The Czechoslovakian Crisis, 1938

Abstract

The events of 1938 reinforced Moscow’s reservations about the practicability of collective security. The year began badly. After Zhdanov’s attack on the Narkomindel for not asserting Soviet interests vis-à-vis the capitalist world in general, came the publication of Stalin’s written reply to comrades Ivanov and Filippovich on the 14 February 1938. He spoke of the need to combine “the serious efforts of the international proletariat with the still more serious efforts of the whole of our Soviet people”. Stalin continued: “We need to strengthen and reinforce the international proletarian links of the working-class of the USSR. with the working-class of the bourgeois countries; we need to organise political aid from the working-class of the bourgeois countries to the working-class of our own country in the event of an armed attack on our own country, equally we need to organise all possible aid from the working-class of our own country to the working-class of the bourgeois countries.”¹ Given the paranoia about subversion in France, the statement was extremely tactless. But it was a telling symptom: the Soviet Union was turning in on itself, folding the Comintern around its exposed form for added protection.