Roosevelt through Stalin's Spectacles

Abstract

STALIN leader in modern history, and in the present circumstances it is hard to discuss his ideas on anything without belabouring the well-known or meandering into baseless speculation. It is particularly difficult to produce much explicit evidence on his ideas about the United States in the years following 1940, when the little that he did publish concerning it was more often than not calculated to mislead foreign opinion. But it may be helpful to attempt to combine the well-known and the speculative in reconsidering the way in which Stalin is likely to have interpreted President Roosevelt's friendly overtures to the Soviet Union during the war, to don Stalin's spectacles in an effort to gain a better perspective on the failure of American hopes for postwar harmony among the victorious powers. Granting that this approach has its pitfalls, the general cast of Stalin's thought lends itself to such treatment. We are dealing with a mind not much given to subtle qualifications, not a fox in Sir Isaiah Berlin's system of intellectual zoology; on the contrary, Stalin was a kind of super-hedgehog, notable for his immensely tenacious grasp of a limited number of simple ideas, which is not to say that he lacked foxy tactical cunning in the pursuit of his objectives. We are not likely to be much misled if we assume that Stalin interpreted profferred American friendship in the light of his limited, simplified preconception of the United States.