My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence Between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin
by Susan Butler
Allies and Enemies
A review by Istv?n De
It was the worst of times. Between 1939 and 1945, fifty million people died a
violent death, the absolute majority among them not as soldiers in arms but as
defenseless civilians. Yet it was, in one way, also the best of times, because
the countries of the world rallied, step by step, against those ultimate rogue
states Germany and Japan, and because German Nazism and Japanese militarism suffered
total defeat. Moreover, toward the end of the war it appeared to many that the
heads of the grand anti-Nazi coalition were firmly set on laying the foundations
of a lasting peace and a more humane society. More particularly, the future
seemed to rest in the steady hands of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin,
the imperial leaders of the two world powers. My Dear Mr. Stalin, the first
complete collection of the correspondence between the American leader and the
Soviet leader, pays tribute to wartime humanity's hopeful dream -- except that
Susan Butler, the book's editor and commentator, does not treat it as a dream.
She believes that the opportunity for a bright future genuinely existed. Unfortunately,
in her rather simplistic view, all of it was undone by Roosevelt's heirs. Butler
is the author of a fine biography of the aviator Amelia Earhart and undoubtedly
did much research for this book. She often shows considerable insight, but she
also makes factual mistakes that demonstrate that she is not a specialist in this
subject. In her detailed notes, Butler points to the many vital issues that, between
1941 and 1945, linked the fates of the two countries. Her message is that if Roosevelt's
policy had been followed, the Cold War could have been avoided. Maybe so; but
it is also possible that it was the Cold War that saved the world from mutual
destruction and hastened the welcome implosion of the Soviet Empire. This
does not mean that the cooperation between Roosevelt and Stalin was not genuine,
or that it brought no benefits to the two countries and to the world. (It alone
enabled the Grand Coalition to defeat Germany and Japan.) Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
who wrote the foreword to this book and who is one of the great New Deal historians,
shares Butler's optimistic outlook on Stalin and Roosevelt's wartime cooperation,
but he also points out that even before the Yalta Conference in February 1945,
Stalin instructed communist leaders in the West to prepare for new confrontations
in the postwar era. And after Yalta, the Soviet propaganda offensive intensified.
So one cannot agree with Butler when she writes that "Stalin did more than pay
attention to what was important to Roosevelt; he followed his lead and made a
significant change in Russian society." What this change consisted of was,
according to Butler, Stalin's instructions to the Soviet press that it take notice
of Roosevelt's statement according to which the Soviet Constitution granted freedom
of conscience and religion. Also, the fact that Stalin, at Roosevelt's urging,
re-established the Russian Orthodox Church. Now, Roosevelt no doubt tried his
best to persuade the American public to accept the Soviet alliance, but it is
wrong to call the publicizing of the Soviet Constitution, which was a sham, a
significant change in Russian society. As for the re-establishment of the Russian
state church, it had been totally infiltrated by Soviet state security.
It is indeed difficult to imagine a more incongruous friendship -- for friendship
it truly seemed to have been -- than the friendship between the Hudson Valley
aristocrat educated at Groton, Harvard, and Columbia and the son of a drunken
Georgian cobbler. One was a master politician who defeated his rivals at the ballot
box, the other was a rigid ideologue who had his rivals (and many other people)
shot. One was a firm believer in a socially conscious capitalist society, the
other was a cynical manipulator of great ideals who may have truly believed in
the greatness of his country and the communist future of the world. There can
be little doubt that the two men respected each other even while nurturing no
illusions about the differences in their worldviews and goals. (The two had one
thing in common: Roosevelt was crippled by polio, and Stalin had a withered left
arm and a face marked by smallpox.) Because Roosevelt died in April 1945, when
the United States was still an ally of the Soviet Union, his revered memory was
perpetuated in monuments, streets, and public squares throughout the Soviet Union
and the rest of the Soviet bloc. Stalin, on the other hand, who died in March
1953, in the middle of the Cold War, was execrated in the United States and the
rest of the free world during the last years of his life and forever after. The
two men met only twice, in Tehran in November 1943, and in Yalta, in the Crimea,
in February 1945. Both meetings were preceded by lengthy and complicated negotiations
in which Roosevelt consistently played the role of the ardent suitor. He proposed
several meetings to Stalin, not always with the participation of Churchill, at
locations including Newfoundland, "either ... side of [the] Bering Straits," Fairbanks,
Alaska, and Khartoum. Stalin turned down most of the proposals with the somewhat
questionable argument that his presence was needed at the front. In the end, the
places where they met were much nearer to Stalin's home than to Roosevelt's and
Churchill's; and in Tehran, Roosevelt chose to reside at the Soviet Embassy compound,
for security reasons, and not at his own embassy. The trips were arduous for the
American and British leaders, involving lengthy flights and travel on warships.
The pilgrimage to Yalta may well have contributed to the death of the already
exhausted president. It was easier to exchange letters, and there are 304
of them in this book, their contents ranging from simple acknowledgments of messages
received, to congratulatory telegrams on the occasion of the other's birthday
or in praise of the "success of your heroic army, which is an inspiration to all
of us," to the detailed discussion of major issues. (Many of these letters have
already appeared in print in other publications.) Mutual politeness was often
marred by Stalin's increasingly rude complaints about what he perceived as the
duplicitous behavior of the United States and its British ally. Roosevelt's own
complaints were always mild: they consisted principally of protestations of innocence,
or of attempts to explain the behavior of the Western allies. Not even such appalling
Soviet crimes as the massacre at Katyn of Polish POW officers, or Stalin's refusal
to allow the Western Allies to help the anti-Nazi Polish insurrectionists in Warsaw
in the fall of 1944, elicited a letter of protest from Roosevelt or, to that effect,
from Churchill. Clearly, both Roosevelt and Churchill saw it as one of
their major tasks to palliate and even humor the Soviet dictator, without whose
help the war could not have been won. Valentin M. Berezhkov, who was Stalin's
interpreter, wrote in his memoirs that "Roosevelt ... understood how important
it was to find a common language with the Kremlin dictator. And as it turned out,
he succeeded in finding an approach to Stalin that seemed to have convinced the
suspicious oriental despot that democratic society was ready to take him into
its arms. ... But then Stalin had also decided to use his charm, and he was great
at that." It is useful, for purposes of context, for Butler to remind us that
Roosevelt was not the only American trying to please the Soviet leader. Joseph
E. Davies, a millionaire playboy who was the American ambassador to Moscow from
1936 to 1938, had been one of the first American officials to heap praise on Stalin;
and Time magazine in 1942 chose the Soviet dictator as its Man of the Year,
and described him as the savior of the Western world. During the war, as
Butler explains, Roosevelt kept all the messages exchanged with Churchill, Stalin,
and Chiang Kai-shek in the Map Room of the Navy Department, to which only he,
his intimate adviser Harry Hopkins, Admiral William Leahy, and Churchill had direct
access. The president did not trust the State Department with the cables, in part
because of the isolationist conservatism of some of its top functionaries and
in part because some of the cables channeled through the State Department took
six months to reach Moscow. Stalin's letters to Roosevelt, although translated
into English by Soviet specialists, were often stylistically clumsy and grammatically
incorrect. It is worth noting that it did not seem to occur either to Roosevelt
or to Churchill to send any of their letters to Stalin in a Russian translation.
The president's first letter to the Soviet leader, dated July
26, 1941, was presented in Moscow by Harry Hopkins, who had traveled there through
Scotland and Archangel. In it, the president offered "to extend all possible aid
to the Soviet Union at the earliest possible time." Thus the United States, a
country not yet at war, declared itself ready to deprive itself of crucial war
matériel to help another power that had not only consistently decried America
as an imperialist arch-enemy, but had also been a staunch ally of Nazi Germany
until the latter chose to attack the Soviet Union. Only Roosevelt had the talent
and the prestige to persuade a hesitant Congress -- and a hesitant nation -- that
this was the right course to follow. Recall that the extension of the Selective
Service Act passed the House of Representatives on August 12, 1941 by only a single
vote. In that year, the American Army and Air Force were inferior in quantity
and quality to those of a dozen other countries, whereas the Soviet war planes,
tanks, guns, and especially troops far outnumbered those of the Germans, at least
until the first day of the German invasion on June 22, 1941. The quantity
and the quality of American aid in the so-called Lend-Lease program, as well as
the speed at which it was delivered, were (along with the question of a second
front) the most important issues that both tied together and separated Roosevelt
and Stalin. As the date of the establishment of a second front was postponed from
1942 to 1943 and then to 1944, Roosevelt tried to console the Soviets with increasing
deliveries of arms, food, and transport. The quantities transferred from the United
States to the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945 were indeed staggering: they
included, among other items, nearly 15,000 airplanes, 7,000 tanks, more than 51,000
jeeps, almost 376,000 trucks, almost 132,000 machine guns, 4.5 million tons of
food supplies, 107 million tons of cotton, and more than 15 million army boots.
At its peak in 1944, Western help amounted to 10 to 12 percent of the Soviet GNP.
Those who, like myself, witnessed the arrival of the Red Army in Central
Europe can certify that the Soviet forces traveled in American-made trucks and
jeeps, and that the foot soldiers carried American canned food in their miserable
knapsacks. Apparently their amazingly practical winter clothing was padded with
American cotton, and they wore American boots. But we also know that American
aid was not everything: Soviet-made tanks, airplanes, and artillery far outnumbered
the American deliveries; and the Soviet T-34 and other models were superior in
quality to the Shermans. Or as Stalin liked to remind Roosevelt in his letters,
American tanks had weak armor, and they traveled in a cloud of gas vapor that
made them extremely vulnerable to fire. Transports from the United States
(and even from Great Britain) to the Soviet Union had to overcome terrible difficulties,
whether on the hastily built railroad line connecting the Persian Gulf with the
Soviet Union (which was preceded by a maritime transport of more than 12,000 nautical
miles around the Cape of Good Hope) or by sailing in arctic waters to the north
of Norway. Losses to the cargo ships were especially terrible, and when, in the
summer of 1942, the PQ17 convoy, which had sailed from Great Britain, lost the
majority of its ships, together with the lives of 153 seamen, Churchill ordered
a temporary cessation of deliveries. Needless to say, Stalin complained repeatedly
about the delays. The problem was not only that ever more aid was needed
by the Soviets, who in Europe stood alone against the Germans until the Anglo-American
invasion of Sicily on July 10, 1943, but also that the Soviets and the West had
different notions about what constituted permissible sacrifices and acceptable
casualties. What for Churchill and Roosevelt were intolerable losses, namely the
sinking of valuable cargo and the death of a few hundred skilled seamen, counted
as nothing for Stalin, who thought in terms of millions of dead.
The biggest bone of contention was the second front, which the West promised but
again and again did not deliver. Early in June 1942, Roosevelt authorized Soviet
Foreign Minister Molotov to inform Stalin that the United States expected the
formation of a second front in that year. The president promised Stalin an invasion
with forces sufficient to draw off forty German divisions; but Roosevelt surely
knew that his general staff was preparing for an invasion for April 1, 1943 only,
and that the Allies did not have the means to mount such a large-scale invasion,
or indeed any invasion, in Europe in 1942. Later he must have realized that the
Anglo-American landings in French Morocco and Algeria in November 1942 were not
the second front that he and the Soviets had been considering. Today it is hard
to understand why Roosevelt and Churchill so brazenly lied to the Soviets, whose
young men and women perished at Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad. The
elimination of more than 300,000 Axis soldiers in North Africa between November
1942 and May 1943 -- the majority of them Italians who were eager to surrender
-- was a great victory for the Grand Alliance, which Stalin did not sufficiently
appreciate. Instead he argued that neither the North African campaign nor the
subsequent invasion of Italy constituted the establishment of a second front.
Churchill wrote to him that a cross-channel invasion in 1943 would be a waste
of effort: "It would be no help to Russia if we threw away 100,000 men in a disastrous
cross-channel attack." And Stalin replied on June 24, 1943 by quoting sarcastically
from the many misleading statements the Western Allies had made regarding the
cross-channel invasion. He concluded: "You write to me that you fully understand
my disappointment. I have to tell you that this is not simply matter [sic] of
disappointment of the Soviet Government, but a matter of preservation of its confidence
in the Allies which confidence is subjected to hard trials." The cross-channel
invasion finally came on June 6, 1944, and it was duly celebrated by Stalin in
his congratulatory telegrams. But the Soviets could never rid themselves of the
suspicion that the delay in the invasion had been due to Churchill's insistence
on mounting the major invasion from the south, which might have brought the Allied
troops into Central Europe before the arrival of the Red Army. Stalin also suspected
that the Allies had been waiting for the Germans and the Russians to exhaust each
other, and that they invaded France only when it became clear that the Red Army
was perfectly capable of defeating Germany on its own. In other words, Stalin
suspected the Allies of the same Machiavellian behavior that he had exhibited
toward the West between 1939 and 1941. (Still, it must be stated that, unlike
the Western Allies, the Soviets kept their side of the military agreements by
launching offensives whenever the West needed their indirect help.) There
were other reasons for grave disagreement between East and West, the most painful
and embarrassing being the case of Poland -- not only had the Soviet Union attacked
Poland in cooperation with Nazi Germany on September 17, 1939, and annexed the
eastern half of the country, but its mistreatment of the Polish population surpassed
in brutality even that of the German occupiers. Well before the German attack
on Russia, Stalin pressed for Allied recognition of the Soviet Union's new western
boundaries. One reason why Roosevelt sent aid to Stalin as early as 1941 was to
divert Soviet attention from the Polish question. Soon after the start of Operation
Barbarossa, the Soviets yielded to Western demands and recognized the Polish exile
government in London as well as allowed Polish POWs in the Soviet Union to organize
their own armed units. A substantial number of these Poles were able to leave
the Soviet Union and to join the British forces in the Middle East. The
terrible Katyn affair erupted in April 1943, when the retreating Germans announced
that they had found the bodies of thousands of Polish officers who had been shot
in the back of the head. The Polish underground and the exile government soon
came to the conclusion that the killers had been the Soviets in March 1940, and
not, as the Soviet propaganda pretended, the Germans in July 1941. When Germany
invited a committee of the International Red Cross to investigate the affair,
and the Polish government allowed a few representatives of the Polish underground
to join the committee, Stalin broke diplomatic relations with the exile government
in London. Writing to Roosevelt that the government of General Wladyslaw Sikorski
was "pandering to Hitler's tyranny," he used the Katyn affair as an excuse for
forming a Polish countergovernment under the Soviet aegis. The Katyn massacre
is one of the best-known wartime tragedies, so it should suffice to say here that
Roosevelt found himself in an extremely difficult situation. He never completely
gave in to Stalin on the Katyn issue, refusing to break relations with the London
Poles. But he tried to humor Stalin by apologizing for the behavior of the Sikorski
government. He wrote on April 26, 1943: "It is my view that Sikorski has not acted
in any way with [the] Hitler gang, but rather that he made a stupid mistake in
taking the matter up with the International Red Cross. ... I have several million
Poles in the United States, very many of them in the Army and Navy. They are all
bitter against the Nazis and knowledge of a complete diplomatic break between
you and Sikorski would not help the situation." Roosevelt might have been very
serious about the Polish voters, but he must also have known that such an argument
counted for nothing in the eyes of Stalin, who believed the president to be as
powerful in the United States as he himself was in the Soviet Union. He expected
Roosevelt simply to sweep away his opponents. The Soviets treated the Poles
under their authority abominably, killing thousands and deporting hundreds of
thousands, which often amounted to a death sentence. They demanded on the radio
that the Warsaw Poles rise and kill the "Hitler fascists," and then they refused
to rush to the aid of the fighting city. Nor did they permit the Allies to help
the Poles. Stalin called the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising "fascist adventurers."
Or, as he wrote to Roosevelt on August 22, 1944 (his letter marred by the characteristic
stylistic errors of the Soviet translators): "Sooner or later but the truth about
a handful of criminals, who for the sake of seizure of power undertook the Warsaw
adventure, will be universally known. These people have used the trustfulness
of the Warsawites, having thrown many almost unarmed people under German guns,
tanks, and aviation." The Polish question continued to bedevil Western-Soviet
relations to the end; it was a major issue at Tehran and Yalta. But all later
accusations to the contrary, there was not much that the Western powers could
have done for that embattled country. No matter how embarrassing it was for Roosevelt
and Churchill to abandon their best ally, the only nation in Europe that had fought
Nazi Germany from the beginning to the end, the military situation made it inevitable
for Poland to fall under Soviet control. Consider that the Soviets absorbed with
barely a murmur the Anglo-American domination of Japan, Italy, France, and the
rest of Western Europe, as well as Greece and the entire Middle East. Soviet rule
of Eastern Europe was similarly a direct consequence of war. It is useful
to remind ourselves that, at the time of the Yalta Conference in February 1945,
the Red Army stood 35 miles away from Berlin, while the Allies were still licking
the wounds they had suffered during the Germans' Ardennes offensive in France
and Belgium. Finally, while it is true that the Soviet aggression in 1939 against
Poland as well as the Katyn massacre and other atrocities were among the worst
crimes of World War II (for which the Soviet leaders should have been tried in
court after the war), Soviet insistence on the annexation of eastern Poland was
no more of an outrage than the Polish exile government's insistence that it remain
Polish. The area encompassing interwar eastern Poland has been changing
hands for centuries; its interwar incorporation into the Republic of Poland was
the result of a war that the Poles and the Soviets had fought in 1920, in the
course of which the Poles first took Kiev in eastern Ukraine, and then the Bolsheviks
nearly conquered Warsaw. Finally, the Treaty of Riga, concluded in 1921, accorded
the territory to Poland, even though the ethnic Poles formed a minority among
the Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Jews. In September 1939, the Soviets
underhandedly seized the area, profiting from their alliance with Nazi Germany;
in June 1941, the Germans invaded eastern Poland; and in 1944 the Soviets returned,
solemnly re-incorporating the area into the Soviet republics. So whereas
mutual claims based on military conquest more or less neutralized each other,
the new boundary between the Soviet Union and Poland more or less conformed to
the demarcation line suggested in 1919 by Lord Curzon, the British foreign secretary.
As a consolation prize, the three great powers offered eastern Germany to Poland,
shifting the country and its people westward. But Polish claims to eastern Germany
were certainly no more legal and historically justified than the Soviet claims
to eastern Poland. In Eastern Europe, where ethnic self-determination was then
on everybody's lips, the violation of this principle was the rule rather than
the exception. Only the ethnic cleansing begun before World War II and tremendously
hastened by wartime developments would solve all these problems, at the price
of millions of casualties and incredible suffering. At Yalta especially,
Churchill and Roosevelt endeavored to have a few representatives of the London
government inserted in the Polish countergovernment created by the Soviets. They
were temporarily successful. Roosevelt also got Stalin to sign the "Declaration
of Liberated Europe," which guaranteed "the right of all people to choose the
form of government under which they will live." In Eastern Europe, this had only
theoretical significance at the time, but it is conceivable that the declaration,
and other similar ones, played an important role in the Polish people's self-liberation
less than half a century later. What counts is that, by the time of Yalta, the
fate of Eastern Europe, including Poland, had long been settled. Back at the Tehran
Conference, military reality had forced the Western powers to recognize the supremacy
of the Soviet Union in that part of Europe. The Conference of Yalta was really
not a crucial event. Besides defeating the Germans and the Japanese,
with British and Soviet help, Roosevelt's main goal was to assure a lasting peace.
As early as 1941, he began to write to Churchill and Stalin about his concept
of the "four policemen," namely the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union,
and China, who would make sure that no rogue states would emerge again. This original
idea gradually developed into the great concept of the United Nations, a world
organization of free states that, unlike the old League of Nations, would be able
to enforce its will through the agency of the Security Council, in which the "four
policemen" would be endowed with veto power. It is hard to tell from the correspondence
how seriously Stalin took Roosevelt's idea, but the latter went so far as to virtually
isolate his great ally Churchill at Yalta, so as to demonstrate to the Soviet
dictator that the United States and the Soviet Union would be the future leaders
of the world. It certainly shows some interest in the United Nations on Stalin's
part that he demanded a vote for every Soviet republic in the General Assembly
of the United Nations, finally settling on extra votes for Ukraine and Belorussia.
At other times, however, he tended to treat the idea of international organizations
cavalierly. Stalin seemed fully to agree with Churchill that the world
would ultimately be divided into spheres of interest, a practical solution that
no world organization could effectively challenge. Witness Churchill's notorious
proposal, which the British prime minister jotted down hastily on a piece of paper,
to Stalin in Moscow, on October 9, 1944. It adjudicated 90 percent interest to
Russia in Romania in exchange for 90 percent interest to Great Britain in Greece,
and so on and so forth. The proposal was taken so seriously that, on the next
day, Foreign Minister Molotov and Foreign Secretary Eden took up the negotiations,
with Molotov asking for more than 50 percent Russian interest in Hungary, and
Eden arguing for a little more British influence than the miserly 25 percent that
Churchill originally wanted in Bulgaria. What these percentages truly meant
was never defined, but there could be no doubt that the Soviets and the British
thought they were practicing realpolitik, as opposed to what they felt were Roosevelt's
utopian ideas of international cooperation. No wonder that they at first tried
to keep the informal agreement secret from Averell Harriman, the American ambassador
to Moscow. And yet from the perspective of sixty years, it is clear that the British-Soviet
percentage agreement was an illusion, because Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria eventually
fell completely into the Soviet orbit, while the British profited nothing from
their allotted 10 to 25 percent in those countries. Meanwhile, the Soviets got
nothing out of their allotted 10 percent in Greece. As for Yugoslavia, where the
agreement called for a fifty-fifty division of influence by the two powers, Tito
played a trick on both sides by making his country both communist and independent.
As opposed to the nonsense of the Moscow proposal, Roosevelt's United Nations
is still with us, and so are a great number of other international institutions
that the president forced upon his hesitant wartime allies. There were
as many reasons for continued cooperation among the three great powers after the
war as there were reasons for an end to the cooperation. The happy scenes on the
Elbe River in May 1945 were a good augury, as was the Soviet Union's willingness
to go to war against Japan. In Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946, the Soviets, the British,
and the French willingly accepted American leadership in prosecuting the major
German war criminals. The peace treaties signed with Germany's former allies caused
infinitely less rancor among the victors than the peace negotiations in 1919 had
caused among the Allies. But Soviet anti-Western propaganda had become venomous
by 1945, and the Soviets' bloody suppression of the anti-Nazi Polish Home Army
was just one of the many outrages committed by the Red Army. Most importantly,
Roosevelt died, and in September 1945 President Truman abruptly ended the Lend-Lease
program, leaving millions of Soviet citizens on the edge of starvation. Later
the Soviets refused to consider the Marshall Plan, the best and most generous
of all American aid programs. Mutual suspicion now triumphed over mutual cooperation.
Reading Roosevelt's and Stalin's letters to each other, as well as the
memoirs of Roosevelt's aides such as Charles Bohlen, B. Averell Harriman, Harold
L. Hopkins, Cordell Hull, George Kennan, and Edward Stettinius Jr., it becomes
clear that these educated, liberal, upper-class Americans mixed a judicious amount
of idealism with realism in shaping the future of their world. This did not prevent
them from often disliking one another, and later from criticizing their boss for
excessive self-confidence and naïveté. But considering that, despite all
their mutual animosity, the United States and the Soviet Union never went to war
against each other and at worst fought by proxy, one must admit that both the
American and the Soviet leaders did a fairly good job, at least when it came to
the preservation of humankind. What would Stalin and Roosevelt say if they could
see Germany and Eastern Central Europe today: all democratic, all capitalist,
all welfare states, and all completely free of Russian but not of American troops?
Stalin would be complaining bitterly, and Roosevelt would rightly see his policies
as justified.
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