This morning I meant to finish Year 1938 of the fabulous Maisky diaries: yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030011… but was unfortunately derailed by the following assertion by the editor (Gabriel Gorodetsky) about the existence of the 'Soviet alternative' to Munich. 
When earlier I read in Putin's speech that "the Soviet Union was ready to help Czechoslovakia, which Nazi Germany was going to rob," I have to say I was a bit skeptical: en.kremlin.ru/events/preside….
That's because I had come to view Stalin's pledge to Czechoslovakia as an empty promise: knowing full well that Poland would not allow the Soviet army to transit its territory, Stalin could make whatever promises he wanted to: he'd never be tested.
On the other hand, the fact that Gorodetsky (a leading historian of Soviet foreign policy during the interwar period) seems to take this promise seriously, I decided to read further. Gorodetsky bases his claim in part on Michael Carley's two articles in Diplomacy and Statecraft.
Here they are. You can tell by the number of citations that they are not particularly well known. But Carley's research is first-rate. Excellent evidence in these pieces on how the Soviets viewed the situation in Europe in the run-up to 1930s.
Carley shows, for instance, that Pierre Laval deliberately sought to weaken the 1935 Soviet-French Pact, and that Litvinov was furious but acceded to these demands nonetheless. Having a weak Pact was better than having none.
Carley blames the UK for pushing appeasement in the hopes that Germany's attention might be diverted eastward:
Here we have Litvinov wondering whether Laval was sounding out the Germans on a French-German agreement in exchange for Berlin's freedom of action in the East.
Carley argues that the Soviets were slow to abandon the prospect of an anti-German alliance, even though the British and the French did.
But in the end, Litvinov got nothing. Note how Carley claims that Stalin's disappointment is perfectly explainable without reference to Marxism-Leninism. I tend to agree with this take. Anyone would draw similar conclusions when put in the same shoes.
I have to say that I was not fully convinced by Carley's analysis. That's because my understanding of Stalin is shaped by the knowledge of how he acted in other contexts. He would stab you in the back at his earliest convenience.
On the other hand, there's Carley's evidence that the Soviets took collective security very seriously. Clearly, both Carley and Gorodetsky imply that there *was* a genuine Soviet alternative to Munich, and that the West mucked it up.
To conclude, then, I was shaken in the unassailability of my assumptions, and I can henceforth plead to be "confused." That's a good place to be anyhow. Most history is confusing. Well, better confused than ignorant.
You can see all the complexities that arise if we go beyond superficialities in assigning responsibility for the Second World War. What's why I am adamantly against politicians - Putin or European MEPs or the Polish MFA - attempting to spin particular historical interpretations.
If you really want to know what happened, don't read resolutions. Read history. Proper history. And primary sources, when you have the time to do so. Fortunately, the joy of being a historian is that I have the time to do precisely that.
