Providing Lend-Lease aid to Britain and above all to the USSR may have been Roosevelt’s most significant accomplishment. It saved countless American lives, and the United States emerged from the war with victory and a booming economy. Perhaps most important of all, without the promise of American assistance, the Soviet Union might well have capitulated.
For Soviet citizens, what came through the press reports, official lectures, and so on was a new narrative of their country on the international scene. Instead of a struggle against capitalism, the new image of the USSR was that it was “at the heart of an alliance of progressive states” in the war against the Hitlerites.105 Be that as it may, the views of the Soviet leadership had not changed much at all. What was said represented no more than a shift in political tactics.
STALIN’S STARK DEMANDS FROM THE WEST
The initial German advance into the Soviet Union in June 1941 had looked unstoppable. People had to decide to stay or go. For the manager of a factory, when to flee became a catch-22. If he took the files and the cash and left too soon, he could be accused of treason. If he “willfully remained” and had contact with the enemy, however, he could suffer the same fate. Time to make the right decision was short.106
Soviet citizens, and not only just those close to the borders, knew their country was precipitously close to falling. One who made it out of Moscow after the war vividly remembered the panic there in mid-October 1941:
Everyone was going in all directions. Nobody was punished for any crime. They broke open store windows in broad daylight. Jewish pogroms started. The arrival of the Germans was expected from hour to hour. German planes were flying overhead from street to street and no one even shot at them; the Germans weren’t afraid but they waved their hats and greeted the public from the planes. They could have taken Moscow easily. There was no one in command of anything.107
Another resident recalled that the upheaval lasted a day or two, “then there was nothing more to loot. The stores were empty.”108 Defeatists were shot out of hand, for example, on October 16, when the NKVD executed more than two hundred. Still others classified as “especially dangerous criminals” were taken from the Lubyanka prison and shot. The strong-arm tactics restored order.109
The Red Army fought ferociously on the outskirts of Moscow, at times within twenty miles of the Kremlin. Nevertheless, Stalin felt bold enough on November 7, the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, to hold the annual parade. He thought it would give the country a needed shot in the arm. The day before, he spoke on the radio and called the nation his “brothers and sisters.” Evoking Russian patriotism, he pointed to examples of great leaders in her past. For the first time, he lauded the new link with the United States and Great Britain and said that the side “who will have the overwhelming superiority in the production of motors will win the war.”110
Only two days after announcing the new solidarity with the Anglo-Americans, he wrote Churchill and accused them of trying to avoid discussions of the postwar settlement. He was also angry that the British had not yet agreed on mutual military assistance. Even with the Wehrmacht at the gates, Stalin already had his eye on the postwar period. Although the prime minister was offended by the tone, he soon sent Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to iron things out.111
Eden and Stalin met with draft agreements in hand on December 16. Stalin wanted Germany weakened and dismembered by transferring a large slice of territory to Poland. What remained of Prussia could become an independent state but without the Rhineland, which included Germany’s major industrial area. Austria would become independent again, as perhaps might Bavaria. Stalin said that all these changes would weaken Germany and make it unable to threaten war for another generation.112 It was he who tried to persuade Eden about these steps and the need for reparations.113
The next day Stalin—as Eden put it—“began to show his claws” and demanded recognition of the Soviet borders of 1941. In effect, he was seeking official sanction of the USSR conquests in its war of aggression against Poland and the Baltic states. Now he proposed that, when victory came, Poland would be compensated by expanding to the west at Germany’s expense. The USSR would get eastern Poland up to the Curzon Line. That was the frontier proposed in vain in 1920 by British foreign secretary Curzon to divide the newly established Polish state from revolutionary Russia. Back then Poland had been strong enough to take land east of that line. If the USSR could get that territory, large parts of the former Russian Empire would again be under Moscow’s rule. Eden demurred and, in a wire to Churchill at the end of the talks, summed up the situation. Stalin wanted military agreements, “but he will not sign until we recognize his frontiers, and we must expect continuing badgering on this issue.”114
The recently revealed Soviet records show how Stalin meant to mislead his allies. The dictator’s passion to dismember the German enemy was the cornerstone of the Kremlin’s plan for postwar Europe, and demanding it at every opportunity was more than mere “negotiating tactics,” as some Russian historians have suggested.115 He meant to expand the Soviet Union and its influence as much as possible. At the same time, being acutely aware of public opinion in the West, he denied allegations circulating there that the USSR intended “to Bolshevize Europe.”116 During all the wartime conferences, in fact, he never once mentioned a desire to advance Communism. Instead, he shrewdly couched his demands exclusively in terms of Soviet “security interests.” This was his new mask, behind which he concealed his ideological and political fixations.
Stalin went to great lengths to make it seem unreasonable that anyone would deny his demands for better security. He offered to support British claims, should they have any, for air and naval bases in postwar Belgium and Holland. He wondered why the British would not give reciprocal support, when all he wanted was a return to the borders of 1941.117
On December 7, as the Red Army was counterattacking German forces, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Japan had not even informed Hitler, who would have much preferred that they had invaded the USSR in the east and thus tied down Soviet troops.
President Roosevelt approached the Soviet ambassador on the day following the unprovoked attack, in the hope that Stalin would join the United States in declaring war on Japan. He was told that the Soviet leader was in no position to do so, nor would he be until the Red Army managed to turn back the Nazis. That was several long years away.118
On December 11 Hitler added to his mistakes with a grand proclamation of war against the United States and thus brought on its economic and military might without getting much in return. The next day in Moscow, Pravda announced that the German advance had been stopped. As if to make matters worse for Hitler, before the year was out, the U.S. and Britain affirmed their decision to defeat Germany first.119
CHAPTER 4
Soviet Aims and Western Concessions
The Western Allies were torn between worries about Communism and more immediate fears of Germany and Japan. Stalin knew of these concerns and tried to present the Soviet Union as an upstanding and reliable partner. Almost from the beginning of the war, he counseled resistance leaders with links to Moscow to adopt a “unity of action” with other anti-Nazi forces. They should do what they could against the occupation but avoid appearing as indigenous Communist revolutionary movements.1 This new party line was a return to the antifascist stance propagated by the Comintern in the 1930s, which had become politically embarrassing in August 1939, when Stalin signed an alliance with Hitler.2