And what makes you think the West could ever trust the USSR of the 1930s? The Russians were happy to form alliances with the Germans after WWI which allowed German manufacturers to construct aircraft, etc inside the Soviet Union away from prying eyes in contravention of the Armistice, something the west eventually became aware of in the early 1930s. Also remember the duplicitous behavior of the USSR towards, for example, the Ford workers who went there in the late 1920s/early 1930s to build a truck industry - many of whom were never allowed out of the country again and ended up in the gulags of Siberia. Whjat about the show trials, such as the Metro-Vick affair of the 1930s, another example of Soviet "openness". This is in addition to the cover-up of the Holodomor, where the Soviets attempted to discredit journalists such as Gareth Jones (probably subsequently murdered in Japanese-occupied Mongolia in 1935 by NKVD agents), Malcolm Muggeridge and Rhea Klyman (amongst others), by the manipulation of international notables including George Bernard Shaw and Edouard Herriot who were hoodwinked into publishing positive articles about the Ukraine, and in some cases by coercion of American journalists such as Walter Duranty (Pullitzer prize winner) and Eugene Lyons, both of whom toed the (Communist) party line to publish denouncements of Jones' work in particular. In the case of Lyons it was because he was enamoured of the Communist regime (he subsequently left the USSR and became a vehement opponent of Stalin's regime), whilst in Duranty's case because he was allegedly being blackmailed by them
Yes, all very innocent, so why wouldn't we trust Russia?
Of course the USSR's subsequent behaviour at Katyn in April and May 1940 where NKVD executioners shot dead 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia in a sort of production line had nothing to do with wanting to take over Poland without opposition, had it?
