by Pavel Kiselev
[REGNUM] Exactly 90 years ago, on September 18, 1934, the League of Nations opened its meeting at the Palais Wilson in Geneva, where an extraordinary decision was made. The country that Sir Winston Churchill had recently called “the most terrible tyranny in the history of mankind” – the Soviet Union – was accepted into the “club”.
In mid-September, thirty delegates of the League addressed Moscow with a telegram inviting the USSR to join the international organization and “bring its valuable cooperation.”
The appeal to Joseph Stalin was signed by such grandees of international diplomacy as the head of the French Foreign Ministry, Louis Barthou (who would die in a matter of days in a terrorist attack, believed to have been carried out by Nazi Germany) and the head of the London Foreign Office, Anthony Eden (who would soon “slam the door” in disagreement with the policy of appeasement of the fascists).
Western democracies decided to turn to the “country of the Bolsheviks” at a time when the world was in turmoil.
The previous year, in 1933, Adolf Hitler, who had come to power, withdrew Germany from the League so that the newly formed Third Reich would have a free hand in the “living space” of Europe.
At the same time, the Japanese Empire also left the club of civilized countries - after the invasion of Chinese Manchuria, which is considered one of the first "Zarnitsa" of World War II.
Italy, which was listed as one of the founding countries of the League, did not leave the organization, but under the leadership of Duce Benito Mussolini, it was preparing aggression against Ethiopia.
It was becoming clear that the eternal peace after the Great War, which the League of Nations was supposed to guarantee, was nothing more than an interbellum. And the ongoing Great Depression was nothing compared to the looming new global battle.
Paris and London at that time clearly sought to attract the Soviet Union as one of the guarantors of the preservation of the "Versailles" post-war world order. It must be said that our country was in no hurry to play this role.
"A HOUSE OF MEETINGS FOR IMPERIALIST BOSSES"
Thus, in 1927, Stalin spoke very dismissively of the League:
“The Soviet Union does not participate in the League of Nations because it does not want to be an integral part of that screen of imperialist machinations which the League of Nations represents and which it covers up with the unctuous speeches of its members.
The League of Nations under present conditions is a "house of rendezvous" for imperialist bosses who carry out their business behind the scenes. What is officially said in the League of Nations is empty chatter, calculated to deceive the people."
The USSR does not want to take responsibility for the imperialist policy of the League of Nations, for the new military preparations that are “sanctified” by the League, the Soviet leader listed.
The Soviet ideological narrative was dominated by an attitude that Vladimir Mayakovsky had briefly formulated in his “ Soviet ABC ”: “Europe is ruled by the League of Nations. There is plenty of room for thieves to run wild!”
When negotiations between Geneva and Moscow on the entry of the “bosses” into the company finally began, the Kremlin, through the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov, voiced rather harsh conditions.
The Soviet Union does not take responsibility for decisions previously taken by the League of Nations. Moscow does not like the organization's Charter, since it "in some cases legalizes war" and does not guarantee racial equality.
Finally, explained People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Litvinov, the USSR with its seven union republics can in itself be called a league of nations, completely self-sufficient.
But, be that as it may, Moscow responded with consent to the invitation to join the global club.
Before answering the question about the reasons for this decision, it is necessary to explain which organization the USSR joined on September 18, 1934.
WILSON'S PULSE
The League of Nations, “born” on January 18, 1919 in the Peace Hall of the Palace of Versailles and dissolved in 1946, after the creation of the United Nations, is usually compared to the UN. Mostly in favor of the currently existing global structure.
The League of Nations was run by three bodies beginning with "s" - the council, the secretariat and the assembly, whose powers duplicated each other. In the UN, the structure is clearer - the General Assembly, the Security Council, the International Criminal Court, etc. are each responsible for their own area of work.
In the League, all member states had equal voting rights, while in the UN, the five countries – permanent members of the Security Council – are “more equal than others”: the countries have the right of veto. The League of Nations had various military control commissions, but did not have its own peacekeeping forces or collective sanctions. The UN is more active than its predecessor in “inventing” international law.
Finally, unlike the League of Nations, a country cannot be expelled from the UN – which would seem to help avoid international ostracism.
But despite all the differences, both international structures have one thing in common. Both have failed to fulfill their declared main task – to preserve international peace. Although the UN was unable to do anything with post-war conflicts – from Korea in 1950 to Donbass in 2014 – the League “failed” more loudly, failing to stop a world war.
But the idea was beautiful, and the scheme seemed to work for a while.
The basis for the emergence of the League of Nations was the “ 14 points on peace conditions” voiced by US President Woodrow Wilson at the end of the First World War, in January 1918.
The idealistic leader of the country that entered the Great War later than others and benefited most from it was sure that the United States would now dictate these very terms of peace – and almost eternal ones at that.
The ideological basis for the post-war Versailles-Washington world order was considered to be the treatise "Towards Eternal Peace" by Immanuel Kant. The working language of the League was planned to be the international artificial language Esperanto (however, it was decided to abandon it in favor of the more practical French and English).
Finally, the opening of the first session of the League was arranged in the most symbolic manner.
On January 18, 1919, 72 delegates from 26 sovereign states and four British dominions gathered in the Peace Hall of the Palace of Versailles (where the defeated Germany would later be “punished”). The “Founding Father” of the League, Wilson, gave a speech.
“In a dramatic pose, feeling his pulse on his left hand with his right hand, Wilson concluded: ‘The pulse of the whole world beats in unison with this enterprise,’” wrote American historian Anatoly Utkin.
Beautiful speeches and gestures masked yet another redivision of the world: the former colonies of defeated Germany were hastily transformed into “mandate territories of the League of Nations” (read: new colonies distributed to the victorious countries).
Also left behind the scenes was the intervention against Russia, which at that time was being carried out by the founding powers of the league: the British and Japanese empires and the French Republic.
The US President's adviser and one of the ideologists of the League of Nations, Edward Mandel House (who was called "Wilson's Talleyrand") wrote back in 1917: "The rest of the world will live more peacefully if, instead of a huge Russia, there are four Russias in the world. One is Siberia, and the rest are the divided European part of the country."
Perhaps if the League of Nations had turned into a full-fledged global government, a collective "civilized world" and tried to deal with our country. In the end, the former Austria-Hungary was accepted "in parts", Weimar Germany was forgiven and accepted into the new global world.
But something went wrong with this “globalization 1.0” from the start.
HOW A LIGHT RAIN "WASHED AWAY" THE WORLD GOVERNMENT
Paradoxically, the country that actually “invented” the League of Nations never joined the club. The United States remained outside the League, along with Nepal, semi-independent Tibet, and the Kingdom of Nejd and Hejaz (the future Saudi Arabia).
The Senate opposed Wilson's plans, believing that US participation in the League of Nations could potentially limit the White House's permissiveness in international affairs. After all, the organization's charter envisaged intervention in a war if it began between members of the alliance.
But the senators' fears were exaggerated. The League of Nations was powerless to intervene in wars waged between the victorious powers.
In the early 1930s, the League failed to stop the aggression of one member country, Japan, against another, the Republic of China. Another "alarm bell" that affected the League's image was the invitation of an outside arbitrator, the United States, to resolve the conflict (however, the Americans did not help either).
In March 1933, when Manchuria was already firmly occupied by the Kwantung Army, the Council of the League issued “recommendations on the Manchurian question.” In response, Japan simply left the organization, and its Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka (a future war criminal) declared from the Geneva tribune as a farewell: “In a few years, we will be understood by the world, as it understood Jesus of Nazareth… Japan’s mission is to lead the world spiritually and intellectually…”
In October 1935, another politician with messianic tendencies, Mussolini, started a war against a country — a fellow League member — Abyssinia (Ethiopia). The country’s legitimate ruler, Emperor Haile Selassie, testified from the rostrum how the Italians were using mustard gas and phosgene, banned by the League, to the fullest extent: “Special sprayers were installed on board the planes that could disperse a fine, deadly rain over vast areas.”
Haile Selassie concluded this historic speech with the words: “If it happens that a strong government… can destroy a weak people with impunity, then the hour will strike for that weak people to turn to the League of Nations… God and history will remember your judgment.”
In the end, Italy, with the help of tanks, bombers and chemical weapons, defeated the weak enemy and, having completed the task, voluntarily left (rather than was expelled) from the League in 1937. In response, the League refused to recognize Ethiopia as part of the new colony - Italian North-East Africa.
This marathon of impotence could have been stopped by the Soviet Union’s entry into the League of Nations.
HOW TO START A WORLD WAR WITH ONE SHOT
In the first half of the 1930s, two related processes were taking place in parallel: the growth of the international influence of the Soviet Union (the only country that, for obvious reasons, found itself outside the Great Depression) and a change in the West’s line of behavior – from an uncompromising struggle against Moscow Bolshevism and the Comintern to pragmatic interaction with the Soviets.
Such pragmatists included, for example, the second president of Czechoslovakia, Edvard Beneš, and the head of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Joseph Paul-Boncourt, one of the main lobbyists for strengthening the League of Nations at the expense of the USSR.
Moscow's line of conduct also changed. Stalin understood that the young socialist country needed to emerge from international isolation after the Civil War and become a full-fledged participant in the largest interstate organization.
One of the Soviet diplomats who understood Stalin’s line well was Maxim Litvinov, who in 1930 replaced Georgy Chicherin, a man from the “Leninist guard,” as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs.
If Chicherin believed that the stake should be placed on the “organizer of the international revolution of the proletariat” – the Comintern, then Litvinov was a supporter of realpolitik: a direct clash between the USSR and the West is disadvantageous for both sides – it is necessary to seek common ground.
Stalin himself, in an interview with the bourgeois press – the New York Times – said that the USSR was ready to help prevent war if the League’s efforts were directed toward that end.
In 1934, the aforementioned Louis Barthou became the new head of the French Foreign Ministry. He was an old acquaintance of People's Commissar Litvinov and an ardent supporter of not appeasement, but of containing the fascist regimes that were becoming more and more numerous in Europe. It was Barthou and Benes who "pushed through" the USSR's entry into the League of Nations and also advocated for our country's inclusion in the League Council.
According to their logic, only the joint efforts of Western democracies and the Soviet Union could stop Hitler, and the format for the international security system should have been a “rebooted” League.
But three weeks after the USSR joined the League of Nations, as mentioned above, Louis Barthou was shot in Marseilles along with the King of Yugoslavia Alexander I. Journalists compared this terrorist attack to the shot of Gavrilo Princip in 1914, which seemed an exaggeration - after all, the world war did not start in 1934.
But the vector of Western policy changed, which led to a world war.
"TO SAVE FUTURE GENERATIONS FROM DISASTERS"
As part of the policy of appeasing Hitler and directing his appetites to the east, Britain and France will calmly watch as the Fuhrer destroys all the fruits of the Versailles-Washington system - from the Rhineland demilitarized zone to an independent Austria.
Just four years after Barthou's assassination, in 1934, Britain and France would feed Hitler the only democracy in Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia, led by President Beneš.
The collective security negotiations that Moscow conducted with London and Paris in 1939 were as fruitless and strange as the “phony war” of 1940. And, let us add, as fruitless as the collective security negotiations that Moscow conducted with the West in 2022.
At the same time, as Soviet intelligence knew very well, the “peacekeepers” Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier were considering the possibility of starting a war against the Soviet Union, for which they planned to launch attacks from Finland and the Caucasus (declassified data was published on August 24, 2024 on the website of the Presidential Library).
It is not surprising that the USSR tried to ensure “individual” security by concluding the so-called Molotov - Ribbentrop Pact with Germany, dividing spheres of influence from the Arctic to the Black Sea.
The League of Nations, which never became a means of saving the world, remained a powerless extra all this time. However, it was enough to exclude the Soviet Union for the Soviet-Finnish War, the blame for which the main members of the League of Nations, of course, pinned on the USSR.
In the Soviet press, the League Council's decision of December 14, 1939 to exclude the USSR was called "shameful." The main initiators of this procedure were branded as "imperialist warmongers."
This rhetoric was entirely consistent with the views of the Soviet government, which had lost all faith in the ability of the League of Nations to fairly resolve world conflicts.
Almost a century later, it is clear that faith has also been lost in the similar abilities of the UN, which, according to its Charter, was supposed to “ save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” But this does not mean that the idea of creating a “collective deterrent,” which they tried to implement back in the mid-1930s, will remain a utopia.