¹ Soviet fears had been further heightened by the fact that both Latvia and Estonia had concluded a non-aggression pact with Germany on 7 June, see Kirby, David, ‘The Baltic States 1940–50’, in McCauley, Martin, ed., Communist Power in Europe 1944–1949 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 23.Google Scholar Thereafter McCauley, Communist Power. That Stalin's action was entirely comprehensible, if not justifiable from the point of view of Soviet interests, had been the view of many politicians at the time, for instance Attlee and Eden; see Harris, Kenneth, Attlee, (London: Weidenfeld, 1982), 161 and 167Google Scholar, and Eden, Anthony, The Eden Memoirs: The Reckoning (London: Cassel, 1965), 55–56.Google Scholar A staunch anti-Stalinist writer like Fernando Claudin criticised the way the pact was used, not the pact itself. See his The Communist Movement. From Comintern to Cominform (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 297. Non-partisan historians find the pact unsurprising on realpolitik grounds; the best treatment of the subject is by Roberts, Geoffrey in his The Unholy Alliance. Stalin's Pact with Hitler (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989)Google Scholar, where the main causes of the pact are traced to the failure of the collective security programme and of the negotiations between the USSR, Britain and France.

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⁶ The minutes of the Central Committee meetings of the CPGB of 25 Sept. and 2–3 Oct., 1939, recently released by the Soviet authorities, have been published in King, Francis and Matthews, George, eds., About Turn. The British Communist Party and the Second World War (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990).Google Scholar They demonstrated that loyalty to Moscow was not an automatic response but something that prevailed after painful discussions. See also the account in Branson, Noreen, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1927–1941 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), 266–7.Google Scholar In practice the attitude of rank-and-file Communists changed very little: they never ceased to consider Nazi Germany the main enemy; see Fishman, Nina, ‘The British Communist Party and the Trade Unions, 1933–45: the Dilemmas of Revolutionary Pragmatism’, PhD thesis (University of London, 1991), 111–15.Google Scholar Thereafter Fishman, ‘Communist Party’.

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⁴⁴ See Reichardt's, Hans-Joachim essay, ‘Resistance in the Labour Movement’, in Graml, Hermann et al. , The German Resistance to Hitler (London: B. T. Batsford, 1970)Google Scholar, and Carsten's, F. L. introduction to it, esp. p. x; see also Anthony Williams, ‘Resistance and Opposition among Germans’ in Hawes & White, Resistance, 154.Google Scholar

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