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though the two countries were separated territorially bythe northern wedge of Poland.The development by Litvinov, commissar for foreignaffairs, of the Soviet policy of non-aggression pacts withher immediate western neighbours, coupled with attemptsto revive trade with them on some scale and with theSoviet entry into the League of Nations (1934), seemedto augur more hopefully; but this proved to be morethan offset by the threats to the stability of the Balticstates from the consequences of the world economicdepression and the Nazi revolution in Germany. Iftheir very close connexions with the Western powershad been suspect in Soviet eyes, fears of the growth ofGerman influence could not fail to make them yet moresuspect and intensify memories of the First World War.By the spring of 1939, when Hitler occupied Memelat the same time as he entered Prague and completed hisdestruction of Czechoslovakia, the position of Lithuania(2,800,000), Latvia (2,000,000), and Estonia (1,100,000),and to a smaller extent Finland (under four million), wasprecarious in the extreme; less because of their internaldifficulties than because of their strategic situationbetween two of the strongest powers in the world.Already two years before they had been raspingly warnedagainst "the bestial howling and gnashing of teeth ofFascism which is preparing war against the SovietUnion. ... It does not pay small countries to bedragged into great adventures'' (Zhdanov, December1936). Already three months before the outbreak ofthe Second World War Molotov had publicly emphasizedthe likelihood of such small states "being powerless todefend their neutrality" (May 1939).Whether or not Soviet requirements in regard to theBaltic states and Finland were the main reason for thebreakdown of the negotiations in Moscow with GreatBritain and France during that same summer, the SovietUnion apparently extorted from Germany in Septemberwhat was in effect for the time being a blank chequedrawn on the Baltic states. Within two months of theSoviet-German treaty and the beginning of the SecondWorld War not only had eastern Poland been overrun253