Litvinov Protocol

Named after the chief Soviet diplomat moving the negotiations forward, Maxim Litvinov, the treaty provided for immediate implementation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact by its signatories, thereby formally renouncing war as a part of national foreign policy.

Near the end of 1927 correspondence between the foreign diplomatic corps of France and the United States began motion towards an international treaty in which signatories would renounce the use of war as an instrument of political policy.

[2] Final language was fairly rapidly agreed upon and on August 27, 1928, there took place a formal signing of what became known as the Kellogg–Briand Pact (named after American Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand) in Paris.

Ever fearful of foreign invasion, the Soviet government sought as its goal total military disarmament, arguing that continued existence of armaments on a massive scale were fundamentally incompatible with a formalistic call for a ban on war.

Once it had decided to add itself to the signatories of the Paris antiwar accord, the government of the Soviet Union, whether for propaganda or practical purposes, became the Kellogg–Briand Pact's leading supporter, attempting to bring it into force with neighboring countries.

[7] On December 29, 1928, Litvinov proposed an additional protocol to the Paris treaty bringing it into immediate effect in the USSR's bilateral relations with historic enemy Poland and newly independent former part of the Russian Empire Lithuania.

Soviet diplomat Maxim Litvinov (1876–1951), namesake of the Litvinov Protocol.
Soviet People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin (1872–1936) was a vocal critic of the Kellogg–Briand Pact and sought to hold the Soviet Union aloof from the treaty, which he perceived as a toothless propaganda document that masked an aggressive hidden agenda.