This work is a study of the responses of the Soviet Union to the various European crises of the 1930s that led to World War II. It is based on research into the substantial body of political and diplomatic documents that has become accessible to scholars since the opening of the former Soviet archives in 1992. Silvio Pons highlights the influence of the doctrine of the inevitability of war on Soviet policy-making during the second half of the 1930s, which received new legitimacy after the collapse of the Versailles system as a result of Hitler's foreign policy. Seen in this perspective, Soviet foreign policy appears less a reaction to Western appeasement towards Nazi Germany (as historians have understood it) than the autonomous outcome of a specific political culture, interacting with foreign and domestic contexts. Contrary to the established image of policy-making under Stalin, this interaction ultimately provided less ground for planning than for contradiction and conflict among the main personalities, especially between Litvinov and Molotov. Thus, any attempt to privilege ideology or "realism" as the primary source of Stalin's foreign and security policy - following a classical polarization that still divides historians - is unconvincing.