During the bulk of the 1920s, Soviet diplomacy had dealt by preference with that other outcast of Europe, Germany, and attempted to play it off against the victors of Versailles and their somewhat cozy and complacent club, the League of Nations – “League of Imperialist Aggressors,” as it was affectionately known in Moscow. When the Great Depression hit the continent in 1929, Moscow mistook it for the prelude to the revolution that had been so devoutly desired. To expedite the process, it refused to cooperate with the German centrist parties against the Nazis and Nationalists – the Comintern follies of the “Social–Fascist line” – and contributed thereby to a German revolution of quite a different kind. Hitler's Nazi regime was initially misread in the same myopic fashion as the prelude to the real one, and so the Social–Fascist line continued its merry way until it nearly provoked a similar Fascist revolution in republican France.

A series of four events forced Moscow to a sober reappraisal of the wisdom of its foreign policy. In diplomatic developments, the Germans and the Poles signed a nonaggression pact in January 1934. In April Moscow proposed and Germany rejected the idea of a more comprehensive Baltic security pact. In the meantime, developments in the domestic affairs of the continent were no more reassuring. In February 1934 the united front from below – the Social–Fascist line – triggered the Stavisky riots in Paris and nearly collapsed the Third Republic.