Office of the Historian

761.6211/170: Telegram

The Ambassador in France (Bullitt) to the Secretary of State

Paris, September 2, 1939—7 p.m.
[Received September 2—4:32 p.m.]

1743. The Polish Ambassador26 informed me today that the Soviet Ambassador in Warsaw27 had called on Beck yesterday and had stated that the Soviet Government considered it extraordinary that the Polish Government had not noted the passage in Voroshilov’s speech28 in which he had stated that the agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union would not interfere with commercial exchanges between Poland and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was prepared to continue to provide commercial supplies to Poland.

It is difficult to interpret this statement of the Soviet Ambassador to Beck in view of the arrival of a Soviet military mission in Berlin. It may mean that the Soviet Government intends to give doses of support to both sides in the war which has now begun with a view to [Page 349] keeping the war going as long as possible so that suffering may be prolonged to the extreme and that in the end the Soviet armies intact will be able to march over the Continent.

Bullitt
  1. Juljusz Lukasiewicz.↩
  2. Nikolay I. Sharonov.↩
  3. For a report of Marshal Voroshilov’s interview with a correspondent of Izvestiya, published on August 27, 1939, see telegram No. 476, August 27, 3 p.m., from the Ambassador in the Soviet Union, p. 311. See also the Polish White Book, doc. Nos. 170, 171, 172, and 173, pp. 187–189.↩