Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

by Stephen Kotkin

Locarno Peace Pact consisted of a clutch of seven agreements negotiated at a resort on Lake Maggiore (October 5–16, 1925) between Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, and Germany as well as Poland and Czechoslovakia. Germany recognized its borders in the west (the Rhineland frontier), effectively ceding Alsace-Lorraine to France, and agreed to vague arbitration over its borders to the east, effectively allowing for future revision. Germany was given a path to admission into the League of Nations, shedding its pariah status. “The gates of war are closed,” declared France’s foreign minister Aristide Briand (who had headed the government back during the siege of Verdun). But no comparable non-aggression pledges or mutual guarantees were issued for Germany’s relations with its smaller eastern neighbors. Polish foreign minister Józef Beck would complain that “Germany was officially asked to attack the east, in return for peace in the west.” The retired former head of state Józef Piłsudski observed that “every honest Pole spits when he hears this word [Locarno].”217 Still, all three principals (Briand, Stresemann, and Chamberlain) would be awarded Nobel Prizes. The Soviets, who had not been invited, were alarmed that Germany had apparently been drawn back into the western orbit as part of a presumed British-led anti-Soviet coalition.