France out of another world war as Litvinov expressed much rage at Bonnet to Hudson. Hudson's insistence that he was in Moscow to only discuss economic matters and his refusal to discuss Litvinov's suggestions of a military alliance doomed his visit to failure. Hudson told Litvinov that he was not convinced that an Anglo-Soviet military alliance was necessary and at one point angered Litvinov when he told him that Britain could do very well without trade with the Soviet Union. Litvinov accused Hudson of being a bully, saying that such threats to cease trade worked with small powers, and that the Soviet Union was a great power. In regard to the trade treaty, Hudson negotiated with Anastas Mikoyan, the Armenian Communist in charge of economic matters under Stalin.. No agreement was struck as both men sought the best possible economic treaty for their respective nations. Hudson also talked with Vladimir Potemkin, the deputy foreign commissar, where he spoke in general about a wish for an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance meant to deter Germany from choosing war. Hudson told Potemkin the lie that Britain was capable of sending 19 British Army divisions to France at once to face the Wehrmacht (in fact the British Army could only sent two divisions to France in March 1939). Potemkin wrote the Hudson mission was a failure because it "began without serious preparations". Potemkin compared Hudson to the character of Khlestakov, the protagonist of The Inspector-General, a 1836 play by Nikolai Gogol. Potemkin wrote that just as Khlestakov was a vain, lightweight man who persuaded people in a provincial Russian town that he was really the dreaded inspector-general of the Emperor Nicholas I whose task was to root all corruption and inefficiencyin the Russian empire, only to be finally exposed at the end as the unimportant man that really was, that likewise Hudson was just a hack politician who had no real authority to say anything important or even interesting on behalf of London who pretended to be someone important. Upon his return to London, Hudson offered a bleak assessment of the Soviet Union in a memo dated 4 April 1939 to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. Hudson wrote that "except where those [Soviet] interests happen to coincide with ours, that are likely a Government to prove an unreliable ally". Through not an expert in military matters, Hudson stated that he talked at length with the British