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German–Soviet Union relations date to the aftermath of the First World War. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, dictated by Germany ended hostilities between Russia and Germany; it was signed on March 3, 1918. A few months later, the German ambassador to Moscow, Wilhelm von Mirbach, was shot dead by Russian Left Socialist-Revolutionaries in an attempt to incite a new war between Russia and Germany. The entire Soviet embassy under Adolph Joffe was deported from Germany on November 6, 1918, for their active support of the German Revolution. Karl Radek also illegally supported communist subversive activities in Weimar Germany in 1919. From the outset, both states sought to overturn the new order that was established by the victors of World War I. Germany, laboring under onerous reparations and stung by the collective responsibility provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, was a defeated nation in constant turmoil. This and the Russian Civil War made both Germany and the Soviets into international outcasts, and their resulting rapprochement during the interbellum was a natural convergence. At the same time, the dynamics of their relationship was shaped by both a lack of trust and the respective governments' fears of its partner's breaking out of diplomatic isolation and turning towards the French Third Republic (which at the time was thought to possess the greatest military strength in Europe) and the Second Polish Republic, its ally. The countries' economic relationship dwindled in 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power and created Nazi Germany; however, the relationships restarted in the end of 1930s, culminating with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 and several trade agreements. Few questions concerning the causes of World War II are more controversial and ideologically loaded than the issue of the policies of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin towards Nazi Germany between the Nazi seizure of power and the German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941. A variety of competing and contradictory theses exist, including: that the Soviet leadership actively sought another great war in Europe to further weaken the capitalist nations; that the USSR pursued a purely defensive policy; or that the USSR tried to avoid becoming entangled in a war, both because Soviet leaders did not feel that they had the military capabilities to conduct strategic operations at that time, and to avoid, in paraphrasing Stalin's words to the 18th Party Congress on March 10, 1939, "pulling other nations' (the UK and France's) chestnuts out of the fire." The Soviet Union and Weimar Germany Revolution and end of World War I The outcome of the First World War was disastrous for both Germany's future and for the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. During the war, the Bolsheviks struggled for survival, and Vladimir Lenin had no option except to recognize the independence of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. Moreover, facing a German military advance, Lenin and Leon Trotsky were forced to enter into the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ceded large swathes of western Russian territory to the German Empire. On 11 November 1918, the Germans signed an armistice with the Allies, ending the First World War on the Western Front. After Germany's collapse, British, French and Japanese troops intervened in the Russian Civil War. Initially, the Soviet leadership hoped for a successful socialist revolution in Germany as part of the "world revolution". However, the attempts to set up soviet-style republics in Germany were local and short-lived (Bavaria: 25 days; Bremen: 26 days; Würzburg: 3 days) or failed altogether (such as the Spartacist uprising). Subsequently, the Bolsheviks became embroiled in the Soviet war with Poland of 1919–1920. Because Poland was a traditional enemy of Germany (see e.g. Silesian Uprisings), and because the Soviet state was also isolated internationally, the Soviet government began to seek a closer relationship with Germany and therefore adopted a much less hostile attitude towards Germany. This line was consistently pursued under People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin and Soviet Ambassador Nikolay Krestinsky. Other Soviet representatives instrumental in the negotiations were Karl Radek, Leonid Krasin, Christian Rakovsky, Victor Kopp and Adolph Joffe. In the 1920s, many in the leadership of Weimar Germany, who felt humiliated by the conditions that the Treaty of Versailles had imposed after their defeat in the First World War (especially General Hans von Seeckt, chief of the Reichswehr), were interested in cooperation with the Soviet Union, both in order to avert any threat from the Second Polish Republic, backed by the French Third Republic, and to prevent any possible Soviet-British alliance. The specific German aims were the full rearmament of the Reichswehr, which was explicitly prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles, and an alliance against Poland. It is unknown exactly when the first contacts between von Seeckt and the Soviets took place, but it could have been as early as 1919–1921, or possibly even before the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. On April 16, 1920, Victor Kopp, the RSFSR's special representative to Berlin, asked at the German Foreign Office whether "there was any possibility of combining the German and the Red Army for a joint war on Poland". This was yet another event at the start of military cooperation between the two countries, which ended before the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. By early 1921, a special group in the Reichswehr Ministry devoted to Soviet affairs, Sondergruppe R, had been created. Weimar Germany's army had been limited to 100,000 men by the Treaty of Versailles, which also forbade the Germans to have aircraft, tanks, submarines, heavy artillery, poison gas, anti-tank weapons or many anti-aircraft guns. A team of inspectors from the League of Nations patrolled many German factories and workshops to ensure that these weapons were not being manufactured. Treaty of Rapallo 1922 and secret military cooperation The Treaty of Rapallo between Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia was signed by German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau and his Soviet colleague Georgy Chicherin on April 16, 1922, during the Genoa Economic Conference, annulling all mutual claims, restoring full diplomatic relations, and establishing the beginnings of close trade relationships, which made Weimar Germany the main trading and diplomatic partner of the Soviet Union. Rumors of a secret military supplement to the treaty soon spread. However, for a long time the consensus was that those rumors were wrong, and that Soviet-German military negotiations were independent of Rapallo and kept secret from the German Foreign Ministry for some time. This point of view was later challenged. On November 5, 1922, six other Soviet republics, which would soon join the Soviet Union, agreed to adhere to the Treaty of Rapallo as well. The Sov.... Discover the Hallett German popular books. 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