The turn towards Germany could also have been made in early 1939, marked by Stalin's speech to the 18th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1939, shortly after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, when he warned that the Western democracies were trying to provoke a conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union and declared the Soviet Union's non-involvement in inter-capitalist quarrels, which is sometimes considered to have been a signal to Berlin.[1][184]