MOSCOW OCTOBER 1943
‘We shall do as we like’
STALIN
THE SHIFTING BALANCE of power across the Atlantic was shown very clearly in the autumn of 1943. After American newspapers reported that Marshall was to be put in overall military charge in Europe, including the Mediterranean, Churchill wrote to Hopkins saying the American should not have authority beyond the Overlord landing in Normandy. On 1 October, he told Roosevelt of his understanding that Alexander would hold the Mediterranean command. Otherwise, he predicted an explosion in Britain. On 1 November, Roosevelt decided to defer the decision, aware of the hole Marshall would leave in Washington.
Another irritant came when a group of senators issued a statement accusing London of unfair behaviour, including passing off US Lend-Lease aid to Russia as coming from Britain. Churchill expressed his regret at such unfounded accusations to Hopkins, and said publicly that the matter would be investigated. But he saw no point in getting involved in this ‘wordy warfare’.
More gallingly, Roosevelt delivered a sharp rebuff to Churchill’s latest hobby horse—an invasion of Rhodes as part of his east Mediterranean strategy. ‘It is my opinion that no diversion of forces or equipment should prejudice “Overlord” as planned,’ the President wrote. This produced what Churchill called ‘one of the sharpest pangs I suffered during the war’. But he had to submit. In his memoirs, he gave an alliance
Reason—‘I could not risk any jar in my personal relations with the President.’
There was also what he called Stalin’s ‘increasing bearishness’ to deal with. When the British declined to accompany the resumption of convoys with a binding commitment to continue shipments, the dictator fired off a stiff reproach. Receiving this as he worked in bed, Churchill said he would stop the convoys. Calming down, he called in the new Soviet ambassador later in the week, and put the ‘offensive’ message in his hand as he left, uttering the diplomatic formulation ‘ nul et non avenu’ to signal its non-reception. There was also a row with Moscow over British sailors who had been arrested after knocking the hats off locals in an Arctic port. ‘It is disheartening to make so little progress with these people,’ Churchill reflected. By the beginning of October, he was telling the War Cabinet: ‘We mustn’t weaken Germany too much—we may need her against Russia.’1
Yet, progress was on the horizon. Unexpectedly, it came from ‘Bruin’ as Churchill called Stalin. Since the three chiefs had not been able to fix a meeting, Stalin suggested their Foreign Ministers gather. This could pave the way for a summit.
Roosevelt and Churchill were both keen, though they insisted it should only be ‘exploratory’—they reserved final decision-making power for themselves. In a transparent move, Roosevelt said he would not want the septuagenarian Cordell Hull to make a long journey to Europe because of his poor health and age. He proposed to send Sumner Welles instead, together with Harriman. This was a sign of how, for all his acute political antennae, Roosevelt could live in a world of his own—an Under Secretary of State would have been seen by Stalin as insulting and he would have nominated a more junior diplomat than Molotov to represent the USSR.
The President was saved from himself by Hull being spurred into action against his deputy. Secretary of State for a decade, he had grown even more irritated by the superior Yankee—not just because of Welles’s close contacts with Roosevelt, but also by the way he dealt directly with diplomats of foreign governments without reference, and made speeches setting out US policy off his own bat. In August, the New York Times reported that the feud was causing a ‘lack of cohesive policy’—and blaming Hull.
Though the Secretary was always highly deferential to the office of the President, the prospect of being replaced by his rival at the highest-level meeting of all three major Allied powers to date, must have been too much. Welles’s enemies resumed the campaign against him over his sexual advances to the Pullman porters. There was a threat to leak the story to a newspaper, and Roosevelt felt obliged to let the axe fall before the story came out. The President also felt he needed Hull’s clout in the Senate in case his plan for a global organisation ran into trouble as the League of Nations had. At a meeting in his office, Hull suggested that Welles might go to Moscow to prepare for the meeting of foreign ministers. The Under Secretary was not in the business of preparing meetings for him. Getting up, he crossed the room, shook hands, and headed for a retreat in Maine. At seventy-two, the Secretary of State would finally get his chance to play a major role in the alliance.
Born in a log cabin in Tennessee, Hull had sat in the House of Representatives for twenty-four years before being appointed to head the State Department in 1933. Tall and lean, he had a reserved, almost shy, manner. A former judge, he believed in broad principles which he assumed would be respected by those who signed up to them. Eden referred to him in his diary as ‘the old man’ while Cadogan described him as ‘the old lunatic’.
Churchill offered London as a venue for the conference, but Stalin insisted on Moscow; Molotov’s other duties meant he could not leave the Soviet capital, he explained. The British and Americans bowed to his wishes, and, when Eden proposed a preliminary Anglo-American session in London, Hull turned down the idea. Eden sent a message to Washington saying that, from his experience ‘Moscow is not a very good place for confidential discussions’. What the British did not grasp was that the Americans were positively anxious not to see them in advance for fear of giving Stalin reason to suspect a Western stitch-up.
* * * *
On 18 October, the Foreign Ministers met in the Kremlin. The weather was bright and crisp. On the war front, American progress continued in the Pacific while the Red Army was poised to cross the Dnieper into Ukraine, confirming the significant improvement in its military capacity and skill. Berlin Radio admitted the military situation in Russia was ‘extremely grave’. Shipping losses dropped, and more U-boats were being destroyed as Portugal gave permission for the Allies to use the Azores as a base in the Battle of the Atlantic. Corsica was taken, but Italy was proving tougher than had been expected. Though the Badoglio government had surrendered, and declared war on Germany, the Wehrmacht held Rome. Much to Churchill’s chagrin, the Nazis had taken Rhodes and other islands in the east Mediterranean.2
The former Public Prosecutor in the purge trials, Andrei Vyshinsky, joined the conference as Molotov’s deputy. White haired and red-faced, with hard eyes behind his spectacles, he lost his temper at times, and stalked from the chamber. He assured the Americans that Moscow had ‘no interest in any territory beyond the Soviet frontiers and there is no real obstacle to the closest kind of cooperation’. Litvinov also attended, but in a subordinate role.
Eden was assisted by Ismay, and a senior Foreign Office figure, William Strang, as well as Clark Kerr and Oliver Harvey. Hull was accompanied by Harriman, flying in to take up the ambassadorial post, and General John Deane, who was to become head of the American military mission in Moscow. As interpreter, Hull took with him the new head of the Russian section of the State Department, Charles ‘Chip’ Bohlen; at other times, he used Arthur Birse, which the Englishman found a trial given his unfamiliarity with US policy and Hull’s low voice, southern accent and labyrinthine thinking.
The three delegations met for two or three hours each afternoon in the marbled, gilded Spiridonovka Palace—experts then laboured on late into the night on the details. The proceedings were well organised, following a set agenda in a businesslike manner. The ministers sat at a large round table with national flags in the centre. Brightly decorated boxes of Russian cigarettes and water carafes were in reach. As well as portraits of Lenin and Stalin, there was a painting depicting the signature of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty in London the previous year which Molotov pointed to with pride, Birse recalled that, from time to time, the Foreign Minister’s pince-nez slipped from his nose.
On the first day, proceedings were interrupted by a ninety-minute lunch. There were breaks for tea and wine in an adjoining room or in the garden where Hull recorded having ‘private and fruitful conversation with Molotov’. If delegates wanted to move round Moscow, they were provided with heavily armour-plated limousines — Eden recalled that the interior of his was ‘scented’. Hull was accustomed to working in overheated rooms and on the first day called for his overcoat. The Soviet organisers turned the heat up so high the next day that Eden thought he was going to faint. ‘Happily the three Powers were able to agree on a compromise temperature,’ he recalled.
On the evening of 21 October, at his suggestion, Eden was received by Stalin who said glumly that Churchill was ‘offended’ with him and had refused to take his letter about convoys from the ambassador. If the Prime Minister did not want to correspond further, ‘let it be so.’
Eden explained that the British leader had resented the tone and content of the message, but had told him to discuss the issue further.
After that, things brightened up, and agreement was reached to renew the supply route. Still, Eden worried that Britain’s contribution to the war effort was not recognised by the Russians. He found Stalin personally friendly, even jovial. ‘A meeting with him would be in all respects a creepy, even a sinister experience if it weren’t for his readiness to laugh, when his whole face creases and his little eyes open,’ he noted in his diary. ‘He looks more and more like a bruin.’
At Eden’s suggestion, the conference agreed to establish an Advisory Commission for Europe—the British could take pleasure in its location in London. A joint body was set up for Italy to meet Soviet complaints about not being informed on events there. Moscow’s demands on the Baltics were, in effect, accepted by both Washington and London. The Foreign Secretary carried a note by Churchill recognising that Moscow’s accession to the Atlantic Charter had been ‘based on the frontiers of June 11, 1941’, and taking note of ‘the historic frontiers of Russia before the two wars of aggression waged by Germany in 1914 and 1939.’
Eden was keen to provide as many safeguards as possible for small states likely to be liberated by the Red Army. It would be the test of his policy of giving Stalin some satisfaction, and then seeking to tie him down to postwar commitments. He even tried to derail a treaty which the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London proposed to sign with the USSR. His big idea was that the three powers should encourage the formation of federations of smaller European states to help them avoid being overwhelmed singly.
Molotov said it was too soon to discuss post-war arrangements, as if Stalin’s proposal put to the Foreign Secretary at the end of 1941 had never existed. With the radical change in the military situation on the eastern front, the Kremlin had no need of agreements; the dictator could count on Red Army Socialism imposing itself. If he chose, he could put up his own candidates to run countries. There was no way Moscow would agree to Eden’s idea which could lead to a cordon sanitaire round the
USSR.
Accordingly, Molotov made plain that his country reserved the right to take unilateral action in the region if its interests were threatened, and to conclude agreements on matters affecting its border security. On Poland, he refused to give any commitments, or to try to improve relations with the government-in-exile in London. The frontier issue was a matter for Moscow and whichever government ruled in Warsaw after the war, he repeated.
Hull pleased the Russians by advocating that ‘Hitler and his gang’ should get a summary trial and then be shot. But he gave Eden very little support—in part, this reflected the fact that he had no authority to agree to anything beyond broad principles. What he wanted from the conference was a grand declaration on the post-war international organisation. The future of smaller European nations was of no concern to him—‘I don’t want to deal with these piddling little things,’ he told Harriman, adding that Poland was a ‘Pandora’s box of infinite trouble’ best left unopened. At one point, his lack of interest in the future of eastern Europe was such that Eden slipped him a note reading: ‘I am sorry to take your time, but behind all this is a big issue: two camps in Europe or one.’ As Harriman noted, the Secretary’s silence may have led the Kremlin to believe that Washington would not raise serious objections in the future over frontiers.
Nor did Hull inspire confidence when he suggested that China and Brazil should join the Allied commission for Italy; this idea died a natural death. A further irritant for the British came when, without telling Eden, Hull gave the Russians a proposal that the Allies should commit themselves to independence for colonies. The memorandum had been rejected by Britain, and Eden said he would not discuss it. Tactfully, Molotov moved on to the next item.
As the conference neared its end, Eden made a last try on Europe, proposing a declaration in favour of democracy and national independence and against spheres of influence. Litvinov said the Atlantic Charter bound the three governments to the first two principles, and that none of them had any intention of establishing spheres of influence. Hull did not demur. Eden withdrew.
Having done nothing to discomfort Molotov, Hull got his declaration committing the Allied powers to a post-war global body in which they would collaborate in peace as they had in war, act together on the surrender and disarmament of the enemy, agree to regulate arms, and work ‘on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states, and open to membership by all such states, large and small, for the maintenance of international peace and security’. Hull then campaigned to get Soviet agreement for China to sign the statement warning that leaving it out would have ‘the most terrific repercussions’ in the Pacific and on US public opinion. He even threatened that supplies might be diverted from Russia to Chiang Kai-shek if Moscow proved obdurate.
The Kremlin gave way, and China’s ambassador was invited to sign on behalf of the Nationalists. Stalin then offered the Americans another reason for Pacific satisfaction.
At a banquet, he leaned behind Hull’s back, and beckoned to the interpreter, Berezhkov.3
‘Listen to me very carefully,’ he said in a barely audible whisper. ‘Translate this to Hull word for word. The Soviet government has studied the situation in the Far East and has decided that immediately after the end of the war in Europe... it will come out against Japan. Let Hull transmit this to President Roosevelt as our official position. But, for the time being, we want to keep this a secret. So you, too, speak in a low voice so that no one overhears you. Understand?’
‘Yes, Comrade Stalin,’ Berezhkov whispered back.
Hull sent the information to Roosevelt in two different codes for the sake of secrecy—and did not tell the British, whom he regarded as too leaky to be trusted.
* * * *
As the Foreign Ministers met, Churchill launched another bid to put the brakes on the landing in France. In a lengthy message to Roosevelt, he warned of ‘grave defects’ in the strategy for 1944. If the operation went wrong, Hitler might be able to stage ‘a startling comeback’. ‘My dear friend,’ he added, ‘this is much the greatest thing we have ever attempted, and I am not satisfied that we have yet taken the measures necessary to give it the best chance of success.’ He felt he was ‘in the dark at present, and unable to think or act in the forward manner which is needed.’ A summit with Stalin would clarify matters.4
Hull warned that any delay of Overlord could undo the benefits of the Moscow conference while Harriman pointed to the danger of ‘a large section of Russians firmly believing we waited till the last possible moment and let Russia bleed’. Molotov stressed that Moscow expected the Western Allies to carry out their promise this time.
However, military difficulties in Italy convinced Churchill that troops and landing craft should be kept in the Mediterranean. Meeting Stalin, Eden read out the report from Italy and a message from the Prime Minister expressing concern about plans for 1944. He admitted that this might mean putting off the attack on France. Stalin reacted with surprising calm; he was in a benign mood, and had been reassured by the American determination to go ahead.
But trouble was in store after the US military attache in Moscow alerted Eden’s team to the way Churchill had not included in his message a dissenting - and more upbeat - note from Eisenhower. Then the British team learned that the Prime Minister had written to Roosevelt to suggest a bilateral Anglo-American summit in Cairo, turning down a suggestion from the President that the Russians should be invited to send a representative to join the American and British Chiefs of Staff in military talks.
‘The P. M. is untameable,’ Harvey wrote in his diary. ‘He cannot leave well alone and he loathes the Russians. He would torpedo A. E.’s conference light-heartedly...The wicked old P. M. will bring our labours to naught yet.’ In Washington, Stimson concluded that it showed ‘how determined Churchill is with all his lip service to stick a knife in the back of Overlord’. Hopkins was put out, too, and Roosevelt called Churchill’s behaviour ‘improper’. The net result was that the British leader was storing up difficulties for himself by deepening American suspicions.
* * * *
On 7 November, Molotov ended the conference and celebrated the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution with his largest party of the war. The host, who got very drunk, wore a gold-trimmed black dress uniform, with a small dagger hanging from the belt. The jewels, furs and gold braid on display recalled pre-revolutionary days. The American and British ambassadors were honoured guests—the Japanese envoy was hustled into a side room. Clark Kerr and Harriman were taken into a chamber where the Soviet trade negotiator, Anastas Mikoyan, and a Russian general were deputed to drink them under the table; the only food on offer was a bowl of apples.5
At midnight, the American left, shepherded out by his daughter, Kathleen, who reckoned that their ability to leave on their feet won them respect; her father spent the next day in bed. Clark Kerr, in formal wear with a large blue and red sash, was less fortunate. Rising to offer a final toast, he fell on to the table, landing amid the glasses and empty bottles and cutting his forehead. Rising, the British envoy managed to make his exit, only to wake the next morning on the floor of his embassy study with his head in the fireplace.
Roosevelt hailed the Moscow meeting as ‘a genuine beginning of British-Russian-US collaboration which should lead to the defeat of Hitler’. Hull told Congress there would be no need for spheres of influence, alliances, balances of power ‘or any other of the separate alliances through which in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests’. Eden, whose memoirs pull a veil over the extent of his rebuffs, pointed to the European Commission as a channel through which Britain could play an influential role in shaping the continent, though Washington sought to limit the organisation’s remit from the start.
The real winner was Molotov—and, behind him, Stalin. The Soviets had headed off any agreements that would restrict them in eastern Europe. The way was open to impose the deep security zone they had always sought and, whatever Hull said, to extend Communist influence over more than half-a-dozen states. ‘Now the fate of Europe is settled,’ Stalin remarked, according to Beria’s son. ‘We shall do as we like, with the Allies’ consent.’6
To capitalise on the Moscow encounter, Roosevelt and Churchill proposed meeting Stalin in Cairo. Referring to the conference of Foreign Ministers, the President wrote of the ‘psychology of the present excellent feeling’ which made a meeting essential even if it lasted only two days. He had just received a fillip with the 85-5 vote in the Senate for the establishment of an international organisation and America’s post-war international role. Now, he proposed to make the conference in Cairo all the more global by including Chiang Kai-shek.7
Stalin refused to attend for three reasons—distance, fear of provoking Japan by meeting the Chinese leader, and reluctance to meet in the quasi-colonial domain of Egypt. So Roosevelt suggested Basra in Iraq, but the dictator would not go so far. Writing as if bound by those around him, he told Roosevelt that, ‘My colleagues in the government consider that my travelling beyond the borders of the USSR at the present
Time is impossible due to [the] great complexity of the situation at the front.’ Instead, he proposed that Molotov could take his place, and then gave way to the extent of saying he could go to Teheran, which was under Anglo-Soviet control.
There were worries in Washington about air travel over the mountains to the Iranian capital. In addition, as Roosevelt explained in messages to Stalin, constitutional responsibilities meant he had to be able to receive documents from Congress to sign and return within ten days, which might be difficult to arrange so far away. Such niceties cut little ice with Stalin, who talked of delaying the meeting. As over the Foreign Ministers’ meeting, he got his way. Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to see Chiang on their own in Cairo, and then go on to Iran. If the President had to deal with a congressional bill, he would fly to Tunis. Nearly thirty months after Hitler had dragged Stalin into the war on the Allied side, and two years after Japan had done the same for Roosevelt, the Big Three would finally come together.
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World History
