A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
HE Russians, whose object is to avert the ratification of the Paris agreements. on German rearmament, have followed up their threat to denounce the Franco-Soviet Treaty of 1945 with a similar threat regarding the Anglo- Soviet Treaty of 1942. Both gestures are petulant, but the second is the more unattractive of the two. Russia's treaty with France was, like most instruments of its kind, a cold- blooded arrangement, a mariage de convenance. Her treaty with Britain, signed in June, 1942, crystallised the comrade- ship-in-arms which Sir Winston Churchill had established, without hesitation and without reservations, a few hours after German troops had crossed the Soviet frontiers in the previous June. The fact that, when the treaty was signed, the Wehr- macht were deep in Russian territory, the 8th Army were retreating in Libya and the Japanese stood on the frontiers of India, does not of course make any legalistic difference to its 'post-war provisions, whose spirit the Russians have in any case consistently ignored. But it is a treaty which enshrines one of the main causes of the Allied victory in the last war, and to treat it as being (so to speak) in the commerce-and- navigation class and to use it, as an afterthought, to increase your stake in a game of bluff, argues to my mind a lack of gravitas.
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