The day was spent in boring committees. I sat, kept silent and listened. M.M. thinks there is no sense for us to be active at the moment in these committees, except perhaps one or two. There was no Assembly today. We spent the evening in the Lignon Castle. M.M., Surits, Shtein and E.N. played bridge, while I interviewed the sous-secretaire on various issues surrounding the League of Nations.

[Butler, whose support for appeasement and the Munich Agreement exceeded even that of Chamberlain, was the first to insist in his memoirs that he ‘was left in no doubt that the Russians did not mean business’ and that ‘Litvinov had been deliberately evasive and vague’.

Butler, The Art of the Possible, pp. 70–1 elicited a furious response from Maisky in The Times, 8 June 1971. For a tarnishing revision of Butler’s image as a respected elder statesman, see P. Stafford, ‘Political autobiography and the art of the possible: R.A. Butler at the Foreign Office, 1938–1939’, The Historical Journal, 28/4 (1985).

However, the diary and corroborative material sustain the argument that Stalin’s caution and Litvinov’s vague public statements reflected a Soviet dilemma. Any public statement might be provocative towards Germany and have unimagined repercussions if the Anglo-German negotiations did indeed reach a positive conclusion, as was anticipated. While unilateral assistance was therefore not on the cards, the Soviet Union’s commitment to its contractual obligations, provided the French first fulfilled their obligation, remained unshaken. Such an outlook, a precursor to the following year’s negotiations on a triple alliance, drew on the lasting and clear lesson of the failure to turn the 1934 agreement with France into a full-blown military alliance and the dismal experience of acting alone in Spain while appeasement of Germany was in full swing. It was one thing fighting the Germans and Italians on the edges of Europe, but quite another having to face Germany alone on the Soviet border, with an insouciant Western Europe looking on. What Litvinov vainly sought in Geneva, therefore, was the inception of military talks in London and Paris (which might have deterred Hitler), rather than negotiations with Beneš at the Castle in Prague.

Steiner, ‘Soviet Commissariat’, has done admirable work, reconstructing brick by brick the Soviet policy, unearthing many hitherto unknown documents. Her verdict that ‘it is hard to believe that an offer of unilateral Soviet support, even if it had been made, would have changed the outcome of the Czech deliberations’ can be confidently accepted. She is equally right to refute retrospective Soviet claims (as well as Maisky’s own) that the Soviet Union would have considered rendering unilateral support to Czechoslovakia. Her narrative is only marred by an uncritical adaptation of Igor Lukes’s claims that the Soviet demise in Munich led the country’s leaders back ‘to their revolutionary roots’ (pp. 755, 759, 762). In his otherwise engaging work, Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: The diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s (Oxford, 1996), as well as in ‘Stalin and Czechoslovakia in 1938–39: An autopsy of a myth’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 10/2–3 (1999), p. 38, Lukes developed a fanciful theory that Stalin expected Hitler’s offensive to be ‘but a prelude to a wave of socialist revolutions in Europe’. Such ideas have been effectively refuted by Ragsdale in The Soviets and in his ‘Soviet military preparations and policy in the Munich Crisis: New evidence’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 47/2 (1999).