[The diary carries an article by Zhdanov, published in Pravda on that day under the title ‘The British and French Governments Do Not Want an Equal Agreement with the USSR’. Pointing out that negotiations had reached an impasse, Zhdanov repeated Maisky’s now well-worn warning that the Soviet Union would not pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the West. The article was shot through with a lingering suspicion that the Western powers were not really interested in an agreement, but were spreading the word about Soviet obstinacy so as to ‘prepare public opinion in their countries for an eventual deal with the aggressors’.

SPE, doc. 355.

]