Article 11 established that ‘any war or threat of war’ which affected any member of the League was considered to be of concern to the whole League and required the organization to convene and discuss proper measures to safeguard the peace.

This is vital information, confirming a clear decision taken in support of fulfilling the commitments to Czechoslovakia under the Franco-Soviet pact. It was indeed confirmed in Litvinov’s report to Aleksandrovsky about his conversations with Payart; V. Mal’tsev et al. (eds), Dokumenty po istorii myunkhenskogo sgovora 1937–1939 (Moscow, 1979), No. 108; see also Nos. 148 & 163. The decision was sufficiently unequivocal and decisive for Maisky to feel confident in pursuing unauthorized initiatives. The approach to Payart was most certainly sanctioned by Stalin, vacationing in the Caucasus, who had been sounded out by Litvinov a day earlier; see Steiner, ‘Soviet Commissariat’, p. 763. Indeed, in J. Haslam, ‘The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovakian crisis of 1938’, Journal of Contemporary History,14/3 (1979), p. 452, the author acutely observes that an article in Pravda during the crisis, which affirmed that Litvinov’s policy represented ‘the unanimous opinion of the whole Soviet people’, hinted that the opinion might not have been ‘unanimous’ earlier.