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The Nazi–Soviet Pact was a nonaggression treaty between the USSR and Germany. By signing a nonaggression pact, the USSR was undermining the plans of the reactionary bourgeois circles and the leaders of the Socialist International to direct aggression against the USSR. According to the Comintern, this treaty was a means to force the British and French governments to conclude a pact with the USSR and to show the parties the need to continue the struggle against German fascism.

This chapter traces Soviet cultural diplomacy through three radically divergent periods: the mid-1930s height of the Popular Front, the Great Terror and show trials from 1936–38, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939–41. Although the Soviet system for receiving foreigners that had emerged in the 1920s was not fundamentally reworked in the 1930s, prewar Stalinism was marked by sea-shifts in ideology and attitudes toward the outside world. The first was the rise of a “superiority complex,” in which virtually everything Soviet was deemed the best in the world, at least officially. The second was a decisive internal Soviet tilt, underway already at the height of European anti-fascism in the mid-1930s, away from the optimistic Soviet quest to engage and dominate Western cultural politics in favor of “vigilance,” ideological xenophobia, and the hunt for hidden enemies. During the Great Terror, international contacts that had previously brought prestige to Soviet cultural mediators suddenly became the grounds for mass physical annihilation as VOKS and Soviet international organizations were decimated; during the Pact period of Soviet cultural diplomacy, reduced to a shadow of its former self, became largely a matter of sending symbolic signals to the Nazis.

Official representations of Soviet diplomatic identity became increasingly incoherent in the months between the Nazi‐Soviet Pact (August 1939) and the German invasion of the USSR (June 1941). Despite official boasting about the success of Stalin’s ‘peace’ policy, rumours of war were extremely widespread and successful in this period. The cultural identity of the USSR in this period focused on the greatness of Soviet civilization and the extension of Stalinist liberty to the newly occupied borderlands. However, the occupying soldiers passed back large volumes of luxury goods and also stories of capitalist wealth from the new Polish and Finnish territories. Alongside Pravda’s refusal to admit to the losses of the Winter War, these changes led many Soviet citizens to rely more heavily on the tactic of bricolage, fusing information obtained via official and unofficial sources, in order to make sense of international affairs.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 lit the touchpaper for a catastrophic wave of genocides in the ensuing world war. At the core of this chapter is the fate of Poland and its peoples under both Soviet and Nazi occupation, Katyn the most infamous episode in the former instance. Even so, the first significant genocide of this period took place in Turkey's Dersim province, reinforcing the ongoing vulnerability of rimlands communities. The Nazi-Soviet division of the 'Lands Between' highlighted similar vulnerabilities among minority communities there. One of these was the Volksdeutsche, the 'return' of whom to the Greater Reich set in motion mass SS-directed deportations of Poles and Jews. Yet the problem of where they would go underscored Hitler's lack of the Russian dumping ground which Stalin possessed for his unwanted peoples. The 'Jewish question' thus played into Hitler's drive for further conquest and lebensraum in the east.

This chapter focuses on a decade dominated by war. Britain's war with Germany in September 1939 overshadowed China's continuing struggle with Japan, and this was not reversed when Britain entered the war in the Far East in December 1941. Meanwhile, the politics of the left in Britain were complicated by the Nazi-Soviet Pact until June 1941. After 1941 the British left contributed to a broad, humanitarian fundraising campaign in support of China (the British United Aid for China Fund). After 1945 the left did not regain interest in China until the Chinese Communists had gained the upper hand in the latter stages of the Civil War with the ruling KMT. The CCC supported the Chinese Communists, but with some reservations, and a new solidarity organisation was created in 1949 to foster relations with the new People's Republic of China (PRC).

This chapter deals with MI5's problems in the years 1939-41. According to its own internal history, written in 1946 by John Curry, MI5 was ‘in a state of confusion amounting almost to chaos’ for most of the two years following the outbreak of war. The chapter introduces the academic William Robson-Scott, who was recruited to MI5 before the outbreak of war as a German specialist. It also draws on the wartime diaries of Guy Liddell which illuminate MI5's attitudes towards government and in particular its differences with the Home Office, as well as its attitude towards the Communist Party of Great Britain following the Nazi-Soviet Pact and finally its interrogation of the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky.