a dispatch to Delbos, Coulondre wrote "Russia's feet are not of clay, as it is currently said, but rest solidly on the Russian land which serves to nourish its steel muscles which I see growing stronger month by month". By the spring of 1937, Coulondre was predicating that it was quite possible for the Soviet Union to ally itself with Germany as he described Stalin as an opportunist who would ally himself with whatever power presented him with the best terms, and that a German-Soviet combination would be a disaster from the French viewpoint. For this reason, Coulondre was quietly critical of Delbos's efforts to "devalue" the Franco-Soviet alliance, as he warned it was dangerous to assume that a German-Soviet rapprochement was impossible. Coulondre was frightened by the Yezhovshchina ("the Yezhov times"), seeing it as evidence of turn towards isolationism and increased xenophobia in the Soviet Union. Coulondre called the Yezhovshchina a "crisis of growth" towards what Coulondre called "counterrevolutionary absolutism", Russian nationalism as the basis of a Soviet identity, and a growing military might supported by an expanding industrial basis as the Soviet regime continued to build factories at a manic pace. Coulondre reported to Paris in October 1936 about daily life during the Yezhovshchina that: "Quand un Russe regarde une fenêtre, on ne sait jamais s'il admire le paysage ou s'il a envie de sauter" ("When a Russian looks out of a window, you never know if he is admiring the scenery or if he wants to jump"). Coulondre attended the second Moscow trial show of January 1937 and the third Moscow show trial of March 1938, often known as the "Great Trial" as the two leading accused were the former premier Alexei Rykov and Nikolai Bukharin, the leader of the moderate faction of the Communist Party (Coulondre had just missed the first Moscow show trial of August 1936). Coulondre later wrote in his memoirs that the accused in both trials "confessed in a monotonous tone...animated by a kind of automatism...all have an immense repentance...It follows for me under the evidence that they recite a lesson learned". In another dispatch to Paris, Coulondre wrote the most important question facing French diplomacy was not "will Russia be with us or not?", but rather "with whom will Russia go?" As the Soviet Union had signed an alliance with France's ally Czechoslovakia in 1935, one of Coulondre's main duties in Moscow