The historiography of Soviet foreign policy in the 1930s and the Soviet search for security has received a good deal of attention over the years, not least as historians have sought to explain the apparent failure of Soviet efforts to contain an alliance against Nazi Germany, only for the Soviets to commit an abrupt volte face that resulted in a non-aggression pact with Germany on the eve of World War II. Michael Jabara Carley has written a welcome addition to this literature with Stalin’s Gamble.

Stalin’s Gamble is the first volume of a projected trilogy addressing Soviet foreign policy during the 1930s. Turning to the period 1930–36, the volume focusses on the challenging efforts of the Soviet diplomatic corps, and in particular those of Foreign Commissar Maksim Litvinov, to secure Soviet security and trading interests with western powers in order to constrain a rising German threat. Drawing on extensive archival material from France, Britain, the Russian Federation, and the United States, Carley has created a detailed narrative of the intricacies of the conduct of Soviet foreign diplomacy and its challenges, successes, and failures during the first half of the 1930s. The periodization might perhaps seem a little odd to some readers in addressing the search for allies against Adolf Hitler in a period before Hitler came to power in 1933, as well as afterwards, but the author makes a strong case for the necessity of an understanding of underlying issues and tensions in the years before 1933. The book’s end point of the fall of Pierre Laval’s Government in France is logical and brings the narrative to a close before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

The author provides not only provides a great deal of detail but casts his net wide in coverage of a broad range of diplomatic issues encountered by the Soviets in the early to mid-1930s. Here the book makes a strong contribution to the existing literature, covering a great deal in a logical and episodic manner that guides the reader through the twists and turns of Soviet negotiations with other powers, and engaging effectively with the challenging complexities of presenting the reader with an account of a multi-faceted context of diplomatic history. While there is more focus on relations with Britain and France, this is understandable given the nature of Soviet negotiations and the partners that they attempted to draw into an alliance, but the positions of other powers receive due attention and Carley walks the tightrope of addressing the complex interweave of diplomacy with poise.

Carley presents not only a detailed account of the content and conduct of Soviet diplomacy in the first half of the 1930s, but also of how Soviet diplomats gathered information in an era when intelligence was less than systematic. Here there is a significant contribution to an understanding of how Soviet diplomats functioned and understood the landscape in which they operated, as well as the complex networks of people within their world. As a helpful means of assisting the reader in this latter regard, the author has provided an invaluable five-page set of biographical notes.

Stalin’s Gamble is an excellent account of Soviet foreign policy in the early 1930s and the individuals involved in its conduct and formulation. The use of archival material is as meticulous as it is extensive, and the detail provided in the volume stands testament to this. Engagingly and fluidly written, Stalin’s Gamble should be commended to scholars and the interested public as diplomatic history in fine form. One can only look forward to the subsequent volumes in this planned trilogy with great anticipation.