The British Political Elite and the Soviet Union, 1937-1939 (review)

The period 1937-39 was a crucible for European diplomacy. As Germany's expansionist desires became increasingly difficult to misconstrue, other European governments, especially the British, French, and Soviets, struggled to formulate an appropriate response. The ideal response—the one that eventually emerged from the exigencies of war—would have been an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance to contain and deter Germany. But in the pivotal prewar period, efforts to create that alliance repeatedly failed, resulting in the devastating German-Soviet Pact of August 1939. This process is the subject of Louise Grace Shaw's The British Political Elite and the Soviet Union, 1937-1939. Combing through archives and personal papers, Shaw attempts to reconstruct the thoughts and motivations of key British foreign policy actors and to tie those thoughts to their actions in the diplomatic arena. As a result, Shaw concludes that responsibility for the failure to create an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance rested primarily with British cabinet members, in particular the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.

Shaw's analysis lies squarely within the counter-revisionist school of thought on this period. She repeatedly and powerfully challenges the revisionist contention that policy-makers labored under structural constraints that inhibited their ability to formulate an alliance with the Soviet Union. In her history, British policymakers are much more personally culpable for the failure to create a system that might have stopped Hitler. According to Shaw, certain cabinet members willfully refused to put aside their ideological distrust of the Soviet Union in order to forge an alliance against a far greater threat to Europe, namely Germany. Shaw heaps particular scorn upon Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who, unlike the other cabinet members who were willing to reach an agreement with the Soviets by summer 1939, "consistently refused to suppress his own intense ideological suspicion and resentment" (p. 190).

Shaw's account is convincing. It is well written and thoroughly researched, based upon extensive investigation of both official documents and private correspondence. Shaw also avoids judging British actors in a historical vacuum. She consistently grounds her assessments in both an analysis of the information available to the actors at the time, and in an examination of French and Soviet actions and policies. Thus her critique of the British cabinet, particularly Chamberlain, is that much more damning.

Shaw occasionally overreaches in her conclusions. She argues, for example, that Chamberlain should have accepted Soviet expansionism into Eastern Europe in 1939 as a small price to pay in comparison to the devastation of World War II. However, this conclusion uses a bit of historical hindsight unavailable to diplomats of 1939. How were they really to choose between German and Soviet expansionism into Eastern Europe, especially before they knew about the cost of the war and the eventual Soviet expansion into that region anyway?

Such overreaching is the exception rather than the rule, however. Shaw's book is an outstanding contribution to the field. All who are interested in the history of World War II would enjoy reading it; specialists in the period will find it a necessity to read.