Fierlinger was appointed by Beneš to serve as the chief of the economic section of the Foreign Ministry despite complaints that he lacked a university degree and that he was unsuitable to be a diplomat.

As such, Beneš frequently visited Geneva to attend the sessions of the League, where he always pressed for it to become the principal instrument of international diplomacy, instead of the traditional congress system.

[7] Predictably enough, the diplomat to whom Fierlinger was most hostile was Count Friedrich von der Schulenburg, the German ambassador in Moscow, whom he made no secret of disliking.

Both Schulenburg and the British ambassador, Lord Chilston, felt after the mass executions of much of the Red Army's senior command in June 1937, the Soviet military was finished as an effective fighting force.

[7] By contrast, both Davies and Fierlinger maintained an optimistic view and argued that the mass executions did not have the sort of negative impact that both the Germans and the British attributed.

[8] On 6 February 1938, Soviet-Romanian relations were badly strained by the defection of Fedor Butenko, the Soviet chargé d'affairs at the legation in Bucharest, who fled to Italy.

[9] Fierlinger's efforts were described as "lukewarm" and the Butenko affair did much damage to Soviet-Romanian relations, which were never good even in the best of times, just as the Sudetenland crisis began to pose the question of Romania granting the Soviet Union transit rights to defend Czechoslovakia.

[9] In a dispatch to Prague, he wrote that the confessions made by all of the accused had "an immensely powerful impression as a captivating, exhausting and historically accurate description of the conspiracy and its contacts in Germany, Poland and Japan, culminating in the coup d'etat prepared for May 1937".

[9] Fierlinger attached much importance to the reference in the trial to the Heimfront of Konrad Henlein, which described as "an agency of German fascism" as evidence that the Soviet Union was concerned about Czechoslovakia.

He wrote with an apparent disregard for his conclusions that the confession were genuine that the reference to Henlein was "put in the script" to prepare the peoples of the Soviet Union for a possible war in Central Europe.

[16] In June 1938, Fierlinger and Coulondre met with Litvinov to tell him that with Europe on the brink of war, it was time for the Soviet Union to set aside its claim to Bessarabia, or there would be no possibility of King Carol II granting the Red Army transit rights.

[14] Both Fierlinger and Coulondre urged Litvinov to make a sacrifice for the sake of peace and said that giving up the claim to Bessarabia could potentially save the lives of millions.

[14] Litvinov, in turn, responded by saying that the Soviet Union was willing to sign a defensive alliance with Romania and promised to keep its troops on the eastern side of the Dniester River upon the end of a possible war in exchange for transit rights, but it was unwilling to give up the claim to Bessarabia.

[14] King Carol and Romanian elites in general had a deep distrust and fear of the Soviet Union and expressed much apprehension that if the Red Army entered Romania, it would never leave.

[17] In August 1938, Fierlinger was accused of passing on secret documents to the Soviets, which led to the Foreign Ministry to take the "necessary precautionary steps", as an investigation was launched into those allegations.

[22] Fierlinger replied that Beneš had not tried to invoke the alliance because of the problems posed by the refusal of the Polish and the Romanian governments to grant transit rights to the Red Army.

[22] The American historian Hugh Ragsdale wrote, "Both the question and answer are strange, as it is obvious that, in accepting the Anglo-French terms, the Czechoslovak government had consented to the abrogation of its mutual assistance pact with Moscow".

On the afternoon of the same day, Coulondre visited Fierlinger to offer him his sympathy[23] and reported, "When I entered his study, I felt there is the coldness which penetrates one in a house where there is a dead person".

[23] Coulondre reported that Fierlinger was furious with the "betrayal" of the Munich Agreement and that he lashed out at both France and Britain, which he accused of sacrificing Czechoslovakia to avoid the war with Germany that he predicated was inevitable.

[19] However, Fierlinger blamed it on France and especially Britain, which he accused of negotiating the Soviets' proposed inclusion in the "peace front", meant to deter Germany from invading Poland, in a lackluster and ineffective way.

[25] In a 1943 essay, Fierlinger wrote that the diplomacy to establish a new international order in 1918-1919 was too influenced by the fear of the Russian Revolution and that only "Lenin's genius could grasp and explain the meaning of historical developments in the new era".

[25] Fierlinger very strongly advised Beneš to drop the plans for federation and instead to make an alliance with the Soviet Union the basis of post-war Czechoslovak foreign policy.

That is evident, for example, in 1943, when the Communists, in conjunction with Fierlinger, facilitated the signing of the Soviet-Czech alliance treaty in Moscow on 12 December 1943 by Joseph Stalin and Edvard Beneš.

[26] Jan Masaryk, the foreign minister of the government-in-exile and the son of the former president, wanted to sack Fierlinger for that letter and complained that he was no longer representing Czechoslovakia in Moscow in any meaningful sense of the term.

[26] Just before the end of World War II in Europe, he in April 1945 became prime minister of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and retained that post after the country was liberated later that year.

[30] On 12 September, Fierlinger handed Valerian Zorin, the Soviet ambassador in Prague, a draft treaty for Czechoslovakia to supply uranium at a fixed annual rate.

[31] On 6 October 1945, Fierlinger met with Bakulin, who told him that the Soviet Union wanted to be the exclusive customer for the uranium from Jáchymov, but it was prepared to be more flexible about the ownership.

[33] In response to a message from Molotov, Fierlinger indicated his willingness to have the Soviet Union be the exclusive buyer of the uranium, but he was opposed to the joint stock company, and the Jáchymov mine must be under sole Czechoslovak control.

[34] On 17 November, Fierlinger spoke at the presidum, consisting of the prime minister and the five deputies representing the five major parties about the treaty, and general approval was expressed.

He became a leading figure in the "left-wing" social democracy movement, which sought the closest possible ties with the Czechoslovak Communist Party under Klement Gottwald, who became the new premier.