banks,1 and this was followed by the arrest in Moscow of two of the Polish representatives. A number of other points of greater material importance still remained unsettled, although the definitive Riga Treaty had been signed as far back as the 18th March, 1921.3 Meanwhile, on the 23rd May, M. Čičerin had protested to the Polish Government against the treatment of minorities in Poland, invoking Article 7 of the Riga Treaty, under which either party had undertaken to assure to the respective minorities their cultural, linguistic, and religious liberty; and this led to an acrimonious correspondence -the Polish Government maintaining that the execution of the article in question was solely within the domestic jurisdiction of the Government concerned in either case, and that the intervention of the other Government was expressly precluded. A fresh controversy over the minorities question was precipitated by certain references to Eastern Galicia which were made, during the AngloRussian negotiations in London, by the Soviet delegate, M. Rakovski, and against which the Polish Government lodged a formal protest at Moscow on the 8th September.5 By far the most serious impediment, however, to the establishment of neighbourly relations between Poland and the U.S.S.R. arose from subversive activities on Polish territory.

In the summer of 1924 the Polish territories adjoining the frontier established by the Riga Treaty were disturbed by a series of raids from across the border; and on the 3rd August these culminated in an attack upon the town of Stolbce, the Polish frontier-station on the Warsaw-Moscow Railway. As in the subsequent outbreak of the 1st December at Reval,' vital points were selected for attack. The majority of the raiders, who numbered about 160, were captured by Polish cavalry while attempting to retreat into Soviet territory. The Polish Government promptly addressed a note verbale on the subject to the ci-devant Prince Obolenski, the Soviet Minister at Warsaw, and the Soviet Government promised an inquiry. Before the month was out, however, a number of fresh raids were reported

1 Le Temps, 7th July, 1924.

2 Ibid., 7th August, 1924.

3 For a detailed survey of the state of these economic and financial negotiations see The Times, 4th September, 1924.

Le Temps, 29th May, 1924.

5 Le Temps, 10th September; the Corriere della Sera, 10th September; and Le Temps, 30th September, 1924.

6 See The Times, 6th and 8th August, 1924.

7 See Section (ii) (c) above.

For the text of this note, containing the Polish official account of the incident, see Le Temps, 10th August, 1924.

9 Ibid., 15th August, 1924.

at various points on the frontier,1 and General Sikorski, the Polish Minister of War, stated categorically to the Press that the raiding bands were well armed and disciplined, that they carried out precise plans of operations, and that they were organized by the Political Bureau of the Russian Communist Party at Moscow, with subsidiary bases at Minsk and Kiev.2 The Soviet Government replied by denying that the band which had raided Stolbce had come from Soviet territory, and by protesting energetically against the assertions of General Sikorski, while at the same time making the counteraccusation that 'White' bands, organized by the Second Bureau of the Polish General Staff, were in the habit of raiding the territories of the Union from the Polish side of the frontier.3 On the 26th September a Polish railway train was held up by bandits at Luminiec, a junction about 140 miles east of Brest-Litovsk and not far from the frontier, and in this case, again, the bandits were alleged to have come from the Russian side. After this, the Polish Government proceeded to reorganize the three eastern border provinces by concentrating the civil and military powers in the hands of military governors and by forming a special corps of frontier guards; and these new arrangements were said to have been discussed by General Sikorski with the French military authorities during a visit which he paid to Paris in October.5 In this unpromising atmosphere the delimitation by a Mixed Russo-Polish Commission of the frontier established under the Riga Treaty was completed in the course of the same month.

These disturbances in the Polish border provinces indicated that the U.S.S.R. was an uncomfortable neighbour, but they were not in themselves conclusive evidence of anti-Polish activities on the Soviet Government's part. This long frontier, traversing an undeveloped country devastated by recent warfare, was difficult to control from either side. The Riga Line, moreover, completely ignored the principle of nationality, and the non-Polish minorities under Polish rule were by no means reconciled to their position. With such inflammable material on the spot, the Soviet Government, when accused of fostering frontier disturbances, might claim the 1 The Times, 28th August; the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 5th September,

1924.

2 Le Temps, 31st August, 1924.

3 Ibid., 11th and 13th September; the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 11th September, 1924.

The Times, 29th September, 1924.

5 Ibid., 2nd and 17th October; the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 15th October, 1924.

benefit of the doubt; but there was no such uncertainty in regard to the activities of the new Soviet Legation at Warsaw.

Before the Legation had been installed in the Polish capital for six months, the Polish Government had to request that six of its members should be recalled, on account of their having misused their position in order to carry on propaganda and espionage. They left on the 30th July,1 and on the 4th August an official of the Soviet Commercial Mission in Moscow was caught in the act of disseminating subversive literature and arrested. Almost immediately afterwards, the central Communist propaganda office in Poland was discovered and raided by the police.3 After this Prince Obolenski was recalled and M. Voikov designated as his successor.4 After some hesitation, the Polish Government agreed to his appointment on the 26th September, but M. Voikov was nearly prevented from taking up his duties by a further controversy between the two Governments regarding assaults on Polish diplomatic officials in Moscow and Leningrad and on a Soviet diplomatic official in Warsaw."

(e) COMMUNISM IN SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE

A new opening for Communism in South-Eastern Europe was offered by the overthrow of M. Stamboliski's Government in Bulgaria in June 1923. Up to that time the popular resentment in Bulgaria against the Bourgeois politicians who had led the country successively into two disastrous defeats had found vent in the Agrarian Movement, and this predominance of the Agrarian Party in Bulgaria had been on the whole more unfavourable to the prospects of the Third International than the White' régime in Hungary. The White' régime was so militant, and had the active support of so small a minority of the Hungarian population, that it might conceivably excite a Communist reaction. M. Stamboliski's Agrarian Government, on the other hand, professed to be founded upon the peasantry, that is, upon the mass of the Bulgarian

1 The arrest of two Polish members of the Mixed Commission in Leningrad, referred to above, was believed to be a counter-move to these expulsions, since it took place during the week's grace allowed to the six members of the Soviet Legation at Warsaw for making their preparations for departure. 2 The Times, 8th August, 1924.

3 Ibid., 9th August, 1924.

4 Ibid., 22nd August, 1924. M. Voikov was believed to have been one of the Soviet officials personally responsible for the execution of the Russian Imperial Family.

5 Ibid., 29th September, 1924.

6 Ibid., 21st and 22nd October, 1924.

people; and the support which he received from this quarter undoubtedly enabled him to override the Bourgeoisie for nearly four years without having to look to the 'Reds' for assistance. His aim, in fact, seems to have been to build up a Green International', or, more accurately, a Green Entente' among the peasant nations of Eastern Europe, which would be able to hold its own against the European Bourgeoisie on the one hand and the Third International on the other; and towards the Bulgarian Communists he maintained an attitude of aloofness, varied by bouts of repression. After the coup d'état of June 1923, however, which resulted in the overthrow and death of M. Stamboliski and the accession of Professor Tsankov's semi-Fascist Bourgeois Government to power, the defeated Agrarians were thrown into the Communists' arms; the joint AgrarianCommunist rising of September 1923 was made under the Communists' leadership; and, although that rising failed, it left the Communists in the field as the principal anti-governmental party. Since the new Bourgeois Government represented a small minority which was maintaining itself in power by force, its position was probably more precarious than that of its predecessor which had just fallen, and if a second revolution were to occur, this time the Communists might expect to secure the reversion.

Against the Government and on the side of the forces of disorder was the cumulative social dislocation arising from the peace settlement and the consequent political discontent, which was inevitably directed against the Government of the day. By the Treaty of Neuilly, Bulgaria had been burdened with the payment of Reparation and the even more irksome charge of the Inter-Allied Commissions of Control; she had been compelled to substitute a professional for a conscript army (a change which still further embarrassed her finances, while leaving the Government militarily so weak that it was not only incapable of aggression but was hardly in a position to maintain internal order); she had been cut off from territorial access to the Aegean Sea; 2 and she had once more been separated from her nationals in Macedonia, whom, after long years of effort, she had succeeded in uniting to herself from 1915 to 1918. These factors particularly the weakness of the Bulgarian Army and the open sore in Macedonia-lent themselves admirably to the Third International's strategy. The impotence of the Bourgeois Government to redeem the Macedonians or even to ameliorate their 1 See II. B. (v) below.

2 See Survey, 1920-3, pp. 338-40.

lot an impotence which was absolute, owing to the existence of the Little Entente and the general international situation-could be turned effectively to their discredit, since the most telling point in their indictment of M. Stamboliski had been his alleged treachery to the national cause in coming to terms with Jugoslavia at the Macedonians' expense, while in overthrowing him they had been indebted to the assistance of the Macedonian refugees-an armed and organized body of desperate men who were one of the most formidable forces in Bulgaria at this time. If the Macedonian leaders could be set against the Tsankov Government, the latter might fall before a Communist assault; and the Communists-who could not make much headway with the Marxian dogma in a country of peasant proprietors where an urban proletariat hardly existed-might then present themselves in a more popular light as the most effective champions of Bulgarian national aspirations. On the 3rd August, 1924, the Berlin Rote Fahne declared that the only real solution for the Balkan problem was a social revolution in each Balkan state, to be followed by the establishment of a federal republic in which every Balkan nation would be included as an autonomous member.1 This programme was referred to again in December by M. Joffe, when he was on the point of leaving Moscow to take up his post as the Soviet Government's representative in Vienna.2 That was, indeed, precisely the policy which the Bolsheviks had already pursued with success in Transcaucasia. In that region, Azerbaijan had been their point d'appui; in the Balkan Peninsula, the country marked out for the same role was Bulgaria; and, if once Bulgaria were secured, the Macedonian and Croat peasant national movements, upon which the Rote Fahne laid stress in the article above mentioned, might supply the further leverage for overthrowing the established order in Jugoslavia.3

6

After the failure of the rising in September 1923, the Bulgarian Communist organization appears to have gone underground and continued its activities under the title of a Labour Party 4 On the 2nd April a conditional amnesty was granted to some thirty or forty Agrarian and Communist leaders who had taken part in the struggles of 1923, and who had been excepted from the general amnesty of January 1924; 5 but about twenty Communist leaders 2 Ibid., 16th December, 1924.

1 The Times, 4th August, 1924.

3 For a general review of the Communists' position in Bulgaria see The Times, 5th August, 1924.

4 Ibid., 25th February, 1924.

5 Ibid., 4th April; Le Temps, 25th April, 1924.