Try, Try Again

When seven deputies of the convening Supreme Soviet last week introduced a motion inviting Foreign Commissar Viascheslav Molotov to deliver a speech at their last session, Moscow's foreign correspondents and foreign diplomats suspected that something important was up. When the Foreign Commissar accepted the invitation, they were sure. Soviet deputies rarely if ever issue spontaneous invitations, and Foreign Commissars certainly do not agree to talk out loud without first talking it over with Joseph Stalin.

On the night that Comrade Molotov rose to speak the Kremlin was jammed with important personages. The diplomatic galleries were filled. Comrade Stalin and his ministers sat in Government boxes. And listening in was a larger audience: world statesmen and the world's people.

After years of being treated with indifference, the U. S. S. R. was coming of diplomatic age, and the lecture on international morals and behavior that Commissar Molotov delivered was being listened to everywhere with interested respect. It was a brand-new experience for Communists. Joseph Stalin, applauding the speech's points, seemed to enjoy it immensely.

Nothing Doing. Kickoff for Comrade Molotov's speech was the Stop Hitler drive of Britain and France and the negotiations that have been going on since mid-April to get Russia to sign on with the anti-Hitler "Peace Front." To the latest British proposals--proposals which British statesmen had confidently predicted would fulfill all Russian demands--the Foreign Commissar bluntly answered "Nothing doing." But he also said that Britain and France should try again, and told them in plain language just how:

> Britain suggested that the mutual assistance pacts be operative under the general principles of the League of Nations Covenant. Why, asked Comrade Molotov, hedge an alliance with "reservations"? In fact, more than one observer asked why bring into the picture at all a League, which has been notorious for words rather than actions, which has done nothing to stop Fascist aggression?

> Britain and France have already guaranteed the frontiers of Poland, Rumania, Greece and Turkey. Comrade Molotov demanded that three other States bordering on Soviet Russia--Estonia, Latvia and Finland--be included in the guarantees. And here he brought up the entire subject of geopolitics in the Baltic, a sea which Germany in wartime must control to be able to assure herself of shipments of Swedish iron ore needed for her war factories, a sea on which Soviet Russia has a frontage of only 75 miles (see map).

The three Baltic States bordering Russia, all of them formerly in Tsarist Russia, do not want guarantees, and least of all by the Soviet Union. What they want is neutrality. (Denmark last week signed with Germany a non-aggression pact which, in Copenhagen, was hailed as a certificate of neutrality.) But, argued Comrade Molotov, it may be that these little States will "prove unable to defend their neutrality in the event of an attack by aggressors." In that case, since they are border buffers, Soviet Russia would want them defended whether the States themselves agreed or not. The Foreign Commissar used the same line of argument in objecting to the Aland (pronounced o-land) Islands fortifications now planned by Sweden and Finland. The islands are near the Gulf of Finland. Armed and in hostile hands, they could close the U. S. S. R.'s only Baltic window.

Unsympathetic. Nor were Comrade Molotov's statements on general policy lost on his hearers. He put to rest any thought that the Soviet Union was thinking of lining up with Germany, although he saw no harm in continuing German-Russian trade relations. The Soviet Union, the Commissar said, "can under no circumstances be suspected of any sympathy whatsoever for aggressors."

For the "appeasers," of Britain and France, he had nothing but scorn. He recalled that British and French statesmen (such as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Premier Edouard Daladier) had once glorified "the successes of the ill-starred Munich agreement," and now he questioned whether they had really changed at heart. Some correspondents wondered if the Soviet's price for Russian cooperation with France and Britain was the political heads of Appeasers Chamberlain and Daladier.

"We stand for peace and for preventing the further development of aggression," said the Foreign Commissar. "But we must remember Comrade Stalin's precept: 'to be cautious and not to allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by warmongers who are accustomed to have others pull chestnuts out of the fire for them.' "

Looking elsewhere throughout the world, Comrade Molotov called President Roosevelt's recent note to Adolf Hitler asking for a ten-year peace a "proposal permeated with a peace-loving spirit." The recently signed German-Italian treaty he called an "offensive alliance." He warned Japan to stop "provocative violations of the frontiers of the U. S. S. R. and the Mongolian People's Republic" in the Far East. As for China, Russia would always support "nations which have become victims of aggression and are fighting for the independence of their countries."

Strength. Comrade Molotov reminded Russia's neighbors that the U. S. S. R. has "grown in strength," and was no longer the exhausted nation of 1921, or even the comparatively healthy fledgling of five or ten years ago. In this estimate all Europe, dictators and democrats alike, seemed to agree last week. For if the Soviet Union was a negligible military power, as many a rumor had it last autumn (see p. 28A), then why all the courting?

Although feigning indifference, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy showed last week their pleasure at the temporary rebuff France and Britain got in Moscow. In London and Paris, it was said, Foreign Commissar Molotov's speech (and his note rejecting the British proposals which followed it) was a "disappointment," but they would try, try again. Apparently they were still trying as the Foreign Affairs Committee of the British Cabinet with the approval of the French Cabinet, batted the ball back to the Russians, decided that offers of guarantees to Latvia, Estonia & Finland would be made only if those States asked for them, waited for the Kremlin to return the serve.

Meanwhile, in Western Europe:

> Under Britain's new conscription law the Government can call up reserves without publicly announcing it, a facility the dictators have long used to scare their adversaries. Last week there began a quiet, gradual mobilization of reservists in Britain which is expected to keep under arms throughout the summer and autumn, Europe's danger period, some 800,000 men.

> Ex-Soldier Adolf Hitler traveled by plane, for the first time in more than a year, to address 250,000 War veterans at Kassel. He assured his former comrades that they had waged in 1914-18 a valiant war, only to be betrayed at Versailles by a spineless Government. To the Fuehrer the World War was caused by British and French ambitions to destroy Germany, "the same objectives that animate the encirclement politicians of today." But Germany, he added, will never be sold down the river again, for "I have seen to it that anyone who has anything to do with the leadership of the State is a 100% man and soldier."

> Sounding off on foreign policy to the executive committee of his Radical Socialist Party, Premier Daladier denied a policy of encircling Germany: "We are for cooperation, which is just the opposite of encirclement. But each time that we have made a step in this direction the answer has been some act of force. . . . To aggression, to autarchic tyranny, to a fanatic ideology, to unjustified demands for 'vital space,' to all violence and brutality, our answer is 'No'. . . . To all efforts at understanding and loyal collaboration, to all that will aid the recovery of business and an equitable distribution of raw materials, our answer is 'Yes.' "

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