The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (245 page)

The need for a bond with the U.S.S.R. was “very serious,” he said, “and I hope I shall be able to put it without any offense.” Nevertheless, it
was
offensive; the thought of shaking hands with what he himself had once called the “bloody paws” of the czar’s murderers shocked all the Conservatives from front bench to backbenchers. But he wasn’t speaking to them now, or to Nancy Astor; or even, at that evening session, to the House of Commons. His audience was in the Kremlin. Ivan Maisky was in the gallery, and his presence cannot have been coincidental. It was customary, when foreign powers were being discussed, for His Majesty’s Government to suggest that their envoys attend Parliament. For a private member to extend such an invitation was highly irregular, but that is the only way the Russian ambassador could have got one that Monday; he and Halifax were on the worst of terms. After Munich, the foreign secretary wrote, Maisky’s “attitude seemed to me… one of some suspicion.” The ambassador, for his part, had come to regard the appeasers as Hitler’s “accomplices.”
¹¹

In this he reflected the views of his superior in Moscow, Maksim Litvinov, the Soviet commissar for foreign affairs. Litvinov and Churchill had been thinking along the same lines, and on March 18, three days after the destruction of Czechoslovakia, the commissar had made his first diplomatic move toward rapprochement, proposing an immediate conference in Bucharest of six powers—Russia, Rumania, Poland, Britain, France, and Turkey—to form a “peace front” against the expanding Reich. In the Quai d’Orsay files there is no record of any response from Bonnet, and the Soviet overture is not even mentioned in his capacious (and self-serving) memoirs. Halifax and Chamberlain read the Litvinov initiative, but the prime minister dismissed the plan as “premature” and the Foreign Office told the Russians that it was “not acceptable.” On March 19 Maisky called at the FO to ask why. Halifax told him that he was short-handed; no minister of the Crown could be spared for the Bucharest meeting. Even though Litvinov had issued a public statement explaining that no Soviet guarantees of Poland and Rumania would be forthcoming unless their governments asked for them—they didn’t ask; they were terrified by the prospect of Nazi reprisals—Chamberlain told the House of Commons on March 23 that His Majesty’s Government took a dim view of establishing “opposing blocs” in Europe, the very argument Beck would use in refusing to guarantee Rumania. After a frustrating session with Halifax, Maisky told Boothby that this rebuff to the Russian proposal had dealt “another smashing blow to the policy of collective security.”
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Churchill’s relationship with the Soviet envoy was very different. They had been meeting regularly for seven years to discuss diplomatic moves which could contain or discourage Nazi aggression. After Churchill concluded his speech suggesting British overtures to Moscow, the House broke up, and Maisky came down to the smoking room to talk to Churchill and other MPs he knew. According to Nicolson’s diary: “The House rises at 10.50 pm and I am seized upon by Winston and taken down to the lower smoking room with Maisky and Lloyd George. Winston adopts the direct method of attack [upon Maisky]. ‘Now look here, Mr Ambassador, if we are to make a success of this new policy, we require the help of Russia.’ ” He said: “Now I don’t care for your system and I never have, but the Poles and the Rumanians like it even less. Although they might be prepared at a pinch to let you in, they would certainly want some assurances that you would eventually get out. Can you give us such assurances?” Although the question was highly pertinent, it was not one an envoy could answer, and they were interrupted anyway. Nicolson noted: “Lloyd George, I fear, is not really in favour of the new policy and he draws Maisky on…. Winston rather objects to this and attacks Lloyd George. ‘You must not do this sort of thing, my dear. You are putting spokes in the wheel of history.’ ”
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This does not ring true. It seems inconceivable that Churchill had not consulted Maisky, with whom he was on such close terms, before his speech. As early as February 9 Maisky had been entertaining writers and independent MPs, encouraging the belief that Britain and Russia should put aside ideological differences and face the common enemy together. Boothby, J. B. Priestly, and Nicolson had attended such a luncheon at the Soviet embassy, and Nicolson noted that evening: “Maisky says that Russia was obviously much wounded by Munich and that we can expect no advance from her side. But (and here he became serious) if
we
made approaches, we should not find Russia as aloof or offended as we might have supposed. Bob Boothby and I have an eye-meet like a tennis-ball across a net.”
¹⁴

After Prague the Russians had, in fact, made a major advance, the six-power proposal at Bucharest. Then, and throughout the spring and summer of 1939, Churchill’s son was seeing a great deal of the Soviet ambassador—Chamberlain wrote his sister of “a regular conspiracy in which Mr Maisky has been involved as he keeps in very close touch with Randolph”—and it is reasonable to assume that when Winston rose on the evening of April 3 he had Russian assurances that his seed would not fall on barren ground. No doubt prodding from Maisky contributed to his proposal, though he alone would have been inadequate. Churchill would have sought, or been offered, encouragement from a Soviet leader of higher rank.
¹⁵

Almost certainly it came to him from Litvinov. The Soviet Union’s commissar for foreign affairs held a curious position in Kremlin intrigues. He had become a revolutionary in 1898, was arrested and imprisoned in 1901, but escaped to England and became a Bolshevik in 1903. As a party member he was actually senior to Stalin. But he had never been admitted to the Kremlin hierarchy. He was a Jew, he had been abroad during the 1905 uprising, his wife was British, and during the great revolt in 1917 he had been in London—as Lenin’s representative, to be sure, but Communists with an eye on the future made sure they were seen on the barricades. Nevertheless, Litvinov had been foreign commissar since 1930. Stalin trusted him, and was persuaded by Litvinov’s argument that the Soviet Union would be wiser to pursue closer ties with England and France than to seek Hitler’s good graces. Hitler, Litvinov said, had none. Thus, in Harold Macmillan’s words, it became Russian policy “to seek security through the League and by alliances with the western democracies.”
¹⁶

The Soviets’ chief obstacle continued to be what Thomas Jones called Chamberlain’s “Russian complex.” Late in November 1938 Bernard Shaw had given a lunch at his flat for Maisky and Jones, and in his diary Jones set down Maisky’s summary of the blows Litvinov—and his policy—had suffered during the year. Immediately after the Anschluss, he said, Litvinov had approached Paris, proposing a joint declaration, vowing to fight for Czechoslovakian independence. In the Quai d’Orsay his demarche had been ignored. The foreign commissar had tried again on September 2. Bonnet suppressed his note, whereupon Maisky went to Whitehall. There, too, he was disappointed. “Beyond expressing an interest in the views of Russia,” Jones wrote, “Halifax made no sign.” The Soviets’ exclusion from the Munich Conference had meant an immense loss of prestige for Litvinov and Maisky in the Kremlin; the Anglo-French rejection of Litvinov’s proposal for a six-power conference was a further blow. Nevertheless, Stalin permitted him to prepare another tremendous move in 1939, which was in its final stages when Churchill on April 3, knowingly or unknowingly, fired the first gun in Parliament.
¹⁷

Ten days later, on Thursday, April 13, in the debate following the invasion of Albania, Winston fired a second gun, warning Parliament that the peril is “now very near. A great part of Europe is to a very large extent mobilised. Millions of men are being prepared for war. Everywhere the frontier defences are manned. Everywhere it is felt that some new stroke is impending.” Should war come, he asked, “can there be any doubt that we shall be involved?” Three months earlier, Britain, free of commitments, could stand aloof, but now His Majesty’s Government had provided guarantees “in every direction, rightly in my opinion, having regard to all that has happened.” Before Munich, when prospects were brighter, Britain had backed away from the growing tension on the Continent. “Surely then,” he said, “when we aspire to lead all Europe back from the verge of the abyss onto the uplands of law and peace, we must ourselves set the highest example.” But if they were to “rescue our people and the people of many lands from the dark, bitter waters which are rising fast on every side,” they must seize every opportunity, or create opportunities where none existed.

Turning again to the need for an approach to the Soviets, he said:

Two days later he got action—of sorts. England and France could not reject Russia’s Bucharest proposal outright; it would have been bad manners, bad diplomacy, and bad politics—the British people were beginning to anticipate the time when they would need every friend they could get. On April 15, therefore, the Soviets received formal proposals from Whitehall and the Quai. They found them disappointing. The British merely asked Russia to follow their example and affirm the independence of Poland and Rumania. The French had wanted more. They had proposed that Britain, France, and the Soviet Union come to one another’s aid should Germany make war on any one of them, but Chamberlain and Halifax weren’t prepared to go that far.
¹⁹

Litvinov wanted them to go much further. The following Monday he rocked the chancelleries of Europe by handing Sir William Seeds, the British ambassador in Moscow, a formal proposal which, if it succeeded, would assure that any Wehrmacht offensive in the east would be met not only by Poland but also by the much larger resources of the Soviet Union, including the Red Army. What Stalin’s foreign commissar had submitted was, in fact, nothing less than a blueprint for a triple alliance—a re-creation of the entente which had declared war on the kaiser’s Second Reich in 1914 and which would have defeated Germany and Austria, without American help, had the Bolshevik revolution not shattered it three years later.

In Litvinov’s draft agreement, England, France, and Russia would not only provide mutual assistance if attacked by Hitler; the treaty would be backed by a specific commitment defining the strength and objectives of their armies, navies, and air forces. This alliance, which Poland could join if she chose, would bind the signatories to “render mutually all manner of assistance, including that of a military nature, in case of aggression in Europe” against any member of the alliance or against “Eastern European States situated between the Baltic and Black Seas and bordering on the U.S.S.R.” Further, the signing parties would neither negotiate nor make peace “with aggressors separately from one another and without common consent of the three Powers.”
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The encirclement of Germany, a myth spun by the Führer at Nuremberg rallies, would be real, and it would be awesome. Any Wehrmacht thrust, anywhere, would trigger retaliation from every country on the Reich’s borders except Switzerland and Italy, whose legions, after their performances in Ethiopia and Albania, counted for very little. Swift action was essential, however; with Germany on a war footing Hitler could strike while the alliance was being negotiated. Moreover, Litvinov was aware that Stalin would be highly suspicious of Allied delay. Therefore the commissar stipulated that military conversations between the three powers begin immediately. It was his last bid for a united anti-Nazi front with the West. He was staking his career on it. And he believed it would work.
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In London the critics of the Chamberlain government agreed. Macmillan recalled: “This was Litvinov’s last chance. It was also ours.” Later Churchill summed up the situation: “If… Mr. Chamberlain on receipt of the Russian offer had replied: ‘Yes. Let us three band together and break Hitler’s neck,’ or words to that effect, Parliament would have approved, Stalin would have understood, and history might have taken a different course. At least it could not have taken a worse.” Robert Coulondre, formerly France’s ambassador in Moscow and now her envoy in Berlin, thought Litvinov’s offer was almost too good to be true. He cabled Paris, urging instant acceptance.
²²

Churchill votes in the General Election, November 14, 1935. The Baldwin victory keeps him in political exile.