To legions of people estranged from Western life, the USSR was a harbinger of a brilliant future. Class justice, racial harmony, democratic decency, and modernization unencumbered by rapacious capitalism and liberal cant would reign. Despite inklings that not all was well, Anna Louise Strong devoted her intellect and energy to the USSR for two decades. To Strong, the performance of the proletarian republic in WWII vindicated Stalin’s leadership, which had already steered the country through collectivization, industrialization, a purge of traitors, and diplomatic competitions between cunning imperialist powers. Once prominent in dissenting circles-alternately celebrated or reviled in the public at large – she is now little remembered. Strong is, though, worthy of scholarly interest as her career and life sit at the intersection of transnational activism and WWII and Cold War history. For the better part of two decades, Strong lived in the USSR, whence she interpreted for her compatriots its promise and progress: “To promote [mutual] understanding became my life’s work.” Her purpose assumed added urgency when in 1941 war engulfed the Soviet Union.

Chapter 7 examines the foreign policy of Nazi Germany during the 1930s, as well as the events of World War II from September 1939 through early 1941. Hitler did not see revision of the Treaty of Versailles as an end goal of policy, but rather as a pretext for pursuing a far more ambitious program geared toward the waging of war and the conquest of “living space” (Lebensraum). He issued reasonable-sounding demands for ethnic self-determination of German minorities in Czechoslovakia and Poland, and claimed to want peace even after telling his own military leaders that war would be necessary to achieve his aims. After annexing Austria in March 1938 with little pushback from other countries, Germany isolated Czechoslovakia, first annexing the Sudetenland in September 1938 and then destroying Czechoslovak statehood a few months later. The non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union opened the way for an attack on Poland on September 1, 1939, bringing Britain and France into the war. Germany defeated and partially occupied France in 1940 while British forces fled the continent. The German people supported the restoration of their country’s military power and the dismantling of the Treaty of Versailles but had mixed feelings about going to war.