CHANCES REMOTE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 November 1939, Page 6

CHANCES REMOTE

RUSSIAN AID TO GERMANY. “I do not for one moment believe,” writes the former diplomat the Hon. Harold Nicolson. M.P.. in the “Daily Telegraph." "that Stalin would agree, to send, or Germany agree to receive, a Russian expeditionary force. Each side is afraid of deriving political infection from the other. The presence of Russian troops on German soil, as the presence of German troops on Russian soil, would not be acceptable to either Government. The German people possess a hereditary suspicion of tile Russians and ’nave for the last six years been indoctrinated with a special suspicion of the Bolshevik Army Joseph Stalin, whose main preoccupation is with the maintenance of his own ascendancy, would be most unwilling to despatch an army upon adventures outside his own frontiers. Nor is it likely that Russia could ever supply Germany in any very large quantity with the war material that she might need. Even if we assume, therefore (and it is a grim assumption), that the Russo-German pact is sometiling more than a mere treaty of nonaggression and implies some form of co-operation in the event of war. then there is no reason to conclude that Germany will derive from this association such an increase in power as will enable her to resist a war of long duration.