Figure 6.1 Iraklii Toidze, “The Motherland Calls!” 1941. Source: Hoover Institution Archives.
September they were threatening Moscow and Leningrad. Upon receiving news of the attack on the USSR, Operation Barbarossa, Churchill pledged the aid of Britain and the two countries rapidly patched up relations. From Washington, Roosevelt watched nervously, unable to engage American troops because of strong isolationist sympathies, and extended lend-lease aid to the USSR. When the Japanese launched their surprise attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor near Honolulu, Hitler inexplicably declared war on the USA, making the USA and USSR wartime allies.35
One of the most contentious issues among the wartime allies was Poland. The Polish government in exile in London, remembering Stalin’s role in the destruction of their country as Hitler’s ally, could hardly be enthusiastic about cooperation with the USSR. In any case, Stalin made rather clear that he regarded the USSR’i 1940 western border - that is, after incorporating considerable Polish territory - to be beyond discussion. But under pressure from the British and recognizing the primary need to defeat Hitler, the London Poles maintained chilly but correct relations with the Soviet authorities. With their help, the thousands of Poles who had been captured as POWs or arrested after the Soviet invasion and transported to the interior of the USSR in 1939-41 were allowed to leave via Iran. Many of them participated in the war effort as part of General Anders’s Polish army. And then in April 1943 retreating Nazi armies uncovered mass graves of thousands of Polish officers. The London Poles had long been frustrated by the inability or unwillingness of the Soviet authorities to explain the fate of many young officers who remained unaccounted for. They now realized that their worst suspicions had been realized. When they asked for a Red Cross investigation of the graves, the USSR angrily broke off relations and prepared to create its own Polish government. Though long denied in the USSR, it was well known at the time and now beyond any reasonable doubt that the thousands of Polish officers found buried at Katyh had been executed by the NKVD in the spring of 1940.36
Two allied conferences brought together the three main leaders of the antiHitler forces - Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin - and aimed to coordinate efforts between the three main warring powers and to set down the contours of the postwar world. At the first, held in Teheran in late 1943, the big three agreed to support the partisans led by Tito in Yugoslavia, promised the opening of a second front in western Europe (long an angry demand of Stalin), set the borders of Poland between the Oder-Neisse River in the west and the Curzon Line in the east, and pledged Soviet support for the war against Japan once Hitler had been defeated. Stalin’s insistence on borders for Poland that amounted to moving the state some 150 miles westward did not bode well for the postwar period, but the allies were too concentrated on the immediate need to defeat Hitler to ponder overly much on the fate of the Poles. The formation of a United Nations organization after the war was also agreed upon at Teheran.
The second wartime conference was held in February 1945 at Yalta, on the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea. Holding the conference on Soviet territory was a triumph for Stalin, though hard on the ailing American president who had barely two months to live. At Yalta the Polish question was again raised, with Stalin insisting on the need for a friendly Polish state to prevent further German aggression on the USSR. In the end, the Curzon Line - roughly the 1940 Soviet western border - was agreed on as Poland’s eastern frontier, with the Polish state receiving territory from Germany as compensation for those lands lost in the east. The powers agreed that an unconditional surrender would be demanded of Germany, which would be divided into occupation forces and obliged to undergo demilitarization and denazification measures. Stalin reaffirmed his commitment to attacking Japan within 90 days of war’s end in Europe. At Yalta the Big Three further discussed the organization of the United Nations, whose founding conference would take place in San Francisco the following June.37
May 9, 1945, marked the end of World War II - known in the USSR as the “Great Fatherland War” - for the Soviets. The Soviet Union was among the victorious powers but lay in ruins. Between 20 and 30 million Soviet citizens had been killed, entire cities and regions laid waste by the Nazi soldiers, with the survivors hungry and in millions of cases without a roof over their heads. But the Soviet Union was now a world power, far more important on the world scene than the Russian Empire had ever been. Two world powers emerged from World War II - the USA and the USSR. As soon as the surrender agreement had been signed with Nazi Germany, Roosevelt’s successor as US president, Harry Truman, stopped lend-lease shipments to the USSR. The mutual suspicions between Stalin and the western powers quickly came out into the open. Despite the immense respect and prestige the USSR had gained for its role in defeating Germany, Stalin continued to see his country as surrounded and threatened by the capitalist world. The use by the Americans of a new, frightful weapon - the atomic bomb - against two Japanese cities did nothing to reassure Stalin.38 Thus the world went from war to “Cold War ” almost without pausing.
Throughout its history, Russia has felt itself to be both European and “not-quite-European.” On the edge of the European continent and stretching nearly halfway round the world, Russia was a unique European and world power. While most of the Russian Empire and USSR’s territory lay to the east of the Ural Mountains in Asia, the great bulk of the population and the capital city were located in Europe. More importantly Russian culture and identity had grown up in close contact with Europe, while Asia, either in the form of the Ottoman Empire or
China, were distant and exotic places from the perspective of St Petersburg or Moscow. Even after 1917, when Moscow proclaimed itself the center for a new socialist world, Soviet foreign policy was much more concerned with Europe than with the rest of the world.
From the acceptance of Christianity in its eastern rite in the late ninth century, Russian identity has always been associated with Europe. This does not mean, however, that Russians always felt themselves entirely comfortable with that association. From Peter the Great onward, even highly cultured Russians often felt a sense of inferiority - or at least a lack of proper respect - vis-a-vis European culture. The Slavophile versus Westerner controversy from the early nineteenth century onward reflected differing understandings of this European connection. Should Russia, as the Slavophiles argued, reject western models and embrace a pre-Petrine, religious model for future development? Or, following the Westerners, did Russia have to go through the same economic and political developments as the rest of Europe? Even under communist rule, while ostensibly following an internationalist ideology, the conflict between Trotsky’s internationalist “permanent revolution” and Stalin’s “revolution in one country” retained echoes of the westerner versus slavophile debates.
In foreign policy, too, Russia was a unique European power. Expanding in central Asia in the last decades of the nineteenth century, it strayed close to Britain’s perceived sphere of interest north of British India. Expanding its commercial interests into Manchuria and Korea around the turn of the century, Russia offended Japan and helped spark the humiliating Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. And despite these Asian entanglements, Russia always perceived its primary interests on the European continent and in particular in relation to the growing threat of Germany. Two wars with Germany would destroy the tsarist order and come close to toppling Stalin. But in the end the victory over Hitler lent Stalin and Soviet communism a legitimacy and prestige in the world they had never before attained. In 1945 Soviet citizens could truly feel that the USSR had outgrown any kind of inferiority complex toward the European west and that it was time for the West to learn from Moscow.
World History
