An Unpublished Letter
In August, 2016, I wrote the following letter to the editor of Prospect magazine:
“In her review of Daniel Todman’s Britain’s War: Into Battle, 1937-41 (Prospect, August 2016) Lara Feigel writes: ‘He (Churchill) sent in foolishly large numbers of troops to help France in 1940 because he was upset to lose such a close ally to a German occupation, while he failed to help the Soviet Union swiftly in 1941.’
This appears as a reckless judgment. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa), the Nazi-Soviet Pact had been in effect for almost two years, and Stalin had been supplying the Germans not only with strategic intelligence, but with oil and war materiel to aid the Nazis’ prosecution of their war against Britain. Churchill had meanwhile supplied Stalin with urgent warnings about Hitler’s plans for Barbarossa, intelligence that Stalin stubbornly ignored. Moreover, since the original casus belli had been Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Britain could be said to have had a moral obligation to declare war on the Soviet Union rather than come to her aid, given the latter’s rape of Eastern Poland and the Baltic States in 1939-1940.
When the Soviet Union was attacked, Churchill immediately declared support for a regime he implicitly loathed, and diverted valuable resources to the Soviet cause, at a time when the USA was not yet in the war. The dangerous convoys to Murmansk started as soon as September 1941, an effort for which little gratitude was received from Stalin. Instead, the Soviet dictator, aided by his manipulative ambassador, Ivan Maisky, and his spies in such crucial places as the Ministry of Information, pressed for the opening of a Second Front, the premature execution of which would have been disastrous for the war effort. Stalin no doubt knew that.
One could assert that the Soviet Union deserved all that came to it. The long-suffering people of that country, however, unlike those in Britain, had no control over the policies of their leader: Churchill, meanwhile, had continually to consider his political opponents as well as the views of the public. The notion that Churchill somehow failed the ‘gallant vast Soviet Union’ is simply ridiculous.”
My letter was not published. Rather than use this opportunity to complain about the way that professional historians are allowed to make highly controversial assertions without there being any open forum for dissident voices to challenge them (perhaps a topic for a later blog), I want to use the letter as a prologue to expand on the messages from my book, Misdefending the Realm.
The Cold War
A dominant narrative in much of recent histories of the Cold War runs as follows: Roosevelt and Churchill had an excellent opportunity to cooperate with Stalin as WWII ran down; the relationship was betrayed by the fact that nuclear secrets were not shared with Stalin; atomic spies were working for world peace; McCarthyite witch-hunts persecuted many innocent leftist activists; any trust that could have been built up with Stalin (who wanted ‘peace’) was destroyed by political extremism. The agreements at Yalta fell apart. In that way did the Cold War start. Amy Knight’s How The Cold War Began (2005) is one such work, suggesting that undue fuss was made over communists who did not actually spy, and that Stalin was justifiably offended by the USA’s bomb being exploded at Hiroshima, the opportunity for international control of atomic power was lost, and the Cold War thus began.
I believe this narrative is a travesty. To begin with, believing in ‘partnership’ with a totalitarian murderer in the interest of ‘world security’ was a mistake of disastrous proportions. In this regard, we have to challenge the judgment of the leaders of the western alliance. Churchill never successfully reconciled his odium for communism with his belief that he could do business with Stalin. Roosevelt, for all his political skills, was a victim of his own vanity and was influenced by a nest of communists in government. He drove an unnecessary wedge between himself and Churchill in a play of appeasing Stalin, and trying to win the dictator’s trust. Stalin expertly exploited Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s weaknesses. Moreover, he gained an immense advantage in negotiations because of the spies he had operating in Britain and the USA. Yet this dimension of an intelligence disequilibrium, by which forces of oppression were able to take advantage of the democracies, is frequently overlooked, or even turned on its head. Every now and then, another book or article appears chanting this tune of missed opportunities by the western powers, claiming, for instance, that Alger Hiss was innocent, the concern about communist infiltration was ‘hysteria’, and the disdain for the Soviet Union was ‘prejudice’. Accordingly, historians such as John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr (the authors of the excellent In Denial) have to write a letter to the press reminding editors and historians of the VENONA transcripts, and pointing out how Roosevelt’s administration was riddled with Communist spies. Only last month, Jonathan Mirsky admitted, in the Spectator (October 14): “. . . Alger Hiss, an actual communist spy – as lefties like myself could not admit for years.” Lara Feigel’s criticism of Churchill’s apparent passivity is the latest symptom of this pro-Stalinist malaise.
In my book, I make the case that MI5 calamitously let the country down when it failed to heed the warnings of the defector Walter Krivitsky in early 1940, and, with a woeful regard for security, carelessly let a report on his interrogations slip into the hands of the Soviet spies Jenifer Hart and Guy Burgess. The result was twofold: Krivitsky was killed a year later, and Burgess was able to effect the infiltration of further spies and communist sympathisers into all areas of government before Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Yet the narrative in my book mainly stopped before Barbarossa. I did not undertake any projection of ‘virtual history’ to suggest how the lack of heeding Krivitsky’s warnings affected British policy towards the Soviet Union. I did not project how the disclosures from Stalin’s spies in Britain affected the conduct of the war, or how events might have unfolded differently as the Cold War took over from the heat of 1945 when Germany collapsed. I did not consider whether the Soviet Union could have been prevented from extending its empire into the territories in whose defence Britain had gone to war. The promotional campaign for my work has concentrated on the longer-term possible outcomes of MI5’s mistakes, and I want to analyse them here.
Security and Cooperation
The topics that dominated internal wartime discussions about handling the Soviet Union were ‘security’ and ‘co-operation’. Security, because the Soviets were determined that their borders not be infringed a third time, after the Germans had invaded Russia during the First World War, and then again in 1941. ‘Collective security’ had failed as a protective strategy in the 1930s, and an agreement with the western democracies was necessary for the Soviet Union to become strong again. (What was frequently forgotten, however, was that much of Stalin’s historical security problem had been self-inflicted, since he had jeopardised his country’s defences – and ability to wage war – by the purges of the Red Army.) Stalin wanted to carve up Germany when the war was won, and rationalised the Soviet Union’s occupation of the Baltic States as a desire to have ‘buffer states’ between themselves and Germany. He recapitulated this theme as they planned the occupation of Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, demanding a leading role in administering these countries at the conclusion of the war. The notion of ‘security’ also played into Roosevelt’s hands, as he had dreams by which the ‘Big Three’ would dominate the forthcoming world government body, the United Nations, and thus prevent further wars. ‘Co-operation’ was a watchword for the Foreign Office diplomats, who believed that a positive approach to defining joint goals for peace, and ensuring the security of Europe after the war, without a vengeful Germany being able to make any recidivist moves, would be likely to be reciprocated by good will and accommodating gestures by Stalin.
Yet there were major problems with this negotiating tactic. First of all, the Soviet Union had engaged in an odious compact with Nazi Germany to invade sovereign states: it was equally as guilty of border infringement. A deep moral question surrounded the notion of ‘buffer states’. ‘Buffer states’ were reliable cushions against possible aggression only if they were dependable, led by governments sympathetic to Soviet aims. In order to be dependable, they had to be controlled. And if they were controlled from Moscow, that meant they became part of the Soviet Empire, and were no longer buffer states. The Soviet Union’s military boundaries were in fact extended. That reinforced the notion of a perpetual communist threat to the rest of Europe, and gave life to ‘domino theory’. Nothing would have pleased the Soviets more than the Communists winning post-war elections in France and Italy. Moreover, the role of Poland was especially poignant in this debate. Britain had gone to war over Germany’s invasion of Poland, and the Polish government-in-exile had been one of the most loyal administrations during the war. While one might ask questions as to exactly how ‘democratic’ pre-war Poland had been, and what the ambitions of its government-in-exile were, it did nevertheless appear that Roosevelt and Churchill were prepared to sacrifice Polish democracy (and national boundaries) in a dire gesture of appeasement to Stalin, who intended to impose his authoritarian communism over that country as the war wound down. Why should that privilege be granted to the Soviet Union? What kind of ‘security’ was that?
The notion of ‘cooperation’ is a dangerous one, as well. If two parties are going to ‘cooperate’, they must have common values and goals. (This is the dominant conclusion from Plokhy’s book, listed below, one that I must admit to have reached before I read his work.) To suggest that Britain and the Soviet Union shared the same vision for what the shape and structure of postwar Europe should be would indicate that at least one party was lying, and trying to deceive the other. ‘Cooperation’ is not a goal, but a process. If security meant only that the Soviet Union’s ability to crush independence of thought in the states it would come to ‘liberate’ after the war, it was not a goal worth cooperating over. That security on which Roosevelt (especially) pinned his hopes simply granted a degree of legitimacy to Stalin’s despotism, and committed eastern Europe to almost fifty years of communist oppression. If (as Plokhy suggests) the Soviet Union needed twenty years of security in order to prepare for the next major clash between ideologies, why would the potential victims of that revolution facilitate their enemy’s recovery? How did Britain and America’s political strategists become so deluded over these matters?
What I find deficient in most of the histories of this period is their single-dimensionality. They almost uniformly ignore, above all, the influence that Stalin’s spies had on the fabric of British and American institutions and strategical thinking, and thus on Stalin’s ability to negotiate to his advantage. I present here a summary of some of the primary relevant works. Victor Rothwell’s oddly titled Britain and the Cold War 1941-1947 (1982) provided an analysis of Foreign Office ruminations, but was correctly encapsulated by A J. P. Taylor in the London Review of Books, as ‘What one clerk said to another’, since it ignored the multiple organs outside the Foreign Office who laid claim to contributing to the forging of British foreign policy. Martin Kitchen’s Britain’s Policy Towards the Soviet Union 1939-1945 (1986) has worn very well, despite a disappointingly equivocal and bland conclusion about the merits of the two participants, and is enlivened by the author’s dry humour. It is understandably parsimonious in covering the activities of Stalin’s spies, not even mentioning the 1940 mission of Burgess and Berlin to Moscow to influence the Comintern. It is balanced well by Stephen Miner’s Between Churchill and Stalin (1988), which contains some penetrating observations about the reality of Soviet policies, with concentration on Cripps’s tenure as ambassador, and draws parallels between the appeasement of Hitler and that of Stalin. Geoffrey Warner provided a rich and insightful contribution to the compilation Diplomacy and Word Power: Studies in British Foreign Policy, 1890-1950 (1996), but his chapter, From ally to enemy: Britain’s relations with the Soviet Union, 1941-1948, surprisingly makes no reference to the influence of espionage and Soviet propaganda on the UK. I have on this site previously drawn attention to the strengths and weaknesses of Bradley Smith’s Sharing Secrets with Stalin (1996). Martin H. Folly’s Churchill, Whitehall and the Soviet Union 1940-45 (2000) focuses laboriously on the strategy of ‘cooperation’ between Britain and the Soviet Union, but it includes only one reference to espionage, and that appears on the last page, in the conclusion, when Donald Maclean receives a belated mention. It lacks any pressing political context, or critical impulse. Ian Kershaw’s Fateful Choices (2007) overall provides an excellent analysis of the war leaders’ strategic options, and covers the intelligence dimension very well, although he is somewhat too trustful of secondary sources (such as Read and Fisher on the Lucy Ring), and rather too sunny over the Roosevelt-Churchill relationship. S. K. Plokhy’s Yalta (2010) has a more American perspective, and is excellent in its focus on the complexities of the Yalta negotiations, although occasionally too discursive. I shall say little about Susan Butler’s irresponsible Roosevelt and Stalin: Portrait of a Partnership (2015). The work with which I initiated this piece, Daniel Todman’s Britain’s War 1937-1941: Into Battle (2016) is a much livelier compendium, but likewise can find no room for such organisations as the Joint Intelligence Committee, let alone the machinations of Guy Burgess’s friends in influencing propaganda. (Yet I struggled to find the assertion that Lara Feigel highlights: on the contrary, Todman writes, on p 692, that “If America was the ‘arsenal of democracy’, then over the winter of 1941-42, Britain was an arsenal for totalitarianism.”) But how can incisive history be written about this period without considering the implications of intelligence, espionage and counter-espionage?
Asymmetrical Relations
The notion of ‘co-operation’ suggests one of partnership. Yet the imbalance in the field of espionage is just one facet of many disparities that governed the partnership between the Allies. In reality, it was a highly asymmetrical relationship that existed between the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the USA, and it had the following dimensions:
1) Moral Equivalency:
Leftist commentators have frequently categorised the discord of the Cold War as a clash between ideologies, namely ‘communism’ and ‘capitalism’, echoing the Leninist line. But it was really nothing of the kind. It should be better described as a struggle between liberal democracy and totalitarianism, and Stalin’s version of the latter was just as distasteful and murderous as Hitler’s. Roosevelt (and, to a lesser extent, Churchill) was quick to classify Stalin as ‘peace-loving’ when it suited them, suffering temporary amnesia over the fate of millions of Soviet citizens for whose death he was responsible, and the fact that Stalin’s ideology required the overthrow of the democracies which the two leaders defended. Moreover, the UK and the USA did not plan to install ‘right-wing’ governments in Europe (as Stalin feared): they wanted to foster liberal democracies that would rely on commerce and free enterprise to bring prosperity – ‘bourgeois’ notions that Stalin detested. To him, ‘democratic’ meant ‘anti-fascist’, and ‘anti-fascist’ meant communist. Stalin’s plans, on the other hand, were authoritarian and despotic, and citizens of such countries as Czechoslovakia would soon learn what the Poles had already predicted ̶ that they had swopped one tyranny for another. ‘Liberation’ thus had two meanings: when the western allies brought liberation, it mean freedom, open elections, and withdrawal (apart from Germany) by the liberators; when the Soviets were the agents, it meant imprisonment, persecution, murder, and imposed communism. Yet British and American representatives, during negotiations, were loath to mention uncomfortable facts like the Purges or the Nazi-Soviet pact, as it might have risked embarrassing their ‘partner’. Likewise they were craven over the discovery of the murders of Katyn Forest, and did not challenge Stalin over the massacre of thousands of Polish officers. Overall, they were reluctant to take any moral higher ground, lest ‘co-operation’ be endangered.
In one respect, Great Britain was morally impaired. The Atlantic Charter of August 1941, signed by Roosevelt and Churchill, had promised political self-determination to oppressed countries. While Roosevelt considered that this principle applied to all peoples, Churchill obtusely decided that it applied only to enslaved European countries, and not to British colonies. Stalin was not morally superior in pointing out this contradiction, but he was correct in identifying the hypocrisy of Churchill’s interpretation of the Atlantic Charter. Britain’s obdurate retention of imperial pretensions (something that the postwar Labour Government oddly hung on to, overruling Attlee’s inclinations) was a severe stumbling-block in its ability to negotiate with confidence and integrity, and it caused a rift between Roosevelt and Churchill that Stalin was able to exploit. Yet this comparison should not be taken too far: Beaverbrook, for example, compared the need for the Soviet Union to control buffer states as a strategic frontier to Britain’s use of an outpost at Gibraltar. The treatment of the colonies by Great Britain was frequently cruel, even brutal, but the use of a territory acquired legally by treaty to defend sea-routes can by no means be equated to the tyrannies imposed by Stalin on neutral countries. Foreign Office opinion, however, had, in 1940, been exceedingly bland about the injustices of the Baltic States’ being sacrificed in the cause Stalin’s defensive whims. When a Foreign Office dignitary like Orme Sargent could later write: “Is not the Russian attitude about Warsaw exactly the same as General Eisenhower’s about Paris?”, it should have been obvious that the propaganda battle had been lost. Britain had not been able to articulate a consistent moral stance.
2) Pluralism vs. Totalitarianism:
Reading the accounts of Whitehall’s development of strategy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union provides the analyst with a bewildering sense of how fragmented the approach was. Not only did multiple Foreign Office members contribute learned papers on how Stalin’s moves should be interpreted; input came from the diplomats in the Embassy (in Kuibyshev or Moscow), from the Ambassadors Cripps and Clark Kerr, from visiting ministers like Eden (the Foreign Minister), or Beaverbrook, from the Chiefs of Staff and the Ministry of Political Warfare, from the Joint Intelligence Committee, and the Ministry of Information – and, of course, from Churchill himself. His pragmatic Chiefs of Staff were almost always at loggerheads with the more idealistic Foreign Office, which contained its own differences of opinion. Moreover, Churchill presided over a coalition government that contained crypto-communists like Cripps and Ellen Wilkinson, and he was answerable to a public that had access to a free press. Communist sympathisers freely published their opinions, and Soviet agents of influence performed their role in official propaganda. Lastly, Churchill had several insistent governments-in-exile on his doorstep, continually asking for special treatment.
Stalin had no such bureaucracy to deal with. Unlike his counterparts in Whitehall, he surely did not maintain a Post Hostilities Planning Sub-Committee. He made all the decisions himself, and his minions (even Molotov) would not suggest any plan of action without having gained approval from the Generalissimo beforehand. His intelligence officers, when they listened in to private conversations, were amazed that British diplomats could challenge their superiors – a phenomenon unknown in the Soviet Union. General Brooke (Churchill’s Chief of the Imperial General Staff, later Viscount Alanbrooke) was in turn amazed at the obsequiousness that Stalin’s generals displayed to their boss. And, while Stalin frequently baited his counterparts with suggestions that he was powerless to act because of how his public might react, that was a charade. Eden (for example) was naive enough not to challenge him. British diplomats ingenuously imagined that Stalin’s more inflexible policies were drawn up because of pressure from Politburo hardliners, who were responsible for Stalin’s occasional foul moods. They even convinced Churchill that Stalin was subject to their malign influences, a frustration that Churchill echoed. (There were no such beasts.) The Soviet public had no access to objective information about the course of the war, and no vehicle through which to express any opinions. Stalin manipulated his citizenry to such a degree that the British complained that their contributions to assist the Soviet Union’s war efforts never received any recognition or gratitude. Stalin publicly minimised the role the Allies were playing, took aid for granted, and complained about British sailors’ antics in Murmansk. He hated any foreign influence reaching his Soviet citizens.
3) Espionage:
Whereas British diplomats continually expressed concern that they might not be ‘trusted’ by Stalin, their sincerity doubted, and the partnership with the Soviet Union might therefore be thrown at risk, Stalin manipulated them by a massive betrayal of ‘trust’ – namely the presence of a large web of spies in all departments of government. This infiltration ironically increased after Krivitsky’s interrogation early in 1940, as Guy Burgess was (probably) able to divert attention away from Communists towards a phantom Nazi Fifth Column. Thus several of Stalin’s Englishmen and Englishwomen, and their sympathisers, soon came to be established in positions of power, influence, or access. For example, Anthony Blunt and Victor Rothschild were employed by MI5, and Kim Philby by SIS. Donald Maclean was in the Foreign Office, while one of the Oxford Group of spies, Christopher Hill, an open Marxist, wrote pro-Soviet propaganda in the Foreign Office Research Department, and became the Northern Department’s expert on Soviet affairs. Burgess himself worked with his crony Harold Nicolson at the Ministry of Information, liaising with SIS, while his friend the Czech communist Peter Smollett (né Smolka) took charge of the Russian desk to push Soviet propaganda. James MacGibbon and Bernard Floud worked in Military Operations (M08). Leo Long was in Military Intelligence in MI14, and John Cairncross at Bletchley Park in GC&CS. Jenifer Hart worked at the Home Office, and Isaiah Berlin and Cedric Belfrage were in British Security Information in New York. E. H. Carr now had an influential position at the Times, and James Klugmann influenced policy for SOE in Cairo. The crypto-communist Stafford Cripps was ambassador in Moscow, while ‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson, the lover of Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, had a junior post in Churchill’s coalition government. Cripps’s revolutionary colleague Walter Monckton also worked in the Ministry of Information. The Stalinists Andrew Rothstein and Denis Pritt freely gave their opinions to the press. The atomic spies, Klaus Fuchs, Alan Nunn May, Wilfred Mann and Melita Norwood (and maybe others) did their mischief. This crew was oddly complemented by the unlikely Soviet enthusiast Max Beaverbrook, who, despite his dislike of communism, became the most fervent spokesperson for diverting resources to the Soviet Union, because he thought it would increase productivity in the labour forces of the factories at home, and also enable him to keep his rival Ernest Bevin at bay. As a last unhelpful contributor, Beneś, the Czechoslovak prime minister in exile, was a fervent Moscow enthusiast, and used his own secure communications facilities in Surrey to pass on many secrets to Stalin. It was thus not just the notorious ‘Cambridge Five’ who were doing Stalin’s work.
The outcome was that Stalin was far better informed about all aspects of British strategy than even the Joint Intelligence Committee, and Churchill lost control of propaganda. The wartime chairman of the JIC, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, was not initially granted access to Ultra secrets (a decision overruled probably in 1941); the JIC knew nothing of the proceedings of the XX Committee that managed turned Nazi spies, as that group was answerable to no one except the W Board. Most astounding of all, the JIC was taken by surprise (as were members of Churchill’s War Cabinet) when the USA dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as they had no knowledge of the Manhattan project. All this information ̶ as well as the complete D-Day plans – went promptly to Stalin via his spies. The project to distribute covertly Ultra extracts to Stalin was a disaster, since he was receiving unedited transcripts from Blunt, Cairncross, and MacGibbon, and he thus disparaged the other summarised source. And because of the contributions of the Cambridge Spies, Stalin also had complete access to Britain’s planned negotiation stances before – and after ̶ Yalta (where the spy Alger Hiss even attended as an adviser to Roosevelt), which meant the Soviet leader was prepared for any compromise or tactic offered. Folly writes, without a trace of irony, that “Stalin’s realism increasingly came to be fused with an admiration for his intelligence, which became almost a mystique; some policy-makers, including Cadogan, seem to have developed an inferiority complex towards Stalin, in terms of their belief that he was far-sighted, extremely well-briefed, and knew exactly what he wanted.” Historians now know better whence Stalin’s expertise came. And because he received more information illicitly rather than being given freely by the Allies, Stalin started to mistrust them, suspecting, for instance, that they might strike a separate peace with Hitler. He was used to total obedience at home, and expected similar subservience abroad. Yet his counterparts were right to treat Stalin warily: he was essentially ‘untrustworthy’ (as Chamberlain had rightly pointed out in 1939). If they had behaved otherwise, they would simply have been like Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’. Stalin lied about his ambitions, and would say anything to achieve them. Moreover, Churchill, Menzies, and others rightfully feared leakage of vital secrets to the Germans. Stalin utterly failed to appreciate this dynamic: a few in the Allied camp (though of course ignorant about his spies) understood it all too well, but they were drowned out by the ‘co-operators’. Finally, SIS had no spies in the Soviet Union: the intelligence breach was entirely one-sided.
4) Culture:
British diplomats and military representatives were quick to characterise their Soviet counterparts as ‘Asiatic’ or ‘backward’, and thus lacking in the arts of diplomacy. They frequently spoke to them condescendingly, and the Soviets were frequently offended by the behaviour of the officers sent on the military missions. Yet this did not prevent the Foreign Office imagining that its opposite numbers could perhaps be taught to act like gentlemen, and that conciliatory gestures would be answered in kind. When this did not happen, they professed surprise. Churchill, in particular, would express his distaste for Bolshevism, and his mistrust of its leaders, when away from them, but would fall under Stalin’s charm when in his presence, and offer emotional speeches of effusive praise for the skills and personality of his temporary ally. Eden and Roosevelt both believed they possessed the perfect techniques for handling Stalin, and building a relationship with him. But seeking to protect Soviet-British relations, and maintaining the ‘partnership’, necessarily meant appeasing Stalin. Eden expressed personal messages of good will towards Stalin in the hope that they might reduce his ‘suspiciousness: Stephen Miner rightly dubs such thoughts ‘fatuous’. Churchill recognised the weakness of appeasement after Yalta, but had to be persuaded by his secretary, John Colville, to remove the Chamberlainite phrase ‘peace with honour’ from his subsequent speech to Parliament that explained the concessions made over the composition of the Polish government engineered by Stalin.
Stalin knew how to manipulate such weaknesses. He adapted his negotiating style very skilfully, using classical passive/aggressive techniques. He used Molotov to bring bad news, after which he would appear as the conciliator. But he was quite ruthless: like Hitler, he did not take treaties seriously. And he respected hard and unobsequious military men (like Tedder, Ismay, Brooke and Portal), who stood up for what they believed in, and were firm but polite, much more than he did the appeasing patricians like Eden, or the bogus revolutionaries like Cripps (whose asceticism and priggishness he found ridiculous). He saw through Roosevelt’s attempt to keep Churchill out of discussions, but was happy to indulge the American president’s delusions. He mercilessly exploited the divisions between Roosevelt and Churchill, for example in the prologue to Yalta, where Roosevelt avoided any western pre-planning for the conference. He was thus able to throw scorn on émigré Poles who had not taken any part in the fighting for wanting to take control of Polish elections, and easily overcame objections about Poland’s new borders. He left Roosevelt, Churchill and their advisors nonplussed because they had not anticipated the contradictions in Stalin’s claims about democratic elections, and he blithely allowed the Allies to endorse the shared concept of ‘liberation’ of Nazi-controlled territories, even when in the Soviet case it involved enslavement. As Miner wrote: “The Soviets did not expect goodwill gestures, they discounted western sincerity, and, most importantly, they did not respond in a like manner.”
5) Warfare:
In one respect the Soviet Union carried a moral and psychological advantage. Having suffered from the predations and cruelty of the Nazi invaders, its forces had beaten back the enemy hordes, and by the time of the Yalta conference in February 1945, had occupied Poland. The country suffered enormous losses in the battles against the Germans, as Max Hastings and Daniel Todman, among many historians of the period, have recorded. The Soviet Union lost about 9 million combatants in battle, or from death in captivity, compared to the British Empire’s figure of under 400,000. Fighting as an infantry army in the Soviet Army was perilous: the chances of surviving captivity were minimal, and if any soldier showed cowardice or a hint of desertion, the NKVD’s commissars were there to shoot him. (Hastings gives a figure of 157,000 shot for military disciplinary reasons in 1941-42 alone.) This philosophy extended to the attitude towards those taken prisoner during Barbarossa (of whom about 3 million would die in German camps): the Soviet Union believed such soldiers should have committed suicide rather than be captured, and it treated them as traitors when they were returned after the Yalta agreements, whether they had forcibly fought as ‘Vlasovites’ in Hitler’s armies or not. When pushed back to their native territory, the Nazis showed fiercer resilience, and Soviet casualties were large. Stalin forced his battalions to move fast in order to get to Berlin first, and he had a strong argument in his favour when he claimed that his forces had performed the lion’s share in the task of beating the Germans into submission. The WWII losses incurred by the Soviet Union (a total of 25 million, including civilians) rightly engendered an enormous amount of sympathy and respect in the West.
On the other hand, the leaders of the democracies could not allow their armies to suffer huge casualties through quixotic enterprises, such as a premature operation across the Channel, or sending divisions to the Caucasus to help Stalin. As they gradually progressed through Germany after eliminating Hitler’s final push in the Ardennes in the winter of 1944, the armies of the western powers faced a different set of morale problems. They were fighting on foreign soil, not removing invaders from native territory. The infantry men thought the war was practically over, and the United States soldiers in particular wanted to return home rather than become the last casualties of the war. They saw surrendering Germans enjoy a more comfortable existence than their own, as their commanders pressed them forwards. Wars are not won by holding positions in attack. They did not understand why the Germans did not surrender, and bring the whole business to a close. Stalin was able to exploit the fact of ‘might being right’ as he brushed off the appeals by Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta to discuss the composition of the Polish government, and insisted on the new boundaries for the Polish nation. These decisions enlarged Soviet territory, and resulted in massive migrations of German citizens from the land now given to Poland, as well as of Poles left stranded east of the Curzon line.
Churchill & Strategy
All this goes to show that it was a very unequal partnership at work. Given the complexity of these relationships, could matters have evolved otherwise, without the subjugation of central Europe to Stalin, if the warnings about Stalin’s subversive activities had been taken seriously? After Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill were anguished by what they saw as Stalin’s betrayal over Polish borders and arrangements for governance. Yet Stalin had not betrayed the agreements forged at Yalta: he had outwitted his allies in having the wording defined to his advantage. Moreover, it was too late by then. Churchill’s physician, Dr. Moran, said the trouble had started at Teheran, but in truth it antedated even November 1943. (Teheran was largely a waste of time.) It went back to 1941.
Churchill’s role in this sad story was well-intentioned, but careless. He was not a great strategist, but a military man, impulsive, and prone to gestures. He frequently incurred the frustration of his military commanders (as the diaries of Viscount Alanbrooke show, for example) by interfering in details, or throwing out wild ideas that should never have seen the light of day. Alanbrooke considered Stalin much superior to both Roosevelt and Churchill as a military strategist (although Ian Kershaw categorises Stalin’s knowledge of military matters asthose of an ‘informed amateur’.) Churchill’s inability to curb the picaresque Beaverbrook (even sending him to Moscow to further his individual cause of unbridled support) provoked anguish with his Chiefs of Staff, as well as with others members of the War Cabinet. And he showed much ambivalence in dealing with the Soviet Union. Away from direct negotiations with Stalin, he was privately vigorous in his denunciations of the communist regime. In those moments he echoed the more consistent anti-communist (and anti-Stalinist) opinions of the War Office, whose voices the Foreign Office considered ‘prejudiced’ rather than displaying sound judgment, and found them unhelpful to the cause of ‘good relations’ with the Soviets. (Much of Churchill’s rhetoric, it must be admitted, now sounds trite and woolly.) But, when dealing personally with Stalin, like others, Churchill fell victim to the Generalissimo’s charm and grasp of detail, often became sentimental, and made concessions that were not necessary or appropriate. He mistakenly treated moments of personal rapport as signs of strategic harmony.
The trouble had really started with Churchill’s radio broadcast of June 22, 1941, after the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union. The historian A. J. P. Taylor, in English History 1914-1945, described this message as something that ‘settled the world for many years to come’. Churchill’s words are well-known: “It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people. We shall appeal to all our friends and allies in every part of the world to take the same course and pursue it, as we shall, faithfully and steadfastly to the end. We have offered the Government of Soviet Russia any technical or economic assistance which is in our power, and which is likely to be of service to them.” He added that “the Russian danger is therefore our danger, and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe”. This was a highly quixotic gesture, and a giant leap of faith. Churchill had certainly believed for some years that the Soviet Union would be required as an ally in order for Hitler to be overcome, but did he need to go overboard? He did not ask his military advisers, or the Joint Intelligence Committee, to analyse the various scenarios concerning the invasion, such as the risk of a quickly victorious Germany turning back to re-assault Great Britain. Most commentators thought the Soviet Union would crumble in weeks, so how could Britain have prevented that, and contributed to an outcome where Hitler was swiftly repulsed? In truth, whatever aid the Allies were able to give (at enormous cost) to the Soviet Union turned out to have little impact on the war. Churchill would have been better off preserving his materiel and forces for a possible German counter-attack. Stalin ungraciously came to regard what aid Britain did offer as an entitlement. The Communist Party of Great Britain, moreover, was a continuous thorn in the flesh of the war effort. The message of sudden co-operation with a power that had been reviled as vicious, and had for the past twenty-one months been abetting Germany in the war effort was too much for many – not just military men, but even Labour politicians – to swallow.
A successful strategist has to discriminate between facts and assumptions. He has to show imagination about outcomes. And he has to be able to convert the strategy into decisive tactics, communicating clearly to those chartered with executing them. Moreover the strategy must possess enough consistency to provide guidance over time, yet allow adaptation should some of the underlying assumptions turn out to be flawed. Churchill’s strategy concerning the Soviet Union did not obey any of these rules. A policy, in 1940, of pursuing trade agreements in spite of dismay over Russia’s invasion of the Baltic States was followed by moralising proclamations in the Atlantic Charter. He sent an ambassador to Moscow (Cripps) who was a more effective representative for Stalin’s ambitions than he was of Britain’s policies towards the Soviet Union. Churchill’s expressed revulsion for communism was undermined by his sudden enthusiasm for Stalin’s dictatorship. He had defended the Crippsian notion that the Soviets had a right to increase its strength in the Baltic States, changing his mind when it was too late, and then reversing himself again after Teheran. (That debate had caused a rift between Attlee and Beaverbrook, with the ironic result that the latter resigned from the War Cabinet.) He did not consult with his War Cabinet or his Chiefs of Staff before making his radio announcement, after which both groups reacted with alarm. He then upset his wished-for allies in the United States by promising to send arms to the Soviet Union. He told his advisors that they should forget about the evils of communism, but expressed dismay when the Ministry of Information projected such a message. He enmeshed himself in awkward entanglements over the second front, raising expectations that could not be met. He allowed contrary messages to flourish, and made life difficult for his ministers through impulsive gestures, such as sending Beaverbrook on a mission to speak to Stalin, and allowing the press baron to broadcast irresponsible messages in the USA. He thus lost the propaganda battle, and confused those serving his administration. Moreover, the left-wingers in his Cabinet pressed Churchill to commit to postwar social reforms for which he was unready: he wanted to defer ‘peace plans’ until the war was won. The coalition government had been insisted upon by Churchill was supposed to represent national unity, but the marked differences in personality and politics meant that it rarely spoke with one voice. Co-operation had thus been a struggle in domestic politics.
Allied Co-operation
The lack of unity extended to the transatlantic alliance, where the two leaders gradually developed markedly different philosophies about the objectives of the war. Matters started well. Roosevelt had performed a skilful, though eminently cautious, job in assisting Britain (giving surplus destroyers, and signing the Lend-Lease agreement, even though they were largely symbolic gestures) before Germany declared war on the USA. He and Churchill were certainly united in their belief that Hitler was the existential enemy they had to defeat, and Roosevelt recognised the importance of the European theatre, but goals became complicated after that. Minor discord occurred as early as Barbarossa, when Churchill’s offer of unqualified support to Stalin took Roosevelt by surprise. In some ways, this gesture was a reminder of May 1940, when more sceptical US politicians wondered what the purpose was of diverting arms to Great Britain if it were going to succumb inevitably to Germany. The Atlantic Charter (of August 1941) was well-intentioned wording that made them both feel good, but then was effectively ignored when it suited them – Churchill, concerning the colonies, Roosevelt in trying to please Stalin. Roosevelt unsuccessfully tried to gain Churchill’s commitment to giving India independence after the war. Roosevelt was less concerned about protecting Britain’s Empire, about which he was disdainful, and a little jealous, and he later had a broader Pacific war to contend with. He was even more scornful about France’s colonial pretensions after its defeat, while Churchill wanted to see a resurgent France as a counterpoint to Germany after the war.
Churchill and Roosevelt did not respond to Stalin’s demands consistently. After Germany declared war on the USA in December 1941, it should have been the goal of the western allies to present a united front to the Soviet dictator over the cause of their shared beliefs in liberal democracy, and to defend the rights of the minor states. But they both foolishly attempted to bargain (or prevaricate) with Stalin over his desire to maintain the boundaries won during the pact with Hitler, predominantly the control of the Baltic States. They thus disagreed about the urgency of settling European boundary issues, and how power should be exercised after the war. Roosevelt referred to the necessity of gaining the Polish-American vote for his fourth presidential campaign: Churchill sent Eden to Moscow to do a deal over recognition of Britain’s interests in India in exchange for allowing Stalin to keep the Baltic States. He later separately bargained with Stalin, in the notorious ‘percentages’ deal, whereby British influence in Greece was traded for Soviet dominance in other Balkan countries.
Moreover, they were divided in responding to Stalin’s demands for the Second Front. Hitler had abandoned a cross-channel invasion, at the peak of his powers, when Britain was almost powerless to defend itself. There would be only one chance to execute a reverse operation successfully, and it would require a massive amount of planning, personnel, and materiel. The western leaders made promises to Stalin they could not keep. Roosevelt, while committing to his ‘Europe First’ policy, underestimated the complexities of a cross-channel invasion. Churchill set his eyes more on ‘the soft underbelly’ of Nazi-controlled Europe, as he wanted to make inroads via Italy in the hope of reaching Austria and Berlin before Stalin. Roosevelt’s belief that he and Stalin, and their respective countries, were the future leaders on the world stage, grew increasingly stronger, and he began to cut Churchill out of negotiations. Churchill seethed, but was powerless to do much, as his country was becoming bankrupt, and losing influence, though he could not face the truth that the days of maintaining an empire were over.
Roosevelt had grand plans for securing postwar peace through a Wilsonian United Nations project, while Churchill’s focus was more on spheres of influence in Europe – a notion Roosevelt disliked. Thus Roosevelt was less concerned about the threat of Stalin, and saw the dictator in a more benevolent light: he had always been partially blind to the evils of Stalin’s regime. (He noticeably omitted Stalin’s dictatorship from the list of totalitarian threats when the Lend-Lease program from the ‘arsenal of democracy’ was announced in December 1940.) He even told Churchill in March 1942 that Stalin ‘liked him [FDR] better’, and preferred dealing with the US diplomats than with the British. Churchill and Roosevelt had long since used the language of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom-loving’ to describe their murderous ally, and forgotten both the freedoms they had been chartered to defend when war was declared in September 1939 and December 1941 and the mass slaughters that Stalin had invoked on his own people. The Soviet Union in 1944, with its armies moving confidently across Europe, was a very different beast from the cowering and helpless entity which the Nazi aggressors so blatantly hoodwinked.
Such dissensions and concessions were dangerous. In the classic phrase used by Chamberlain, Roosevelt and Churchill ‘missed the bus’. In 1943, as Stalin turned the tide (with the help of his English spies) against the Germans at Kursk, his confidence increased. No longer did he have to seek favours from his allies. But he could still manipulate them. In 1943, he made the gesture of dissolving the Comintern ̶ in name only, as if to signal that plots to subvert the western democracies were a thing of the past. The Foreign Office overall believed this gesture because its civil servants wanted to, as they did with many of Stalin’s insincere promises. MI5 believed it was a fraudulent move, but the Security Service was not listened to, or did not press the point. Yet it should have been obvious to the Joint Intelligence Committee (if it had read the transcripts from the highly clandestine ISCOT project, which decrypted transmissions between Moscow and its guerrilla armies in Europe) that the plans for introducing communism by force in central Europe had not gone away. The Chiefs of Staff had their suspicions of Stalin’s true intentions confirmed by his passivity at Warsaw in August-September 1944, where he refused to help the uprising against the Germans because the insurgents were democrats inspired from London, not communists. Moreover, Roosevelt did not see Stalin between Teheran, in November 1943, and Yalta in February 1945, when FDR was a very sick man. Stalin had prevaricated, saying he had to stay in the Soviet Union to manage his forces. He was also highly scared of flying, and very wary about assassination attempts. The mountains had to go to Mahomet. And Mahomet was fully prepared to exploit the fissures in the two edifices.
Alternative History?
What could have happened differently? Could the ideals of resisting totalitarianism have been converted into a sturdy defence of the democratic aspirations of the central and eastern European countries? Had there been an opportunity when Churchill (and later, Roosevelt) could have presented a bolder front to Stalin without pushing him into a renewed alliance with Hitler? My contention is that, had Churchill known the details of Krivitsky’s revelations, and a tougher and confidential follow-up had occurred, he would have had an opportunity to cleanse the stables, influence public opinion, and present a far more pragmatic and determined face to Stalin when Barbarossa occurred. If Stalin’s strategy for subversion of British governmental institutions had been known to him, Churchill might have not behaved in such a starry-eyed fashion when he pledged assistance to the dictator in June 1941. Yet such a scenario is unavoidably complicated by a series of events that would have had to happen. Chamberlain was prime minister when the Krivitsky interrogations took place, and there is no evidence that Churchill ever heard about the defector, or read the report that MI5 produced. I therefore present a series of steps that could have led to an outcome where Stalin would not have been able to ride so roughshod over the long-suffering citizens of the countries that eventually lay behind the Iron Curtain. I shall next analyze these individual steps, and allocate a score to the degree of difficulty associated with each, in consideration of the political and organizational challenges at the time. (1 = straightforward; 5 = highly complex).
Krivitsky would have had to be secreted somewhere, and paid to give a fuller account of the hints he gave concerning spies in the undergrowth. The whole process would have to be highly secret, and if a report were to be written on his interrogations, it would have had to be subject to very tight controls. Chamberlain and Churchill would have had to be notified. An investigation would have had to take place into the backgrounds of identified Soviet agents (primarily Maclean and Philby), which would have led to warnings of friends and associates with similar backgrounds. That process would have had to be converted into a policy of positive vetting for future employment, and the sacking of communists (or ex-communists) from government posts. It would have required a new strategy for handling the Soviet Union to be developed, executed with a firmness that would not have allowed the customary dissents in the Foreign Office and elsewhere. Roosevelt would have had to be informed, and sold on the measures, so that a similar exercise could take place in the USA. Churchill would have had to change his tune on the destiny of the Empire after the war, and to take more closely to heart the precepts of the Atlantic Charter. Churchill and Roosevelt would have had to resolve their differences, agree about goals for democratic constitutions in central Europe, and present a united and forceful opposition to Stalin’s wiles.
1) Safeguarding Krivitsky (1): This could have been an easy task. The diaries of Guy Liddell, where he describes his discussion with Krivitsky on the day before the defector sailed back to Canada, have been redacted. But there had been a plan to spirit him (and his family) to a safe place in Scotland, and, had he been paid enough, his memory would probably have enabled him to recall more crisply the identities of the figures he hinted at in his testimony. He assuredly knew more about the profiles of the agents than he was prepared to divulge for free to institutions he still regarded as hostile. The historian of MI5, Christopher Andrew, has offered excuses that MI5 did not know how to handle defectors, and was inadequately staffed. But that does not add up to a valid explanation: it was the service’s duty to develop such skills, and in Jane Archer it had a superbly qualified officer who was in the process of being wastefully sidelined.
2) Confidential Report (2): Irrespective of the evolution of the process of interrogation, the distribution of the report that outlined Krivitsky’s revelations was a mistake of disastrous proportions. If the heads of intelligence (Kell, Menzies) had given a minute’s thought to the implications of a defector’s claims that Britain’s government was infested with Stalin’s spies, and the nature of those accusations being widely-spread in Whitehall, they should have placed an embargo on any publication. It was a completed abdication of tradecraft, showing how amateurish the mechanisms of counter-intelligence were. Thus a grade of (1), given the obviousness of the correct action, is corrected to a (2) by the reality of a security organisation that could have benefited from some more military discipline.
3) Notification of Chamberlain and Churchill (1): The reporting lines were confused. MI5 answered to the Home Office: SIS (who was represented in the interrogation) to the Foreign Office. The two intelligence services were not invited to join the Joint Intelligence Committee (which focused very much on imperial military matters until then) until late May 1940. Chamberlain, still prime minister at the time of the interrogations, was rather disparaging about intelligence, but Churchill was an enthusiast, and would have jumped at an opportunity to read such a report, or even meet the defector. Gary Kern, in his A Death in Washington writes that Krivitsky’s friends reported that MI5 had arranged for him to meet Churchill, but the encounter never happened. One unfortunate episode that occurred is that MI5 at one stage suspected that Churchill’s nephews, Esmond and Giles Romilly, were the characters hinted at by Krivitsky: if Churchill had come to hear of this, he might have discounted Krivitsky’s reliability. Yet Churchill had a very good relationship with Vernon Kell, the head of MI5, going back to World War I, and one might have expected him to brief him, or his intelligence advisor, Desmond Morton (who had worked for SIS as an expert on communism) on the case. Churchill was to fire Kell in May 1940 – for reasons probably associated with the Nazi Fifth Column: no evidence seems to exist that Churchill was aware of the Krivitsky interrogations at the time. David Stafford, in his Churchill & Secret Service, indicates that Churchill was fully occupied with possible German espionage in the first nine months of the war: there is no mention of Krivitsky, or John Herbert King, the Foreign Office spy identified by Krivitsky, in Stafford’s work. Overall, however, one cannot help thinking that Churchill would have taken the report very seriously.
4) Investigation of Krivitsky’s Allegations (1): Commentators nowadays accept that, with some degree of sleuthing, the main characters hinted at by Krivitsky could have been identified. That would have turned the spotlight on Donald Maclean and Kim Philby. Both had to explain away leftist backgrounds at their interviews (for the Foreign Office and SOE/SIS respectively, with Philby’s recruitment taking place later in 1940). But Philby’s past in Vienna was well-known (by such as Hugh Gaitskell). Trails would have led to the Cambridge University Socialist Club, and the Apostles, and searching interviews could have taken place. With the knowledge of Philby’s activities in Spain, and Krivitsky’s testimony, Philby would have had a much tougher time in 1940 explaining away his past. The links would have led to Anthony Blunt, who, it must be remembered, was himself withdrawn from Military Intelligence training because of his communist past, and to Leo Long and Guy Burgess.
5) Removal of Communists (2): It is not whimsical to suggest that a ban on communists in government service, or at least in positions where security was affected, would have been possible in 1940. Later, when the Soviet Union was a ‘gallant ally’, and propagandists were championing its cause, public opinion would have objected violently to any such measures. Nervousness about the Unions, and their required productivity, no doubt existed, but the Labour Party was adamantly opposed to the Soviet Union’s excesses, even before the Coalition government was formed in May 1940. It is sometimes forgotten that Churchill, during the Fifth Column ‘panic’ that month, was as keen to cut down on Communists as he was fascists, and a lively debate about the wisdom of hiring communists for sensitive positions continued throughout 1940 (which Burgess and Rothschild successfully countered). But at a time when the Soviet Union was providing war materiel to Nazi Germany to spite the efforts of the Political Warfare Executive, a properly executed campaign could have succeeded. King had confessed, and, while it would have been difficult to gain any outright admission of guilt from the Cambridge crew, their subversive careers could have been averted. It should be remembered that Krivitsky’s revelations led to the removal of over a dozen spies, and that Maclean, Blunt, and Philby had all been challenged over their communist pasts at their interviews. As it happened, Burgess’s reputation as a fixer, and his many connections and protectors, may have warded off investigations, but Burgess had been scared enough about betrayal by Goronwy Rees (to whom he confessed his Comintern allegiance in 1939) that he wanted him killed. In a different climate, Rees would have spoken up about Burgess’s working for the Soviets ̶ a fact that might have been concluded in any case by the mission to Moscow in August 1940.
6) Different Strategy for Handling the Soviet Union (3): During the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Britain still discussed trade agreements with the Soviet Union. Britain needed her timber to build ships: the Soviet Union needed machine-tools, and certain raw materials. Yet no discernible strategy for dealing with Stalin’s Russia emerged: it was all very fragmented and tentative. Churchill had admittedly for some time believed that Hitler would betray the Soviet Union, and that the latter would eventually come in on the side of the Allies. He even thought that such a move would be essential to secure the Allies’ victory. But this policy never was converted into a consistent set of principles by which the country would be prepared for the event. A proper strategist would have set up some guidelines around which negotiations should take place, and public opinion guided: a recognition that the Soviet Union was a durable ideological enemy, and planned to destroy the democracies; that alliance with it should be cautious, as the countries’ goals were different; that the public should be reminded of the slaughters that had taken place in the name of communism; that Stalin should be approached with reserved toughness, and no attempt at appeasement; that offers of help should be conservative, and not affect the imperial war effort; that promises should not be made that could not be kept; that discussions of ‘trust’ and ‘cooperation’ were virtually meaningless when dealing with Stalin’s state. Yet forging and communicating such a stance was alien to the British, pluralist way of doing things, and Churchill, who did not think along such lines, was too impulsive. The Foreign Office would have challenged such a stance for its ‘pessimism’. Thus this step is somewhat problematic.
7) Coordination with Roosevelt (4): For Stalin’s thrusts and subversion to be thwarted, Churchill would have needed a similar exercise to have taken place in the USA. The country was at the beginning of the war fiercely anti-communist: in fact its opposition to totalitarianism cast aspersions on the Nazis and the Communists, and it was determined to stay out of the conflict, remembering when it had come to the rescue of Europe just over twenty years before. Roosevelt had to tread the path of bringing the USA into the war very carefully. Yet he had authoritarian instincts himself, and his wife – a committed leftist – was an influential figure over him, and the country. Moreover, the USA authorities were very slow to react to Krivitsky’s revelations, or other warnings of Soviet spies in place. J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, was furious with Krivitsky for suggesting his bureau had been neglectful in allowing Soviet spies into the country. Whitaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss in 1939, but Roosevelt ignored Adolf Berle’s subsequent report about communist penetration, and Hiss was not even interrogated until 1942. Roosevelt was not impressed with the deliberations of the Dies Committee, for he had developed an early admiration for Stalin, and appeared to have forgiven him his transgressions. He thus minimised the significance of Krivitsky’s story. The elimination of Stalin’s network of spies and agents of influence in the USA would therefore have been a tough challenge to overcome. That group was, however, less influential in helping Stalin negotiate with, and confound, the Allies than were the agents installed in Great Britain.
8) The Atlantic Charter (4): The Charter was signed in August 1941 by Roosevelt and Churchill, i.e. after the Soviet Union had been invaded, but before Pearl Harbor, and the declaration of war against the United States by Germany. The symbolism of the event was important, as it indicated the nominal support of the United States for the Allied cause. A key ingredient of the agreement was the commitment to self-determination by peoples, a broad hint that the countries of Europe that had been invaded by the Nazis or the Communists (or by both) should have the right to determine their own form of government after the war. This motion was enthusiastically taken up by the governments-in-exile of the affected countries. But it was also noted by the putative leaders of those colonies, British, French, Dutch, especially, who took it as a signal that such entities would also be granted independence when the hostilities were over. That had never been how Churchill, a confirmed imperialist, had conceived the charter. Roosevelt tried to finesse the issue by postponing any interpretation until the conflict ended, but Churchill got himself into severe trouble with Roosevelt, for wanting later to grant the Soviet Union the ownership of the Baltic States as a bargaining tool. Churchill also had problems with Stalin, who pointed out the prime minister’s hypocrisy in pushing back against Soviet plans for other central European countries, in particular Poland, when he had no plans to let India and other colonies elect the governments they wanted. It would have taken some highly imaginative and influential figure to sway Churchill at this time: ironically, during the war, the Labour members of his coalition were almost as keen to protect the notion of Empire as he was. If Roosevelt had challenged Churchill head-on on this issue, rather than working behind his back to undermine him, the outcome could have been different, and the two leaders might have been able to face Stalin with more resilience.
9) Roosevelt and Churchill United: (3) As Churchill’s (and Britain’s) influence during the war waned, Roosevelt increasingly excluded him from discussions, in the misguided belief that he (Roosevelt) and Stalin were a more substantial pairing out of the Big Three. This breach occurred primarily because of Roosevelt’s disdain for, and disapproval of, the British Empire, but he also had designs on taking over some of Britain’s military bases, and economic opportunities, after the war. The United Nations was the light that guided FDR’s mission, and he started to tire of the complications of European territorial disputes. He and Stalin (he thought) would ensure that ‘security’ dominated the post-war landscape, even though it might mean the peace of a Schillerian churchyard. Roosevelt wanted an earlier second front across the Channel, where Churchill prevaricated, partly because he hoped to reach Vienna and Berlin before Stalin. Thus their visions of the post-war world diverged (as did, of course, Stalin’s), and the fault-lines meant that Stalin was able to exploit their disagreements. If an opportunity to influence Stalin did exist, it would have been early on, in 1942, when he was on the defensive, and needed all the aid he could get. Conditions could have been set for such assistance. Stalin might have reneged on them, of course, but he would have been on much weaker footing. As he started to repel the Nazis in 1943, his confidence gained, and he viewed his Western Allies more scornfully. With the personalities and motivations they had, it would never have been easy for FDR and WSC to reconcile their differences. And, as Molotov pointed out, giving in to Stalin’s demands just led to more.
Conclusions
The conclusion must be that the overwhelming benefit that could have been gained by a purge of communists in administration would have been a much more effective negotiation with the Soviet Union. Stalin would not have been aware of the discord and hesitations in the Allied camp, and would not have been able to bluff or threaten his way into consummating his aggressive territorial and governmental demands. Churchill would have been able to keep a tight hold on his stance vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, and influence public opinion accordingly. True, Britain would not have been able to discipline communists in an illiberal way (the Communist Party was never actually banned), but it would have been able to exclude them from positions of influence, or when there was a security risk. Admitted loyalties to a foreign power would have been censured. We can recall that Cripps was expelled from the Labour Party because of his defence of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland.
It would have changed the terms of negotiation. Stalin’s overtures suggested that he was susceptible to western approval. As early as November 1941, when his country was on the verge of collapse, he was asking for agreement on war aims, and seeking acceptance of the Soviet Union’s frontiers gained in collusion with Hitler. Thus he was assuredly looking for some positive sign of approval from the western powers to gain expiation for his past offences, and to give his post-war security plans a certificate of acceptance. It must be admitted that even if he had been sharply reminded of such illegality, and Roosevelt and Churchill had set stringent conditions for providing aid, he might still have ignored them when the tide later turned in his favour, but the historical record suggests that tougher negotiation at the time could have been successful. Once Stalin learned that ‘buffer states’ were a valid concept, however, and that some diplomats believed he was entitled to vanquish independent countries, the door was open for him to exploit the opportunity. A lack of access to the secrets of his allies would have weakened his ability to bargain.
Whether the behaviour of Roosevelt and Churchill could have changed is more problematic. The attributes that made Churchill an inspiring leader of the nation – his rhetoric, his buccaneering spirit – meant that he was no more than an adequate chief executive. He reorganised his Cabinet skilfully, but he did not seek their opinions, accordingly set course, and rally them around a plan of action. Many of his cabinet meetings drifted without focus. His attachment to the Empire was unswerving. Yes, he probably could have been persuaded that a less generous and more principled attitude to the Soviet Union, one more in tune with that of his Chiefs of Staff, would have been more appropriate, and thus more effective by not kowtowing to Stalin, but he would probably still have fallen prey to Stalin’s deviousness. And Beaverbrook, the anti-communist, caused as much havoc as any of Churchill’s leftist advisers.
Roosevelt had similar operational dysfunctionality, often bypassing his lieutenants, and not issuing precise orders. Yet his instincts were frequently on target. His clever manipulation of Congress to aid Britain before the USA entered the war was invaluable, but he thought he could equally deftly handle Churchill and Stalin. He was too easily affected by Stalin’s charm, however, and betrayed some major blind spots. His failure to recognise that the USA and Great Britain had far more in common, and at stake, than did the USA and the Soviet Union, betrayed his democratic ally, and the principles for which they were fighting. He was not so interested in the fortunes of central Europe (apart from the Polish vote), and became carried away with his Wilsonian vision for a resuscitated League of Nations, the United Nations.
Thus the Cold War would have happened anyway. Nothing could really stop Stalin after 1943, when he began to repulse the Germans, and started his march into central Europe. Might made right. But with more resolute demands from the West, a more hopeful configuration of states might have emerged. The Iron Curtain might have been moved further east. The Baltic States might not have been saveable, but perhaps a democratic Polish government could have been insisted on, a moderate socialist administration established in Czechoslovakia, and a pluralist set-up in Hungary assured, to complement the independent spirit of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Thus not so much liberty – for which the war had been declared in the first place – might not have been lost for so long, and the collapse of communism might have occurred many years earlier.
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