‘They treat us with scant respect’: prejudice and pride in British Military Liaison with the Soviet Union in the Second World War

Abstract

Britain stationed a military mission in the USSR from 1941-45. This article examines the British conduct of the Mission at a crucial stage of the war, from November 1942 to November 1943. Prompted by a report from the head of the Mission, the Chiefs of Staff decided in February 1943 to institute a ‘new deal’, to try to end what was seen as ‘one-way traffic’ in the relationship. A new head, General Martel, was appointed, to make higher-level contacts. The attempt to try and make the relationship equal, reciprocal and symmetrical was short-lived as other military concerns moved the ‘bargaining’ approach of the ‘new deal’ back towards an acceptance of asymmetry. While the Soviet contribution on the battlefield was a weighty element in the balance, this article demonstrates that in the diplomacy of alliance military liaison, such rational calculations were accompanied by irrational factors like concern for personal or national prestige, cultural differences concerning ‘manners’, the pressures of life as a foreigner in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and inter-service rivalries in Whitehall that set the representatives in Moscow often at cross-purposes.