p With more than forty years gone since the outbreak of the Second World War, there is unabating interest in the events that had led up to it. It is important, first and foremost, to see clear who was responsible for that war and how, if at all, it could have been averted.

p One plain fact is that the Second World War had been engineered by the German, Italian and Japanese imperialists. In the mid-1980s they had started an outright struggle for world domination, having first launched a frantic drive to prepare their economies and armed forces for war and installed terrorist fascist dictatorships.

p Confronting the bloc of fascist aggressors was the Anglo-Franco-American group of imperialist powers intent on retaining their own dominating position in the world which they had gained through their victory in World War I. The aggregate potential of the Anglo-Franco-American group of nations, together with other countries which were close to them, was superior to that of the aggressors. But the ruling circles of Britain, France and the United States felt they had nothing to gain from another world war. So they sought to preserve and, if possible, consolidate their world positions without war.

p In spite of the worsening relations between the imperialist powers, the basic antagonism was still between them and the world’s first socialist state.

p The fascist aggressors did not even bother to conceal that they regarded fighting communism and destroying the Soviet state as basic to their foreign policy programme. So tho Anglo-Franco-American group decided to do everything possible to compose its differences with them at tho Soviet Union’s expense. The British foreign service was 7 particularly active. Britain’s reactionary governing quarters bent every effort to strike an imperialist deal with the Nazi Reich so as to divert its aggression from the British Empire eastward, against the Soviet Union.

p The Soviet Government clearly saw the formidable danger hanging over the USSR as extremely explosive hotbeds of war cropped up in the capitalist fold. The Soviet people were faced by the hardest and crucial task of saving their land from destruction in the flames of a worldwide war.

p As the danger of war loomed larger, the Soviet government did everything possible to accelerate economic growth and build up national defence capability. It was precisely the strength and power of the Soviet Union that the aggressors had to take into account, above all, as they figured out whether to attack the USSR.

p The Soviet diplomacy undertook a vigorous effort to use whatever opportunity there was to oppose aggression, as the fascist powers menaced not only the Soviet Union, but many other nations, large and small. That menace created certain requisites for co-operation between the capitalist countries, thus threatened, and the USSR. So the Soviet Government did its best to bring the nations anxious to prevent war into a common front to counter tho aggression.

p The Soviet Union was aware of the entire complexity of the problem. For it meant, in point of fact, establishing cooperation with one group of imperialist powers having no stake in war under the prevailing circumstances against another group on course for aggression. The reason why the USSR sought such co-operation was because it wanted to safeguard both its own security and the peace of the world.

p Soviet diplomacy laid bare the aggressors’ expansionist plans, exposed the mortal danger they spelled for many nations and peoples, and worked hard to stop the aggressor powers from tacking together their anti-Soviet blocs and drawing more states into them. At the same time it exposed the scheming of the reactionary governing circles of Western powers in trying to placate the aggressors at Soviet expense and getting thorn to destroy the Soviet state.

p At the same time, Soviet diplomacy advanced a constructive action programme to keep the peace, curb the fascist aggressors and stop the drift to war. It called for dependable collective security systems to be set up in Europe and 8 in the Far East in order to raise insurmountable barriers in the aggressors’ way.

p The Soviet Union’s vigorous efforts for peace and international security, its resistance to fascist aggressors and determined support for the victims of aggression earned it immense international prestige. The peace-loving people of all lands saw the world’s first socialist nation as the standard-bearer in the battle to safeguard peace and prevent war.

The Soviet Union’s foreign policy of the 1930s was a clear indication of its steadfast commitment to peace.