POWER POLITICS: Boo!

The dictators’ press got raving mad last week at France and Great Britain. Usually such pre-arranged fits of anger spring from some positive antitotalitarian act, such as France’s ordering more warplanes from the U. S., Britain’s guaranteeing another country’s security, Poland’s refusal to give up Danzig. What pained Germany and Italy this time, however, was French and British indifference at the German-Italian military alliance (TIME, May 15), which Count Galeazzo Ciano and Joachim von Ribbentrop ceremoniously signed at Berlin.

Yawns. The dictators had expected the democracies to get scared over this juncture of totalitarian arms. Instead there were only deep yawns. The British thought an Italian-German alliance, after all that has happened in the last three years, was a pretty Did story. The French, far from being frightened, snickered that Germany had acquired a new protectorate, Italy.

Obviously this point of view was unendurable and soon Nazi and Fascist press puppets were swinging into action. German Propaganda Minister Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels sprinkled Nazi papers with such ominous phrases as “impending decisions,” the “war of tomorrow,” the “mighty reckoning” to come. The Italians went Dr. Goebbels one better. Il Messagero, of Rome, flatly warned: “If within a certain time the democracies do not yield to councils of reason we go to war.” The Fascist official newsorgan Resto del Carlino roared: “The time of reckoning is near. . . . They still deny us Tunis, Djibouti, Suez and also deny Danzig and colonies to our ally, Germany. A transfer of power is near. The future is ours.”

Final. Virginia Gayda, II Duce’s journalistic shadow, confided that there were “secret conventions” in the Italian-German treaty, said the pact was a “final invitation” to Great Britain and France to “collaborate” in a European peace. Neither he nor any of his colleagues was at a loss to describe what they meant by “collaboration”: Great Britain and France were to provide the dictator countries with “vital living spaces.”

To put some reality into the alliance Adolf Hitler held a showy conference of generals in Berlin, and Italian Chief of Staff Alberto Pariani and German Commander-in-Chief of the Army General Walther von Brauchitsch set to work forming an Italian-German supreme military council. Later, Colonel General Erhard Milch, Chief of Staff of the German Air Force, flew to Rome to unify the two countries’ air forces.

All this seemed pretty alarming to foreign correspondents in Italy, who began describing the “rising international tension.” But the dictators’ press has shouted “Boo!” so many times in the last few years that no longer did such grimacing register in Paris, certainly not in London. There, instead of pondering over the combined Italian-German military might, crowds stood before bookstore windows and gazed at maps of Soviet Russia, commenting approvingly on the size of the great brown expanse. Brokers were calling the advance in stock prices the Stalin Boom. Movie audiences were applauding newsreels of the Red army.

Gesture. Bigger news was that the British Government, after weeks of dickering at London and Geneva, had virtually said “Yes” to the Soviet terms for a big, ironclad Stop Hitler alliance between Britain, France and Soviet Russia. Soon afterwards in Moscow, able, lively British Ambassador Sir William Seeds went to the Kremlin to present his Government’s views to Premier Viacheslav Molotov, also Foreign Commissar since the retirement last month of the veteran Foreign Commissar Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff.

Sir William and Comrade Molotov conferred for an hour, at the end of which the Foreign Commissar said he would transmit the British note to his Government, i.e., Joseph Stalin. In Nazi circles, meanwhile, hints were circulated of an impending German, not British, understanding with the Soviets, and there were inspired ghoulish stories that the Communists had proposed to the Nazis a partition of Poland. But while Comrade Stalin maintained an enigmatic silence the British were taking it for granted that the British-French-Russian alliance was in the bag. They even announced that Kliment Voroshilov, top-ranking Soviet General, friend of Stalin and Molotov and Commissar for Defense, had been invited to attend British Army maneuvers next fall.

One thing was certain: The day that Joseph Stalin finally decides to cast his lot with Britain and France will be a particularly black one for Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. After that, the acquisition of “vital living spaces” should come hard for the Fiihrer and Il Duce. There may not even be room enough for them at home.

If there is a family of nations, Russia and England are like brothers who seldom speak, fight when they look friendly, fight somebody else when they seem most at odds. If the new agreement is signed in an atmosphere of overwhelming suspicion, it will be no new thing in Anglo-Russian relations. When both were in monarchic Holy Alliance, they intrigued against each other, sabotaged each other’s trade, angled for republican U. S. support. When Tsar Nicholas I proposed that they divide up Turkey in the middle of the last century, England fought Russia as Turkey’s ally in the Crimean War.

Every ten years saw a diplomatic somersault in the relations of the two countries. After the Crimean War, when the peace treaty forbade Russia a fleet on the Black Sea, the Tsar lined up with Germany. After the Franco-Prussian War, victorious Germany backed Russia in denouncing the treaty. But when England and Russia were at odds again over Turkey, Germany backed out.

Next decade, after squabbles with England over Afghanistan, Persia, the borders of India and Russia’s whirlwind expansion into Asia, Russia had teamed up with France; Englishmen were quoting Kipling’s “The Bear that walks like a “Man”; Russians were damning England as the land of money-loving merchants. Thereupon, in 1907, they agreed to an alliance against Germany. By 1917, after the Bolshevik Revolution, they were enemies again; in 1927, three years after they had exchanged chargés d’affaires, England broke off relations as a result of Comintern anti-British propaganda in China. Two years later, while the British press tiraded against Communism, the British sent an ambassador to Moscow.

But though normal diplomatic forms have long been observed, trade agreements negotiated, the two countries have had fewer cultural relations than the U. S. and Russia. Strictly according to precedent were last week’s negotiations: upsets, reversals of policy, war and the threat of war, aid to each other’s enemies, suspicion, distrust and downright hatred culminating in iron-clad alliances have marked British-Russian relations for more than a century.