Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

FRANCE IS TO BLAME 699accompanied by great revolutionary actions' in Poland; it found railroadstrikes and barricade battles in Rumania; it found the Bulgarian workingclass closing its ranks behind the Communist Party; and 'the principalfortress of the world proletariat, the mighty land of the Soviets, the landof the triumphant working class ... by its immense socialist conquestsinspires the toilers of all countries in their revolutionary struggles. . . .The international proletariat is confronted with the great task oftransforming the crisis of the capitalist world into the triumph of theproletariat revolution.'Shordy before this, Russia had concluded a special kind of peacetreaty with her smaller neighbors. In February, 1933, Maxim Lit-vinov,People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, had proposed that theDisarmament Conference in Geneva define the term 'aggression,' whichwas so frequently mentioned in diplomatic notes. The DisarmamentConference did not come to a definition; but in July, Russia concludedtreaties with ten of her neighbors, including Poland, Czechoslovakia,Rumania, and Turkey, for the sole purpose of establishing what wasmeant by the term 'aggression.' What was significant in these treatieswas that henceforth a state would be guilty of aggression if itmaintained on its territory armed bands which might penetrate into aforeign country; and, conversely, it was agreed that the domesticconditions within a neighboring country could never be considered anexcuse for an attack. Thus, the existence of the German S.A.-formationsand the Polish Legions in Poland might constitute an aggression, but theCommunist constitution of Soviet Russia could not serve as a pretext foraggression. But what if one state supported armed bands on another'sterritory? In many countries the Communist parties or sections of themwere just that; but the treaties did not refer to them.True, the Soviet Union, engaged in a gigantic economic and socialreconstruction, certainly wanted peace with her large neighbors —whether she also wanted peace with her small neighbors was doubted, atleast by them. While the Japanese conquest of Manchuria createdsuspicion and hostility at Russia's eastern border, her relations with theother great powers became more conciliatory. On September 2, 1933,she concluded a non-aggression treaty with Fascist Italy; on November16, she was recognized by the United