In this and previous work I return to earlier explanations of the failure of Anglo-Franco-Soviet negotiations: in effect, that ideological anti-communism impeded Anglo-French efforts to conclude a war-fighting alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. The Anglo-French rejection of numerous Soviet initiatives to improve relations during the interwar years, or to create an anti-Nazi coalition, especially during the period 1935-1938, greatly increased Soviet mistrust and cynicism. Western historians seldom consider the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact in this, its proper context. They look at it only within the short time frame of March—August 1939. From this narrow point of view, the nonaggression pact was a singular event demonstrating unmitigated Soviet perfidy. The Soviet government saw the matter differently: it was only “one double-cross deserves another,” preceded by years of Anglo-French deception and bad faith, reaching a nadir in September 1938 at the Munich conference where Czechoslovakia was dismembered. From the Soviet point of view, Munich was an abdication and a betrayal. The Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, the Soviet tit-for-tat, was poor statesmanship, as many Russian historians now concede, but then, in the extreme tension of the last weeks of peace, it seemed like the only way to assure at least the short-term security of the Soviet Union.”4 The Soviet government, having long condemned France and Britain for appeasement, now took up the very same policy, and for the same reasons. If, after all, the “revisionists” can raise two cheers for Anglo-French appeasement, should they not also do the same for the Soviet equivalent?
https://archive.org/details/AllianceNeverWas
