Reynolds , David Pechatnov , Vladimir The Kremlin Letters: Stalin's Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 183 Portukalian, put the point precisely. His fate was to witness ‘The reign of the absurd — which flourishes today in the question of the Middle East’. Despite all, he remained an optimist. This moment, he wrote on 22 May 1922, ‘will not last forever. Stability, the logic of things, will again take the upper hand’ (p. 204). How sadly mistaken he was, and how similar to today’s Middle East is the story told in this commemorative memoir. Department of History Jay Winter Yale University Reynolds, David and Pechatnov, Vladimir (eds). The Kremlin Letters: Stalin’s WartimeCorrespondencewithChurchillandRoosevelt.Withtheassistance of Iskander Magadeyev and Olga Kucherenko. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2018. xx + 660 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Index. £25.00. The correspondence of the World War Two leaders of the ‘Grand Alliance’, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston S. Churchill, has long been of interest to historians. A first version was published in Moscow in 1957 in Russian and English editions. The Moscow edition was accurate and prepared as part of a Soviet reply to ongoing Western efforts to delegitimize and render invisible the preponderant contribution of the Red Army to the destruction of the Nazi Wehrmacht. Stalin himself worked on the project, but it was only published after his death. As the editors David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov point out, the Soviet government also wanted to counter the selective use of Stalin’s letters by Churchill and other Western memoirwriters . The first edition of the big three correspondence was without much contextual material which Reynolds and Pechatnov have provided in this new edition. An earlier two-volume Russian version of the correspondence was published by Pechatnov and his colleague at MGIMO (Moscow State Institute of International Relations), Iskander Magadayev (Perepiska Stalina s Ruzvel´tom i Cherchillem v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 2 vols, Moscow, 2015). The correspondence begins after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 and ends with Roosevelt’s death on 12 April 1945. It covers all the major issues of the war-time alliance, most importantly, the opening of a second front in France, the direct route into the heart of Germany, and the delivery of war materiel to the Soviet Union via Arctic convoys. Stalin and his diplomats pressed from the very beginning of the war for a second front to relieve pressure on the Red Army which faced 80 per cent of SEER, 98, 1, JANUARY 2020 184 Axis forces in 1942. Churchill stalled on the second front for as long as he could. This was well known in Britain where cartoonists David Low and Leslie Illingworth often drew images of Churchill dragging his feet, conniving to delay a landing in France. British public opinion was keener on the second front than was the British prime minister who was more interested in the Mediterranean theatre of operations. When he felt pressure from Moscow or British opinion, Churchill lashed out that Stalin had only himself to blame for his difficulties because of signing the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. This argument was disingenuous, as Churchill must have known, since it was the Soviet government which had pressed for a broad anti-Nazi entente from late 1933 onward and the British and French who demurred and sought their own deals with Hitler. The conduct of the British and French governments in their last chance negotiations with Moscow during the spring-summer of 1939 was particularly scandalous. After the tide of battle turned against Nazi Germany — marked by the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in early 1943 — Stalin still pressed hard for the second front, though he appeared to believe that the Red Army could finish off the Wehrmacht without the Western allies (April 1944). ‘Our allies are in a hurry’, Stalin remarked: ‘They are afraid we will rout Nazi Germany without them’ (p. 409). In February 1942 this was in fact a topic of discussion in the Foreign Office. Better late to the party than never was, nonetheless, Stalin’s view. It was only when Roosevelt came down on Stalin’s side at the first Big Three conference in Teheran in November 1943, that operation ‘Overlord’ was finally...