Soviet Contempt for Anti-Comintern Pact

Saturday 29^th November 1936

The Soviet response to the Anti-Comintern pact dispelled any faint hopes that its signatories might have had that it would be treated as a measure against one organ of the Soviet state (or, officially of the Communist Party) and not the USSR itself. It pointed the finger at Mussolini’s Italian for attempting to spread Fascism abroad through intervention on the side of the Spanish Nationalists.

The Soviet Foreign Minister insinuated that the there were further secret clauses to the Pact that went well beyond the brief paragraphs that had been published, He implied that it masked a full-scale military alliance against Russia. He framed Soviet defiance in soaring rhetoric, "the Soviet Union will stand and proudly tower as an impregnable fortress, against which will be broken the turbid waves of the frenzied Fascist sea".