Reasons of the Failure of the Triple Alliance Negotiations 1939 in Soviet Propaganda: an Attempt of Deconstruction

Abstract

The article examines the course of the Moscow parleys 1939 (also known as triple alliance negotiations) between representatives of Great Britain, France and the USSR which goal was the signing a military convention between these countries. In Soviet and Russian historiography, the blame for the failure of the parleys is traditionally laid at the feet of Britain and France. A similar view is represented in Soviet, Russian, and even Ukrainian encyclopaedias, which point to the role of French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier as a person who deliberately sabotaged the negotiations. Nevertheless, the analysis of archival sources has refuted the Soviet falsification about Edouard Daladier’s sabotage of the Moscow parleys. The politician’s personal interest in cooperation with the USSR, his attempts to establish diplomatic contacts between the countries in the interwar period, and the behaviour of his emissary, General Aimé Dumenc, suggest that the real reasons for the failure of the negotiations were deliberately falsified and distorted. A careful analysis of the geopolitical and military situation in which Great Britain and France found themselves in 1939 shows that these countries were interested in signing a military convention with the USSR to counteract the expansionist policies of Germany and Italy, and the study of the transcripts of the negotiations allows us to conclude that the Western countries were serious about their intentions to enter into a military alliance with the USSR. Instead, the USSR representatives showed an excessive interest in obtaining the right to pass their troops into Poland and Romania. It was the inability to meet this demand that led to the failure of the Moscow parleys. Obviously, the Soviet Union, in an attempt to shift the responsibility for the failure of the negotiations and to avoid responsibility for its alliance with the aggressor, which was formalised in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its secret protocol, tried to blame France and Great Britain. The study of the Ukrainian encyclopaedic editions of the Independence era has shown that their compilers paid inadequate attention to the personalities of leading political figures of the interwar period and abused the citation of Soviet ideologically biased publications.