Thinking about this letter from the Soviet ambassador in Czechoslovakia to the people’s commissar for foreign affairs of the USSR (1938)

Referring to his ties with the Sudeten Germans and through them with the democratically-minded Germany, Skrach [Chief custodian of the personal papers of the former president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Masaryk] repeatedly assured me that he regarded Czechoslovakia’s capitulation as the greatest misfortune precisely because the Hitlerite regime in Germany was thoroughly rotten and would not have withstood even the shortest of wars- even against Czechoslovakia alone. Without any prompting on my part Skrach drew the concclusion that Czechoslovakia had been sacrificed precisely because all the participants in that tragedy were horribly afraid of the collapse of the Hitlerite regime, afraid of perishing under the ruins of that colossus, afraid of the inevitable revolution which would then have affected not only France bur also Britain, and the whole of Europe for that matter. According to Skrach’s information, it was only for the benefit of the outside world that Hitler was assuming a strident tone and an arrogant stance. In conversations with Chamberlain he had allegedly put it to the former quite bluntly that it was not only war that would signify an early social revolution, but that a mere setback for Hitler would, in the final analysis and in the very near future, lead to the collapse of the National-Socialist system and to the triumph of Bolshevism in Europe. This had allegedly coincided with Chamberlains assessment: hence his zeal in saving Hitler and his regime.