Telegram from Plenipotentiary Representative of the USSR in France V.P. Potemkin to the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the USSR.

Documents of foreign policy of the USSR. T. 20. January - December 1937 / Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR; - M.: Politizdat, 1976., pp. 13-14.

January 5, 1937

A conversation with Daladier and Gamelin [1] , who were at our breakfast yesterday, convinces of the growing anxiety of French military circles before the expanding German-Italian intervention in Spain and Germany's military preparations. Both interlocutors recognized the extreme danger of Hitler's creation of an anti-French military base in Spain. Both noted a lull in the activities of the Germans along the Dutch and Belgian borders and, on the contrary, the continuous accumulation of German forces in the areas of Konstanz, Schaffhausen and the Black Forest.

Daladier accused England of opposing the provision of assistance to the legitimate government of Spain, and noted that she, by the bilateral Mediterranean agreement with Italy [2] , isolated France and increased Mussolini's demands on the French government. Gamelin echoed Daladier, pointing out that the Anglo-Italian agreement did nothing to ensure communication between France and her North African possessions. The same Gamelin expressed the idea that Italy's biggest gain was the opportunity to use the natives of Abyssinia for the extraordinary strengthening of its army. As you can see, Delbos' optimistic communiqué [3] about the Anglo-Italian agreement is disavowed by French military circles. Gamelin's anxiety was expressed in his statement that he did not consider the winter an obstacle to a German attack, and that therefore France and her friends needed to keep up.

As a detail, I will note Daladier's report that arrests have recently been made here among the "Trotskyist youth." The searches revealed the connection of these elements with other countries and the presence of directives aimed at the decomposition of the French army.

[1] Respectively the Minister of Defense of France and the Chief of the General Staff of the French Army.

[2] See gas. Izvestia, January 3 - 5, 1937; Sat. British and Foreign State Papers, vol. 141. London, 1950, pp. 387 - 389.

[3]   See gas. Izvestia, January 4, 1937