Word: sovietize
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Italy. It was raining in Rome when news hit the city that Soviet troops were moving in on the rear of the Polish Armies. Quizzing citizens, U. S. correspondents met profound gloom, not from sympathy for Poles or hatred of Russia, but because Italy's precarious neutrality was threatened. Next week, asked Italians, would the Soviet Union claim Bessarabia that she lost to Rumania in World War I? Or the week after? What would Turkey do? Would she take what she had got from France and Great Britain and join Russia? Would there be an offer of peace...
...breaking with Britain and France, would join with Stalin and Hitler in another move for "peace" as devastating as the German-Russian Pact had been. Said the astute Associated Press, employing the language of Metternich: Turkey, while committed to Britain and France, had reaffirmed "her warm friendship for the Soviet Union, whose troops are massed along her frontiers...
...would not declare war on Russia. Said a Government declaration: "This attack [the Russian invasion of Poland] made upon their ally, at a moment when she is prostrated in the face of overwhelming forces brought against her by Germany, cannot ... be justified by the argument put forward by the Soviet Government. The full implication of these events is not yet apparent. ..." A Government spokesman made it clearer: "His Majesty's Government do not think a declaration of war on Russia follows automatically as a matter of good faith on the invasion of Poland...
...Viacheslav Molotov and asked what was up. Said he with Oriental suavity, he had heard rumors of a German-Russian plan to dismember Poland. . . . Thunderstruck, Premier Molotov gasped, drew back, while the veins of his forehead stood out in his apoplectic fury: this, he reminded his visitor, was the Soviet of Socialist Republics, the fatherland of the toiling masses, the vanguard of the antifascist struggle; that any ambassador could believe such a slander of the Socialist State made him, Molotov, wonder if he was the proper ambassador to be accredited to it. The Chinese Ambassador left, to read in Pravda...
...this perplexing situation, Russia formally denounced its non-aggression treaty with the missing government, worried because Poland had become "a fertile field for any accidental and unexpected contingency which may create a menace to the Soviet Union," found its sacred duty to "extend the hand of assistance to its brother Ukrainians and brother Byelo-Russians inhabiting Poland...