreign relations are unmistakable—first a security settlement with the Western entente, then, eventually, a new treaty arrangement with the USSR.^[12]

Ebert, Stresemann, Schubert, and Erich Wallroth, director of the Eastern Department at the Wilhelmstrasse, all agreed that the security initia-

tive with France and Britain had priority over any neutrality agreement with the USSR. When it came to the question of the basic orientation of German foreign policy, they were all "Westerners." Even Maltzan, who had managed the Rapallo negotiations three years earlier, urged—in his last action before departing for his new post as ambassador to Washington— that great caution be exercised in negotiations with the Russians. Chicherin's proposals were too extensive, he warned, and it could not be assumed that the Russians would honor any treaty concluded with Germany, or, if they did, that they would keep it secret. Consequently, the Wilhelmstrasse declined to conclude any agreement with the USSR before the success of the negotiations with the Entente powers was assured. As Stresemann told Krestinskii: "I may not conclude a secret treaty with Russia so long as our political situation is not clear in the other direction; for if I am asked whether we have a secret treaty with Russia, I must be able to answer no."^[13]

Risks accompanied this strategy and the Wilhelmstrasse took them into account. If the negotiations with London and Paris failed, the Russians would be in a position to exploit Berlin's diplomatic defeat and isolation and "kick Germany around," as one German diplomat put it. If, on the other hand, they succeeded, Moscow could claim that Germany's ties to London and Paris made any agreement with the USSR valueless. In either case, the Rapallo relationship initiated in 1922 would suffer heavy damage. Moreover, clear tactical reasons compelled negotiating with the USSR. Discussions with Moscow might be used as leverage with Paris and London, as a way of advancing the progress of the security pact negotiations that lagged through the spring and summer of 1925.^[14] Nevertheless, the Germans declined to open negotiations with Russia. German-Soviet negotiations could precipitate, Schubert said, another Rapallo incident, "ein neuer Rapallo-Fall."^[15]

With the future of Soviet relations with Europe at stake, the NKID resumed the offensive, complaining that Germany was conducting negotiations with Britain and France that would lead to a written treaty while making only verbal assurances to the USSR and postponing any serious negotiations that would lead to the binding bilateral obligations Moscow desired. On 3 July the NKID sent to the German Foreign Ministry the draft text of a treaty by the terms of which both parties would promise "not to resort to direct attacks or any other unfriendly actions against each other and not to enter into political or economic blocs, treaties, or agreements or combinations with other powers against the other contracting party ... [and] henceforth to coordinate their actions in the question of membership of the League of Nations or sending observers to the League." To

ascertain the reaction of the Wilhelmstrasse, Litvinov eventually traveled to Berlin and spoke with Stresemann on 8 April, and then conferred with Brockdorff-Rantzau in Moscow.^[16] During the period from April to July however, the German Foreign Ministry offered only lengthy explanations of German Westpolitik , verbal assurances, indications in principle, vaguely worded formulas, and postponement. Europe's security was being discussed and resolved, Rakovskii stated in July, "as if the Soviet Union did not exist."^[17]