Lenin had his eye on America from the very beginning of his accession to power, before, even, that power was consolidated—when the Red Army was still fighting White Russian forces, Allied armies were maintaining a blockade, and famine was pervasive. The Council of People’s Commissars, the highest government council, on the first day of 1919, pondered how to establish diplomatic relations with the United States. Lenin, chairman of the council, and Stalin, his faithful shadow in those early years, viewed America as a possible ally in an otherwise hostile world, as a country that could shield them from European aggression, at least until they could stand on their own two feet. On January 1, 1919, therefore, the Council of People’s Commissars issued a remarkable document:
On the problem of our relationships with the United States. The Soviet Russia should set herself free out of the iron circle she has been surrounded with. Otherwise, she will perish…It is only the United States of America that may help the Soviet Government since they need friendship with the Republican Russia in the interests of their domestic and foreign politics. They need: first, markets for the products of their industry; second, opportunities for profitable investment of their capitals; third to weaken English influence in Europe…The relations between the United States and Japan are not sincere…The war between them is inevitable…It is first of all necessary to enter into relationship with the United States…Entering into relationship with the United States is the issue of paramount national importance and the fate of Soviet Russia depends on its successful resolution.
The hope was that recognition by America was achievable because the United States needed Soviet markets, and it feared, as did the Soviet Union, Japanese expansion. Commerce, always the first step, would pave the way to diplomatic relations. Lenin’s view never changed. The statement America is “the principal force in the world. All possible means will have to be employed, somehow or other to come to an understanding with the United States,” appeared in Izvestia two years later.
Lenin died on January 21, 1924. Stalin was by then general secretary of the Central Committee and head of the government. He too wanted to establish a dialogue with America, particularly after the European countries, one by one, and finally Great Britain granted recognition. But America remained out of reach: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover would have nothing to do with the Soviet Union. By 1930, Stalin, fed up with his lack of progress in gaining recognition, vented his annoyance to the New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty: “America knows where we stand…We have done what we could, but we won’t hang on their necks. We still are willing to do what I said before: get the debt question settled by the payment of an extra percentage on credits or a loan and resume normal relations, as we have done with the rest of the great powers.” He went on, “A debt settlement with America—that is easy enough; it is a comparatively small matter, anyway.”
Stalin watched for every new blip in American foreign relations that might involve Russia and might jump-start trade between the two countries. The year 1931 came and went. He was told, “The major issue is the issue of our tactics for the coming year, the latter looks like to be no less difficult than the previous…The banks of Morgan…the DuPont group—refused to engage in any talks…the time for Russian affairs has not come.”
Roosevelt, when still governor of New York, called in Walter Duranty, one of the few Americans who knew anything about Soviet Russia, and quizzed him about the Soviet economy, particularly about its gold production and capacity to pay for goods it might buy. Four months after taking office, he decided to pursue recognition. It wasn’t that he admired Stalin.
America, in the depths of the Depression, badly needed markets for its farmers and its factories; in addition, Japan was pressing into China. The U.S. ambassador to China, Joseph C. Grew, saw how quickly FDR had grasped that recognition would address both problems. “He said not a word about Manchuria but started building up the fleet and recognized Soviet Russia.” FDR accepted that Stalin was a dictator, as he made clear to Henry Goddard Leach, editor of the magazine The Forum, in 1930, when Leach wanted him to step in and take control of New York’s cities. FDR wrote to him, “I go along with you 100% in the thought that something must be done, but the answer is not State control or Federal control. That is moral cowardice and leads the country straight for the type of government now in effect in Russia and Italy. The editor of the Forum in the year 2030 will recognize that Mussolini and Stalin were not mere distant relatives, but were blood brothers.”
By June 1933, the idea of recognizing the Soviet Union had gone mainstream. The U.S. Board of Trade, the dean of the Harvard Business School, and the Foreign Policy Association, among others, backed the reestablishment of diplomatic ties with Russia. Many of the important U.S. newspapers as well were in favor of such a move. Commented Roy Howard, chairman of the board of the Scripps Howard Newspapers, “I think the menace of Bolshevism in the United States is about as great as the menace of sunstroke in Greenland or chilblains in the Sahara.”
Because most of the State Department’s foreign service officers were so opposed to the move, Roosevelt simply bypassed the department and in August 1933 put Henry Morgenthau, his neighbor and friend, whom he was about to name secretary of the Treasury, in charge of the first step: putting out trade feelers. At lunch one day with FDR, Morgenthau was unburdening himself about the problems he was running into caused on the one hand by the lack of authority on the part of the Russians he was dealing with and on the other by the roadblocks put up by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation that would need to finance loans to the Russians. If he could work out a deal, Morgenthau worriedly remarked to the president, he would be a hero, but if he couldn’t, he would have to leave Washington. Roosevelt replied, “Well, of course, you know that I stand back of you in these negotiations, and if you have to leave Washington I will leave with you.”
Nevertheless, realizing that Morgenthau’s effort was not working, and undoubtedly by this time having apprised members of the State Department that negotiations, however preliminary, were at last beginning, he turned to them for help. With Hull, he crafted a letter to Mikhail Kalinin, president and nominal head of the Soviet Union, asking him to send a representative to Washington to work out the opening of diplomatic relations between their two countries. When it was received in the Soviet Union, it was huge news and incredibly welcome. Radio broadcasts in the Soviet Union had an enormous impact; every home, no matter how humble, had a radio, a radio with only one channel—the government channel. (For this reason radios didn’t look like Western radios; there was no dial: a radio was either on or off. Radio was the ideal medium for a totalitarian government to use to educate its populace.) Now Soviet radio, a political tool of the government that reached every home, blasted out the news.
Russians across the land were thrilled by Roosevelt’s letter: there was a sense of exhilaration. It was to Soviet citizens as if the Soviet Union had finally arrived. Even the lowliest workers felt it. Charles Thayer, a West Point graduate in Moscow studying to be a foreign service officer, remembered being “awakened one night by the hotel night porter who told me with pathetic excitement that the radio had just announced that Roosevelt had written a letter to Kalinin hinting at reestablishment of relations.”
Within weeks, Maxim Litvinov, foreign commissar (minister) of the Soviet Union, was on the high seas bound for the United States. FDR, taking no chances with the State Department, decided to personally handle negotiations and had Litvinov brought to the White House for private discussions. Over several days the two men resolved the difficult issues of freedom of religion for Americans in the Soviet Union, which Russia did not wish to grant, and payment to Americans for their holdings in Russia seized by the Bolshevik government after the revolution and reached a gentleman’s agreement on the size of the debt incurred by Russia prior to the Soviet takeover that had to be paid. Diplomatic relations between the two countries were resumed on November 16, 1933.
The following day at the cabinet meeting, Roosevelt proudly recounted how persuasive he had been with Litvinov, particularly on the subject of religion. After Litvinov said that they had all the freedom of religion in Russia they needed, and no one was punished for going to church, merely discouraged, he had replied as follows:
“You know, Max, your good old father and mother, pious Jewish people, always said their prayers. I know they must have taught you to say prayers …” By this time Max was as red as a beet and I said to him, “Now you may think you’re an atheist…but I tell you, Max, when you come to die…you’re going to be thinking about what your father and mother taught you …” Max blustered and puffed and said all kinds of things, laughed and was very embarrassed, but I had him. I was sure from the expression of his face and his actions that he knew what I meant and that he knew I was right.
Litvinov’s reaction to the president’s statement is unknown: whether it was agreement, amazement, or, as Frances Perkins hazarded, embarrassment. But the result was that the president got his way.
FDR sent as ambassador, as expected, William Bullitt and armed him with a long, detailed, unusual letter of advice, for if he was pleased that he had finally gotten America to recognize the potentially powerful nation, he was under no illusions about its dangerous strangeness:
January 7, 1934
It is clear to me that the unusual difficulties presented by the problem of establishing an Embassy and Consulate in Moscow require unusual treatment. You will be more or less in the position of Commander Byrd—cut off from civilization and I think you should organize your expedition as if you were setting out on a ship which was to touch no port for a year.
FDR then went into a detailed list of what he would need: automobiles and the establishment of a commissary to supply all needs from food to office machines and supplies. He recommended bringing doctors (he suggested setting up a small operating room, as well as an isolation ward for contagious diseases) and finding tennis courts for recreation. But it was his advice on diplomatic conduct that is most illuminating:
In addition to the points enumerated above, it seems to me essential that all our diplomatic, consular, military and naval representation in the USSR should be forbidden to indulge in spying of any kind and should be instructed to cultivate the frankest and most direct relations with the members of the Soviet Government. You will, of course, warn all the members of the staff of both Embassy and Consulate in Russia that they will be spied upon constantly and that they should be on their guard against communicating at any time official secrets of any kind to anyone.
In the Soviet Union, the news was greeted with great joy; the newspapers acclaimed Roosevelt as a hero. Large photographs of the president appeared on the front pages of all the newspapers, columns and columns were devoted to the story, and the event was painted as a personal victory for the president, who was—the highest praise a Communist could bestow—referred to as a champion of the working class. “The laboring masses of the Soviet Union warmly greet this new victory for the cause of peace,” enthused Pravda. “It is necessary to pay full tribute to the initiative taken by the President of the United States. The question of normal relations was placed in his agenda after his inauguration. Mr. Roosevelt found it necessary to overcome not a few prejudices in American bourgeois circles before he was able to bring this matter to a successful conclusion.”
Izvestia cast the event in terms of a class war: “The United States, the greatest capitalist power in the world, has at last been ‘compelled’ to establish normal diplomatic relations.” It was, the editorial continued, “the end of a long drawn out struggle which the progressive elements of the American bourgeoisie had been carrying on for the recognition of the U.S.S.R.” Because nothing was published in the Soviet Union without the knowledge and approval of Stalin, the articles in both papers amounted to a salute from Stalin to the president of “the greatest capitalist power in the world.”
“By all appearances a decided and courageous political leader,” Stalin was quoted as saying a month after recognition. “He is a realist and knows facts as they are.”
When Ambassador Bullitt reached Moscow in December, Stalin gave him a dinner in the Kremlin, something unheard of in Russian diplomatic history. In his toast to FDR at the dinner he gave notice that he had been following FDR’s political fortunes and political enemies, particularly Hamilton Fish, saying, “To President Roosevelt, who in spite of the mute growls of the Fishes dared to recognize the Soviet Union.” In 1934, Stalin said to Bullitt, “President Roosevelt is today, in spite of being the leader of a capitalist nation, one of the most popular men in the Soviet Union.” Later in the year Stalin seemed to entertain the idea that FDR not only was admirable but might, in fact, have in mind socialist goals, saying to the English journalist H. G. Wells, “Undoubtedly Roosevelt stands out as one of the strongest figures among all the captains of the contemporary capitalist world.” Not that he had any doubts, he told Wells, “about the personal abilities, talent and courage of President Roosevelt. But if the circumstances are unfavorable, the most talented captain cannot reach the goal.”
On no other person except Lenin did Stalin ever heap such praise.
Part of the reason Stalin so happily welcomed the new relationship with the United States was that Hitler, who had come to power in 1933, was beginning his propaganda campaign against Slavs, Jews, and other non-European races. Mein Kampf, the führer’s part-autobiographical, part-political tract, published in the mid-1920s, was permeated with violent anti-Slav, anti-Soviet venom. In it Hitler was quite explicit about his plans to colonize Slav lands with worthy German farmers. (“If we talk about new soil and territory in Europe today, we can think primarily only of Russia and its vassal border states…the German plow which needs only to be given land by the sword.”)
Stalin was hoping that the United States would help the Soviets by selling them various things they would need in case of war, a necessity because Hitler had made no secret of his plans for Russia. In 1936, Germany laid down the keel of the Bismarck, a battleship eight hundred feet long, carrying eight fifteen-inch guns, manned by a crew of more than two thousand men, capable of attaining a speed of thirty knots, although heavily armored—the largest ship Germany had ever built. Stalin decided the Soviet Union needed a battleship too—an even larger one. Because the Soviet Union did not have the facilities to build such a huge ship, he set out to have it built in the United States. Stalin appointed as his chief negotiator Sam Carp and gave his company, Carp Export & Import Corporation, $200 million—a huge sum in those days—to draw on, with full authority to enter into contracts with shipbuilders. There was precedent, as Stalin, history buff, knew: during the Crimean War with England ninety years earlier a private U.S. firm had built a steamship for the Russian government. Stalin instructed Carp to ask for a super battleship with sixteen-inch guns—guns even more powerful than the Bismarck’s. Carp, an American citizen who lived in Connecticut, brother to Molotov’s wife, Polina, worked diligently on the project, but almost immediately he ran into problems caused by Chief of Naval Operations William Leahy and Secretary of the Navy Claude A. Swanson, both of whom, strongly anti-Communist as was most of the navy brass, in concert blocked the project. When word that the navy was blocking the proposed battleship deal reached Secretary of State Hull, he laid the matter to the president. At a cabinet meeting on April 3, 1937, recorded Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior, “It was evident that the President saw no objection to this ship’s being built on one of our yards, and neither did Hull. The President told Swanson to tell any shipbuilding company that it was a private concern and that this was a private contract and it could do as it pleased about the matter.”
However, naval officers at various ranks, all of whom viewed the Soviet Union as a potential enemy, threatened companies that wished to sign on to the project with the loss of future contracts. Bethlehem Steel, which had been working on designs for the ship, privately admitted that the Soviet order “would merely lead to impossible controversies with the Navy Department.” Carp persevered. In February 1938, the battleship was again brought to Roosevelt’s attention. FDR “expressed the hope that a battleship in accordance with the plans could be constructed in this country.” On April 8, Roosevelt said again that he “saw no objection to the project or the disclosure of the design to the Russians.” Still, construction had not yet started.
The importance of this project to Stalin cannot be overestimated. On June 5, 1943, Ambassador Joseph E. Davies was accorded what the world believed was a signal honor when he made his last formal parting call on President Kalinin and Premier Molotov before leaving and taking on his next post, as ambassador to Belgium. Upon arrival in the Kremlin, Davies first paid his respects to Kalinin, who said he could understand Davies leaving, for “the life of a diplomat in Moscow was not altogether agreeable and had its limitations; for the reason that contacts between officials of the Soviet Union and the Diplomatic Corps did not generally obtain as they did in other countries.” Then Davies had been taken down a long corridor to another section of the building and ushered into Molotov’s office. Scarcely were he and Molotov seated when Stalin walked in.
The rest of the diplomatic corps and Davies himself thought Stalin met with him because he was highly pleased with him—he continued to believe this for the rest of his life—but the reason Stalin met with Davies was that he knew Davies was a conduit to Roosevelt and he wanted to push forward getting the battleship built.
Stalin began the meeting by telling Davies that he couldn’t understand why the battleship project was not going forward, that the Soviet Union was prepared to pay cash, that this would provide employment to the unemployed in America. He made the leading comment (given that he knew Davies and the president were close friends and knew the lack of progress on the battleship was because of opposition from high-level government personnel) that “if the President of the United States wanted it done he felt sure that the army and navy technicians could not stop it, and that it could be lawfully done.”
Davies faithfully transmitted Stalin’s concerns to FDR. Three days later, June 8, FDR, saying there was no objection to the project, that he “hoped it would be carried out,” ordered the navy to assist the architects, shipbuilders, and Soviet officers to facilitate the building of what had now grown to an order for several ships. Further, FDR ordered that to get around uncooperative naval personnel, an officer of flag rank be appointed to take full charge of the project. On June 17 the State Department “relayed the good news” to the Soviet ambassador, Alexander Troyanovsky. Glacial progress followed; although one ship’s hull was completed, bureaucratic opposition continued; no ship was ever built. The Hitler-Stalin pact put an end to the enterprise. From this episode Stalin might have learned that Roosevelt was sympathetic to the Soviet plight and the danger that Hitler represented but that he didn’t always get his way.
Stalin stayed interested in keeping in America’s good graces and making a good impression. When he was called by Grover Whalen, the head of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, sometime in 1937 about funding a Russian pavilion, Stalin agreed to talk to him and, at the end of a half-hour telephone conversation, to pay $4 million to put up a large pavilion in a choice location. It was Whalen’s first large-scale foreign contract. The resulting first-rate Russian pavilion included a life-size copy of the interior of the Mayakovskaya subway station. So entranced were the various visitors and officials that the designer of the station, Alexey Dushkin, was awarded the Grand Prize of the fair.
The menace of Hitler was constantly at the forefront of Stalin’s and Molotov’s minds in 1938. Stalin was strengthening Soviet defenses. In April he stepped up Soviet production of airplanes to four hundred a month, forty-eight hundred a year. From 1934 to 1937 the percentage of the total Soviet government revenue devoted to military purposes rose from 3.3 percent to 22 percent. A third five-year plan was published and implemented to continue adding to the industrial strength of the country.
NINETEEN THIRTY-EIGHT was the year Germany’s armies began marching across Europe. Hitler announced the Anschluss with Austria and accomplished it with a bloodless invasion on March 12. In September, in the misbegotten hope that this would slake Hitler’s thirst for territory, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Britain, Prime Minister Édouard Daladier of France, and Prime Minister Benito Mussolini of Italy flew to Munich and signed an agreement ceding Germany the Sudetenland, the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia.
In 1939, as it became obvious that Hitler and his Wehrmacht were ready to spring again, the question that occupied the international community was not so much if as where the next strike would be.
Most Americans still thought of Europe’s problems as being as far away as the moon. Isolationists believed the oceans were impenetrable moats that protected America from harm. Roosevelt didn’t. He had been influenced at an early age by Admiral Alfred Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power upon History (according to his mother, he buried himself in it “until he had practically memorized the whole book”) and found incomprehensible the isolationist idea that America could retreat from the world, safe behind the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. From Mahan he had learned that if a country did not defend and patrol its oceans, its shores could always be breached; a nation’s commerce, its economic health, depended on freedom of the seas.
The president decided to discuss the growing danger to the country in his annual message to Congress on January 4, 1939. He pondered over the right words for days, remembered the speechwriter Sam Rosenman, intent as he was to alert people and get his message across without raising the hackles of pacifists and isolationists—the vast majority of citizens—who still believed America could stay untouched, no matter what happened in Europe, no matter how many countries Hitler and Mussolini overran.
He had begun to prepare America for war in various ways, which he carefully didn’t mention. He explicitly couched his words in terms of defense of American institutions and stressed religion throughout. He referred to God and religion nine times. “Storms from abroad directly challenge three institutions indispensable to Americans, now as always,” he said. “The first is religion. It is the source of the other two—democracy and international good faith…Religion, by teaching man his relationship to God, gives the individual a sense of his own dignity…Democracy, the practice of self-government, is a covenant among free men to respect the rights and liberties of other nations of men.”
On the other hand, he wanted to warn Hitler that America would fight if provoked too far. Therefore, he ended by saying, “In our foreign relations we have learned from the past what not to do. From new wars we have learned what we must do. We have learned that effective timing of defense and the distant points from which attacks may be launched are completely different from what they were twenty years ago.”
To the three writers working with him on the speech—Tom Corcoran, Ben Cohen, and Sam Rosenman—he said, so that they were absolutely clear on how he felt about Chamberlain and the Munich Agreement, “We can do business with him [Hitler] all right but in the process we would lose everything that America stands for.”
As the threat of Hitler grew, the countries within marching distance of the Wehrmacht sought to make alliances, the Soviet Union among them. Poland, the only country, after Hitler annexed Czechoslovakia and Austria, still remaining between Germany and Russia, was torn between fear of newly militant Germany and fear of its ancient borderland foe: Russia. The enmity between Russia and Poland dated back centuries. In Red Square stands the famous statue that commemorates the two Russian heroes—the prince and the butcher—who threw the Poles out of the Kremlin in 1612. The sculpture is the only structure besides Lenin’s tomb in that vast space, testimony to how long and deep the quarrel between the two countries ran.
Even so, Polish public opinion—although muted in a feudalist society still run by colonels and landed aristocrats—was strongly anti-German. The colonels in power, however, and particularly Poland’s powerful foreign minister, Jósef Beck, who controlled foreign policy, were strongly pro-German. Beck came away saying, after a meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, “If the Soviet Union is militarily feeble, what good is it to be tied to it; if the Soviet Union is strong they will never leave.” Even in the face of Hitler’s insistent and patently false claims of Polish atrocities against Germans as the rationale for threatening to grab Danzig, the Polish port on the Baltic, as well as taking control of the Polish Corridor, Beck clung to the belief that Hitler was not going to attack Poland. It was a fatal mistake. (One interesting explanation for Poland’s otherwise inexplicable mésalliance has always been a suspicion that Beck was a German agent and that Hitler had talked him into a German alliance by dangling before him the prospect of Poland’s claiming a piece of the Ukraine. This has the ring of truth, for his young son Anthony, whom he sent out of harm’s way to Loomis, an exclusive prep school in America, would find, after his father’s death, among his prized possessions a photograph album consisting of his father posed with Nazi generals and various officials of the Nazi government elite.)
STALIN WANTED AN ALLIANCE with Chamberlain and Daladier because there was no other choice: there were no countries other than Britain and France to which he could turn to protect the Soviet Union from Hitler.
He made a speech broadcast over the radio to the nation and the world on March 10, 1939, on the occasion of the Eighteenth Party Congress. To the assembled Soviet delegates in the great hall built in 1935, equipped with thirteen hundred desks, one for each representative of each republic, he said,
But war is inexorable. It cannot be hidden under any guise. For no “axis,” “triangles” or “anti-Comintern pacts” can hide the fact that…Germany has seized Austria and the Sudeten region, that Germany and Italy together have seized Spain—and all this in defiance of the interests of the non-aggressive states.
They [Great Britain and France] let her have Austria, despite the undertaking to defend her independence; they let her have the Sudeten region; they abandoned Czechoslovakia to her fate.
He accused both countries of pointing up “the weakness of the Russian army,” “the demoralization of the Russian air force.”
Why, he asked, was this happening? It looked like a one-sided war. Were the nonaggressive states weak? “Of course not. Combined, the nonaggressive democratic states are unquestionably stronger…England and France have rejected the policy of collective security and have taken up a position of neutrality.”
The point of the speech of interest to the international community was Stalin’s statement that if England and France took collective action, they were stronger: the war, he was saying to them, could be won. And that made Russia available as an ally.
Five days later, March 15, Hitler seized the rest of Czechoslovakia.
When Stalin touched on the possibility of an alliance with the Allies in his March speech, it amounted to a clear call to Britain and France: It was for Foreign Minister Litvinov to negotiate that alliance.
Litvinov, skilled diplomat, anglicized by many years of living in London as the Soviet ambassador to Great Britain, married to an Englishwoman, was known to be sympathetic to Britain. He was also a friend of America’s. He had negotiated recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States with Franklin Roosevelt. During his time as foreign minister the Soviet government had indicated it was prepared to fight for Czechoslovakia and maintained a wary distance from Germany. Under Litvinov, Russia had joined the League of Nations and followed a policy of collective security in 1934. At that time Litvinov had negotiated the Franco-Soviet Pact of Mutual Assistance: Stalin called it “an obstacle to the enemies of peace.” In 1936, Stalin had predicted how German aggression would break out upon the world: “History shows that when any state intends to make war against another state…it begins to seek frontiers across which it can reach the frontiers of the state it wants to attack…I do not know precisely what frontiers Germany may adapt to her aims, but I think she will find people willing to ‘lend’ her a frontier.”
He had been right on the mark.
Stalin made those statements before Munich. The question before the world in 1939 was, would Britain pull back from the principle of collective security? A week went by after Stalin’s speech with no reaction from Britain. Taking the initiative on March 18 at Stalin’s direction, Litvinov proposed that France, Britain, Poland, Russia, Romania, and Turkey join together at a conference to draw up a treaty to stop Hitler. Chamberlain reacted negatively. As he wrote to a friend, “I must confess to the most profound distrust of Russia. I have no belief whatever in her ability to maintain an effective offensive, even if she wanted to. And I distrust her motives.” Chamberlain had never quite gotten over the notion implanted in his brain as a youth by his father, Joseph, that the world should be run by the Teutonic nations, by which was meant England, Germany, and America. Nevertheless, realizing that he had not achieved “peace in our time” at Munich in September 1938, on March 31, 1939, Chamberlain announced to an approving House of Commons that Britain and France would guarantee Poland in case Hitler attacked it: “would lend the Polish Government all support in their power.”
But that was no help to Russia.
On April 14, Lord Halifax, the powerful, aristocratic British foreign minister and the ex-viceroy of India (Churchill called him the Holy Fox), gave Britain’s answer to Litvinov’s March 18 proposal. He told the Soviet ambassador to Great Britain, Ivan Maisky, that the British government would not extend to his country a guarantee of support if it was invaded, as it had to Poland. This, it was reported, “enraged” Stalin.
Nevertheless, Litvinov, in Moscow, tried for the next six weeks to bring Sir William Seeds, the British ambassador to the Soviet Union, who spoke also for the French ambassador, Paul-Émile Naggiar, to the point of discussing a military and diplomatic alliance. However, the ambassadors offered nothing—no alliance, no guarantees. Britain was telling Russia to go it alone.
On April 16, Stalin took a giant step: he had Litvinov formally propose to Seeds that Russia, France, and Great Britain make a pact that would bind their three countries to declare war on Germany if they or any nation between the Baltic and the Mediterranean was attacked: “to render all manner of assistance including military in case of aggression in Europe against any one of these powers.” The agreement, Litvinov stipulated, should be cast in the form of two pacts: Great Britain and the Soviet Union, and France and the Soviet Union; each should conclude accords for immediate military support in case of aggression, similar to the pact recently concluded between Great Britain and Poland.
THE PROBLEM WAS POLAND. No matter who allied with whom, everyone except the Polish foreign minister, Beck (his faith in Hitler was unshakable), agreed Hitler, who periodically erupted into diatribes about his intentions to control the Polish Corridor and Danzig, would start the war by invading Poland. William L. Shirer, war correspondent and author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, spent the first week in April in Poland. He found Poland a conundrum, observing, “Militarily and politically they were in a disastrous position. Their Air Force was obsolete, their Army cumbersome, their strategic position—surrounded by the Germans on three sides—almost hopeless…[T]he strengthening of Germany’s West Wall made an Anglo-French offensive against Germany in case Poland were attacked extremely difficult. And finally it became obvious that the headstrong Polish ‘colonels’ would never consent to receiving Russian help even if the Germans were at the gates of Warsaw.”
And yet, he saw incredulously, they relied on Germany.
In point of fact, if the German army marched on Poland, there was nothing Britain could do to stop it—no matter what any treaty said. Halifax used as his excuse for putting off serious negotiations with the U.S.S.R. Jósef Beck’s refusal to allow Russian soldiers to enter his country, even to drive back a German army. In fact it was obvious to all, according to Shirer, that Britain could have forced the Poles to agree to Russian action on Polish soil if it had wanted to.
On May 1, Lord Halifax visited the Soviet embassy in London; it was the first time a British foreign secretary had set foot in the embassy since the revolution. But it became apparent that Halifax’s attitude had if anything hardened: he told Ambassador Maisky that his government was not ready to enter into a pact with Russia.
IN AMERICA, PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were apprehensively watching the growing danger to peace Hitler represented. The president, and Hull, too, had come to the conclusion that if Britain and France made a pact with the Soviet Union, it would deter Hitler. They, too, saw that the combined military might of the three nations not only matched but dwarfed that of Germany. They also saw the danger: the possibility that Stalin, if he could not make a deal with Britain, might make a deal with Hitler. It would make sense for him; it would buy the Soviet Union time to build up its defenses. Joseph E. Davies, ex-ambassador to the Soviet Union, a highly independent thinker whom Roosevelt relied upon, reporting on European alliances from his listening post in Brussels, where he was now U.S. ambassador, prophesied, “The deciding element in Hitler’s determination as to whether it will be peace or war this summer in Europe will be whether Britain and France will make a definite agreement with the Soviet Union.” He and other knowledgeable Americans watched, for that was all they could do.
Stalin was getting interesting information about FDR’s mind-set from his ambassadors. Alexander Troyanovsky, the first Russian ambassador to the United States (from 1933 to 1938), small, stocky, reserved, and well regarded, had met with Roosevelt six times over the years he had been stationed in Washington. He was called back to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1938, lived for months fearing arrest, and was spared because he was a longtime friend of Stalin. There is an unsubstantiated story that in one of the few known instances where Stalin exhibited compassion, Stalin saw Troyanovsky’s name on a list of those to be killed, drew a line through it, and wrote “Do not touch.” Troyanovsky had reported that Roosevelt was sympathetic to the Soviet Union, but was “being intimidated and to a great degree fooled by the State Department apparatus which is cooking various memos in neutralist spirit and in general is working in favor of the aggressors.” Constantin Oumansky, Troyanovsky’s replacement, who was loathed by Stimson and Hull (Hull would write that Oumansky was “insulting in his manner and speech…overbearing…protested our acts as if they were heinous offenses”), nevertheless had his ear to the ground and reported the president “strongly hates the Nazis and the Japanese” and that Roosevelt chafed at the restrictions the Neutrality Act put on him. He noted as well “the activization of the reactionaries who at present are mostly manifest at the Dies [House Un-American Activities] Committee …an office of daily baiting of the progressive wing of Roosevelt administration.”
Stalin learned another interesting fact about FDR. The NKVD reported that Neville Chamberlain would probably not even be negotiating with Russia at all if it were not for the pressure FDR was exerting on the prime minister. The information came from Donald Maclean, master Soviet spy. Maclean, who had been recruited to Communism while at Cambridge and would later defect to the Soviet Union, was then, as third secretary in the British embassy in Paris, privy to all the discussions taking place between the British, the French, and the Russians. And, according to Maclean, Roosevelt virtually forced the British government to begin discussions with the Soviets. “Donald Maclean reported that…Roosevelt urged Chamberlain to enter into negotiations with Britain’s European allies, including the Soviet Union, to contain Hitler. Our intelligence sources reported that the British government reacted reluctantly to this American initiative and had to be forced by Roosevelt to start negotiations.”
Lord Halifax, along with most of his class, had a deep-seated fear of Communism. After meeting Hitler, he had said of the führer, “By destroying Communism in his country, he had barred its road to Western Europe…Germany therefore could rightly be regarded as a bulwark of the West against communism.” He and other world leaders feared Russia not only because Communism as a system of government was Western Europe’s worst nightmare but because, in 1939, the Soviet Union, the embodiment of the Communist model, seemed to be such a vibrant, functioning economy. Indeed the argument could be made (and in many circles it was) that the Soviet Union was more of a success story than America, still fighting its way out of the Depression, or the democratic countries of Europe, which were still trying to recover from World War I. Therefore Halifax continued to drag his negotiating feet as much as he could get away with, seemingly bound to discourage serious consideration of Russian overtures, hoping by this tactic at least to delay war, even if he could not avoid it.
April saw the launching of Germany’s new super battleship, the Bismarck.
On May 1, Litvinov stood on the reviewing stand next to Stalin as the Red troops and guns and armor passed by at the great annual May Day parade in Red Square. Soviet newspapers marked him out as “guest of honor.” Presumably, Stalin had not yet heard about Halifax’s latest rebuff to Maisky. But certainly by the end of the day Stalin had been notified of what had occurred in London, for two days later he abruptly dumped Litvinov and made Molotov, already chairman of the Council of the People’s Commissars, the new foreign commissar. Soviet newspapers reported the change on a back page. It was totally unexpected. The German chargé d’affaires in Moscow reported that “the sudden change has caused the greatest surprise here, as Litvinov was in the midst of negotiations with the British delegation…appears to be due to a spontaneous decision by Stalin.”
In personal terms, the change finally gave ascendancy to Molotov in what had been a decades-long rivalry with Litvinov for Stalin’s ear. In political terms, it meant trouble for England, for Molotov was less pro-British and more trusting of the Germans than Litvinov. He had written a remarkably revealing letter to Stalin in 1933 (undoubtedly followed by others as the years passed): “Litvinov along with his unscrupulous circle is inclined to slide down the road of ‘opposition’ to the Germans…I consider it necessary to stop him.”
In contrast, early on Litvinov had singled out Hitler’s intention “to cut a road for expansion to the East by fire and sword…and enslave the Soviet peoples.” In putting Molotov in charge of Soviet foreign policy, Stalin opened the door to negotiations with Hitler. If Stalin couldn’t get a treaty with the Allies, he would take his chances with Hitler, and it would be harder to deal with Hitler if Litvinov, who was Jewish, was in charge of the negotiations.
Molotov had always been Stalin’s closest companion, the only person who “would talk to his chief as one comrade to another.” For Stalin, dealing with this urgent matter of protecting his country from war, having Molotov on the front line meant that he would learn every nuance, every change, every possibility out there; he would be more than able to negotiate with the Germans.
Molotov continued the negotiating sessions with Naggiar and Seeds, but two days after Chamberlain as much as declared in Parliament that Britain would not enter into a treaty with Russia, Stalin told Molotov to meet with Count Friedrich von der Schulenburg, the German ambassador to the Soviet Union, and start a discussion of trade relations between their two countries.
Germany wanted to neutralize the Soviet Union at this moment in time because Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Reich foreign minister, eager for war, had convinced Hitler that rapprochement with Russia would give the Reich the immediate chance (after invading Poland) to strike a mortal blow at Great Britain. And after Great Britain was conquered, it would be time enough to finish off Russia.
Molotov was at first confrontational. He accused Schulenburg and his government of negotiating in bad faith. Molotov assured Schulenburg that “Stalin was following the conversations with great interest, he was being informed about all their details.”
The German Foreign Office in Berlin wasn’t at all sure it would be possible to “turn” the Soviets. “We are of the opinion here that the English-Russian combination certainly will not be easy to prevent…The possibility of success is considered here to be quite limited,” it advised Schulenburg.
Shortly thereafter, on May 31, Stalin had Molotov make a speech on the radio, the medium of choice for a major foreign policy speech, because Stalin and Molotov assumed not just all Russia but all interested countries would be listening.
Molotov now announced on the radio that Britain had neither guaranteed military aid to Russia if it were attacked nor guaranteed aid to the border countries. “We stand for peace and against aggression,” he declared, “but we must remember Stalin’s admonition that we cannot be used to pull the chestnuts of others out of the fire.” He clearly made the point that Russia wanted an effective pact of mutual assistance with England and France that laid out the extent and character of the aid the Soviet Union expected, as well as the aid to be rendered to the border countries that were guaranteed in the event of hostilities. Molotov included for his Russian audience (as well as British, French, and German listeners) a warning that the possibility of rapprochement with Germany shouldn’t automatically be excluded. In 1938, Germany had wanted to open trade relations with the Soviet Union, he explained. Talks then were broken off, but, he continued, “The conversations may be renewed.”
Of course, they already had been.
The use of the radio at this moment was indicative of a turning point. If Stalin had only wanted to warn France and England, Molotov could simply have met with the British and French ambassadors. What was necessary was for Molotov to go on the radio to prepare the Russian people for such an enormous change of policy.
Molotov mentioned only one world leader by name in the broadcast: Roosevelt—a clear signal that Stalin was aware of the president’s efforts on his behalf. On April 14 the president had sent a message to Hitler in which he listed thirty-one countries he asked him not to attack for at least ten years. The main effect of the message had been negative, unfortunately, for Hitler held the message up to ridicule in a speech to the Reichstag that William Shirer described as “the most brilliant oration he ever gave.” However, FDR’s message had been met with appreciation in the Soviet Union. Now Molotov stated that the destruction by the German state of international treaties “was the answer of Germany to the proposal imbued with the spirit of peacefulness of the President of the United States, Roosevelt.”
Within a short time Molotov was taking the lead in meetings with Schulenburg and had put political as well as economic issues between their countries on the table for discussion.
The next Soviet negotiating step took place in London and was a challenge to Halifax. Would he come to Moscow to negotiate seriously and iron out differences? asked Maisky.
Halifax replied, “It was really impossible to get away.”
Anthony Eden, who had previously been foreign secretary, horrified by Halifax’s rudeness, volunteered to go in place of Halifax; Chamberlain vetoed the idea. Maisky asked Halifax a second time to journey to Moscow; again he refused. It was impossible for him to leave London, he said, “for the present.”
Given that Chamberlain had traveled to Munich to bargain with Hitler, the foreign secretary’s repeated refusal to travel to Moscow was a slap in Stalin’s face.
ROOSEVELT BADLY WANTED to get to Stalin, to add his voice to those who were telling him not to make a deal with Hitler. He found a messenger at hand. Ambassador Troyanovsky was being replaced, was coming to the White House for his farewell visit to the president on June 6, and would be debriefed in Moscow. FDR gave him a simple message. “Tell Stalin,” he said, “that if his government joined up with Hitler, it was as certain as that the night followed the day that as soon as Hitler had conquered France, he would turn on Russia, and it would be the Soviets’ turn next.”
MEIN KAMPF HAD SOLD in the millions in Germany by the mid-1920s and had appeared in an English edition in 1933. British rulers had read Hitler’s words that Russians and Jews were scum, words brought home in his continuing public pronouncements that Germany had a right to the Slavic farmland, particularly the Ukraine. The German master race needed lebensraum, he had ranted: “The Russian space is our India. Like the English, we shall rule this empire with a handful of men.” Having digested these words, the British can possibly be forgiven for thinking, as Hitler grew ever more violent and threatening, that there was no need to rush to conclude a treaty with the Soviet Union because there was no danger of Russia and Germany making a treaty. Indeed, they might have thought that the process of negotiating a treaty with Russia, whose form of government they feared might take root in their country, would serve them as well as or perhaps better than the treaty itself, because the negotiations themselves might make Hitler pause—or even stop—before making his next aggressive move. It appeared to be outside their imaginations to consider that Hitler and Stalin might link up. Negotiations would buy them time, maybe enough time to deter Hitler till spring, because it was well-known that after the first week in September, heavy rains made Polish roads impassable, and afterward came winter, when there was snow and ice and it would be even harder to start a war.
The Soviet press was the tool that Stalin now employed to jump-start discussions with Britain. He had Pravda hurl charges of insincerity at the Allies. “The British and French Governments Do Not Wish an Equal Treaty with the Soviet Union,” the front-page headline read on June 29. Stalin did not entirely close the door to Britain and France, as a close reading of the article showed. Also reported was that the author’s “point of view regarding British and French insincerity is not shared by ‘his friends.’ ”
ON SEPTEMBER 15, 1938, the day Chamberlain first traveled to Munich to try to deal with Hitler, Roosevelt had written to a good friend that war was “inevitable…Perhaps when it comes the United States will be in a position to pick up the pieces of European civilization and help them to save what remains of the wreck.”
Now, almost a year later, as he watched the Soviet Union drifting into Germany’s orbit, Roosevelt began to prepare in earnest. On July 5, 1939, in preparation for the war he could see looming on the horizon, he quietly issued a military order. It created a new institution, the Executive Office of the President; reporting to it from that moment on would be the Joint Board of the Army and Navy (the chiefs of staff), which coordinated all strategic plans, the Aeronautical Board, and the Joint Army and Navy Munitions Board, which controlled all military procurement programs. Whereas before the chiefs of staff had reported to the secretary of war and the secretary of the navy, now all military planning—all questions of strategy, tactics, and operations—would come to him. He would hold all the reins in his hands.
As the warm days of July passed, the French, British, and American ambassadors in Berlin were wiring their governments that they found it increasingly apparent that the German general staff was preparing for war in August. By that time, they pointed out, the harvest would have been gathered, the fortifications would be ready, and the reservists whom they saw trickling into Berlin would be assembled in large numbers in military camps.
Ambassador Davies returned from Belgium on the Queen Mary, which docked in Manhattan on July 17. By 12:30 p.m. the next day he was at the White House having lunch with Roosevelt, briefing him on what Belgians with ties to German leaders had learned of Hitler’s plans. As they discussed the war that they both were sure was coming, Davies advised the president that based on the knowledge he had gleaned from business and diplomatic sources, he believed Hitler and Ribbentrop expected to break Stalin away from England and France. He predicted that Hitler would make war on Poland before the party rally in Nuremberg in September.
Davies also told FDR that in Brussels they “were praying for the amendment of the Neutrality Act, in the belief that it might possibly deter Hitler and at least delay the war.” Davies noted in his diary, “These statements gave him no surprise. It simply seemed to confirm his deep pessimism.”
In fact, Davies’s words galvanized the president. Armed with Davies’s information that a change in the Neutrality Act might avert war, Roosevelt called a meeting later that same day of key senators to see if he could persuade them to amend the act immediately so that America could help by sending armaments abroad. He hoped Davies’s additional evidence at this moment in time, with Stalin teetering between Germany and the Allies, with the Allies loath to commit to Stalin, would get the Senate moving. He held the meeting upstairs in his study. Present were Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Vice President John Nance Garner, and, crucially, the Republican senator William E. Borah, the ranking minority member of the Foreign Relations Committee, the key to the opposition, plus other senators. FDR opened the meeting by talking about the power and influence of Senator Gerald Nye, Republican of North Dakota, whose extreme isolationist views were blocking change. Borah interrupted. With a sweeping gesture he said, “There are others, Mr. President.” FDR was so taken aback he asked Borah to repeat what he said, which Borah did, emphatically, repeating, with conviction, that “no war would occur at least in the near future…Germany isn’t ready for it.” Hull, deeply upset, predicted there would be war before the end of summer. He offered to let Borah see the cables he was getting and argued the case for repeal of the act. According to participants, he had tears in his eyes and was on the edge of losing self-control, so greatly was he outraged by Borah’s brusque manner and his arrogance in thinking that he knew more about Germany than the State Department. The meeting went on until midnight, at which point Garner said, “Well Captain, we may as well face the facts. You haven’t got the votes and that’s all there is to it.” The Senate was a hurdle Roosevelt could not, in the summer of 1939, overcome.
MOLOTOV HAD NOT GIVEN UP on negotiating with Naggiar and Seeds. He now convinced them that the Soviet Union wanted to enter into military discussions “immediately” in Moscow and that a military mission should be sent to Moscow forthwith to sign an agreement of mutual assistance. Halifax finally agreed to this.
The pressure on the British Foreign Office and most particularly on Halifax and the close group surrounding him, and their resistance to concluding a meaningful treaty with the Soviet Union, can be seen in a comment senior British diplomat William Strang made: “The history of the negotiations for [the triple alliance] is the story of how the British government were driven step by step, under the stress of Soviet argument, under pressure from Parliament and the press and public opinion polls, under advice from the Ambassador at Moscow, and under persuasion from the French, to move towards the Soviet position.”
On July 31, Admiral Sir Reginald Drax and General Joseph Doumenc, the British and French negotiators, presumably armed with authority to conclude a military pact, and their staffs set off for Moscow. Their mode of travel was extraordinarily inefficient. The British navy was still the greatest in the world, but instead of putting the diplomats on a decent ship or, even more practically, on an airplane (Chamberlain and Daladier had flown to Munich), Halifax dispatched the group on the City of Exeter, a slow freighter. The City of Exeter took ten days to reach Leningrad.
The meetings between Schulenburg and Molotov continued as the City of Exeter proceeded east. Schulenburg, as an enticement to Stalin, now assured Molotov that Germany would “safeguard vital Soviet Baltic interests.”
Molotov was doing a brilliant job holding off Schulenburg. Schulenburg was by no means sure that Stalin would go through with a treaty with Hitler. In fact, he informed the Wilhelmstrasse, he was extremely doubtful: “My over-all impression is that the Soviet Government is at present determined to sign with England and France if they fulfill all Soviet wishes.”
Back in London, Chamberlain decided to stick to his plans and leave—on August 5—on a fishing trip to the trout streams of Scotland. The American ambassador in London reported, Chamberlain “hopes to be away a reasonable time.”
ROOSEVELT WAS INFORMED by Cordell Hull of the status of discussions between the Soviet Union and England and France at the 2:00 cabinet meeting on Friday afternoon, August 4. FDR was aware that the City of Exeter was still on the high seas. Directly after the cabinet meeting, working with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, in a last-ditch effort to stop Stalin from making a treaty with Hitler, Roosevelt wrote a personal message to him. How to deliver the message was the tricky question. It was decided to send it, because the president vitally wanted Stalin to read it—but didn’t want to get caught out having sent it—in a highly secret, roundabout way, but it took eleven days in that summer of endless negotiations before it reached Molotov and almost two weeks before Roosevelt heard of Stalin’s reaction. On that Friday also, in Washington, the U.S. commercial agreement with the Soviet Union facilitating trade was renewed.
The City of Exeter arrived in Leningrad on August 10, and on August 12 Drax and Doumenc were ready to begin talks with their Russian opposite numbers. Because the treaty under discussion was military, and the Russians expected serious negotiations to be concluded, the Russian delegation was headed by the commissar of defense, Kliment Voroshilov. Voroshilov had with him as advisers the most senior Soviet military leaders, including General Boris Shaposhnikov, chief of the general staff of the Red Army; the commander in chief of the Red Air Force; and the commander in chief of the Red Navy. In contrast, the Allied negotiating team that faced them was a motley crew: General Joseph Doumenc was the commander of the First Military Region for France, and Admiral Sir Reginald Drax was the naval aide to King George VI. Accompanying Drax was Air Marshal Sir Charles Burnett, a pilot, who was not, according to the German ambassador to London, even a strategist.
The meeting was held in the Spiridonovka Palace, an imposing Gothic mansion from tsarist times that provided a backdrop of spacious rooms decorated with gold ceilings, brocaded walls, and exquisite Oriental rugs, which had been designated the official place to entertain foreign emissaries by the Ministry of External Relations. Because it was a warm day, the doors to the carefully tended pleasant garden were thrown open as the men sat talking and smoking around the table.
Drax arrived without written credentials giving him the authority to negotiate. (A crucial week passed before his papers arrived.) Russia had 120 infantry divisions ready to fight if there was war. Voroshilov asked how many British troops would be ready to fight. Five regular divisions and one mechanized division, Drax answered. Voroshilov was stunned. Russian intelligence had gotten British troop strength wrong; Britain was much weaker than they had believed. So was France. Voroshilov asked the key question, adding it was “the cardinal point to which all other points are subordinate”: Would Poland agree to permit Soviet troops to enter the country to fight if the Germans invaded? British instructions to Drax were to duck the question, to answer that surely the Poles and the Romanians would invite the Red Army in. On August 17 Voroshilov proposed the talks adjourn until the question was answered. The delegations met again on August 21, but since the question remained unanswered, the talks were terminated for good.
With the clarity of hindsight it can be seen that the Allies were not negotiating in good faith. Before the conference had begun, Seeds had written, “I am not optimistic as to the success of military conversations…but to begin them now would give a healthy shock to the Axis Powers and a fillip to our friends, while they might be prolonged sufficiently to tide over the next dangerous months.” Sir Charles Burnett, the pilot, after four days in Moscow wrote to London, “I understand it is the Government’s policy to prolong negotiations as long as possible if we cannot get acceptance of a treaty.”
As the City of Exeter had set off, the American chargé d’affaires in London had cabled Washington, “the military mission which has now left for Moscow has been told to make every effort to prolong discussions until October 1.”
The British Foreign Office was not negotiating in good faith.
ROOSEVELT HAD JUST APPOINTED Laurence Steinhardt, previously ambassador to Sweden and Peru, U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. Steinhardt had arrived in Moscow and presented his credentials to Molotov on August 10, the day the City of Exeter reached Leningrad.
Great precautions were taken with Roosevelt’s secret message to Stalin. In order not to raise the ire of American isolationists eager to find traces of FDR’s meddling in European politics, it had been addressed to Steinhardt and signed not by FDR but by Sumner Welles. It was sent by the direct safe wire that the State Department relied on between Washington and the U.S. embassy in Paris. From Paris, because both telephone and telegraph wires throughout Europe were known to be routinely tapped, the embassy was instructed to follow the usual safe but maddeningly slow procedure of entrusting it to a courier. The second secretary of the embassy handed it to Steinhardt nine days later, the morning of August 14. It was planned that Steinhardt would personally give it to Molotov, who would, presumably, repeat its contents to Stalin. Steinhardt immediately requested an appointment with Molotov and personally presented the letter to him on August 15.
My Dear Ambassador, The President has asked me to send you these urgent lines…Were the axis powers to gain a victory, the position of both the United States and of the Soviet Union would inevitably be immediately and materially affected thereby. In such event the position of the Soviet Union would be affected more rapidly than the position of the United States…The President could not help but feel that if a satisfactory agreement against aggression on the part of other European powers were reached, it would prove to have a decidedly stabilizing effect in the interest of world peace.
Roosevelt was asking Stalin to stay away from Hitler.
Molotov listened carefully to Steinhardt. Then he explained where his government stood. Steinhardt, with Molotov’s assent, took notes.
Molotov told him that his government was interested not in “merely general declarations” but in “a determination of the action to be taken under specific conditions or circumstances—and that there shall be mutual obligation to counteract aggression…All the negotiations with Britain and France which have taken place thus far we value, in so far as they may lead to an agreement for mutual defensive assistance.” Steinhardt asked his opinion as to the probable outcome of the negotiations. Molotov answered, “We have spent much time negotiating—this shows we expect the negotiations to succeed—but we are not to be blamed for the delay.”
Molotov said that he well understood Roosevelt could not take any “immediate” part in European affairs “but that he knew that President Roosevelt held close to his heart a deep interest in and desire for the preservation of world peace and that for this reason his Government would attach the greatest interest and the utmost importance to the views just expressed.”
The president’s message was too little and too late to change anything. That very evening at 8:00 Molotov met with Schulenburg. Schulenburg cabled that he found Molotov “quite unusually compliant and candid…Significant is his quite clearly expressed wish to conclude a non-aggression pact with us.” Molotov agreed Foreign Minister Ribbentrop should come to Moscow “to lay the foundations for a definite improvement in German-Russian relations” and conclude an economic agreement followed by a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union.
When Ribbentrop read the cable, he was beside himself with excitement. He could hardly contain himself. He sent a telegram marked “URGENT” to Schulenburg telling him to call upon Molotov and inform him that the Reich foreign minister could fly to Moscow “any time after Friday, August 18.”
On August 20, Schulenburg, as directed, presented to Stalin a cable on a sheet of paper with no letterhead, addressed to “Herr Stalin”: it was from Hitler. It was altogether conciliatory and polite:
The conclusion of a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union means to me the establishment of a long-range German policy…I am convinced that the substance of the supplementary protocol desired by the Soviet Union can be cleared up in the shortest possible time if a responsible German statesman can come to Moscow and negotiate…The Reich Foreign Minister has full powers to draw up and sign the non-aggression pact as well as the protocol.
I should be glad to receive your early answer. Adolf Hitler.
Stalin cabled back immediately, “I hope that the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact will mark a decisive turn for the better in the political relations between our two countries,” and stated that Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister of the Reich, could arrive August 23.
Ribbentrop, thrilled as he was, now worried that this trip wouldn’t come off—that Stalin might change his mind—sent a telegram to Schulenburg the following day: “Please do your best to see that the journey materializes.”
Meanwhile, the German army was readying for war. A column a half mile long—made up of battle-ready soldiers, huge trucks carrying armaments including sixteen-foot guns, trucks on caterpillar treads—was seen heading for the German barracks in Gleiwitz, two miles from the Polish border. The British war minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha, observed by reporters in shorts on the beach in Cannes on August 20, after being handed a telegram, was further observed dressed and on a train heading for Paris within a half hour. In Scotland, Neville Chamberlain packed up his gear, left his cherished trout streams, and caught the night train to London.
Ribbentrop arrived in Moscow in Hitler’s private plane, a well-appointed Condor, on Wednesday, August 23. With him were nine diplomats, including the German undersecretary of state, the chief of protocol, and the chief of the German Foreign Office’s Eastern Department. Underlining the importance of the mission, Stalin greeted the delegation when it arrived at the Kremlin.
Meetings between the German and the Soviet officials were held throughout the afternoon and evening and on into the night. Ribbentrop telephoned Hitler at 1:00 a.m. to tell him that the pact had been signed. The news was immediately flashed over German national radio, and because it assured Russia’s unconditional neutrality no matter what actions Germany undertook, The New York Times reported, it “created the greatest elation in all political circles.” According to Steinhardt, Stalin personally conducted the negotiations with Ribbentrop, and when they were concluded, Ribbentrop drank a toast to Hitler and “the revival of the traditional German-Russian friendship.” According to the diaries of several German officers who were present, Ribbentrop even went so far as to repeat the Berlin joke making the rounds that “Stalin will yet join the Anti-Comintern Pact.”
Announcement of the pact appeared in Pravda and Izvestia later the same day. Although it was not part of the public document, in return for the promise of Soviet neutrality (article 2: “To refrain from supporting in any way any country at war with the other”), Hitler had reluctantly agreed that the Soviet Union could have the Baltic States and the part of Poland contiguous with the Soviet Union.
Stalin had regained lands the tsars had ruled.
When Hitler, at Berchtesgaden, was notified, he “stared into space for a moment, flushed deeply, than banged on the table so that the glasses rattled and exclaimed in a voice breaking with excitement, ‘I have them! I have them!’ ‘Now, Europe is mine.’ ”
The next day, there being no reason to spend more time talking with the English and French representatives, Voroshilov, with two other members of the Politburo, Georgy Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, went duck hunting at Voroshilov’s hunting preserve. (Khrushchev mistakenly remembered the day as a Sunday, but otherwise his recounting of events is eminently plausible.) The weather was perfect; they all had great success at bringing down ducks. Afterward the three men went to Stalin’s dacha, where they sat around talking, drinking, and finally eating as the day ended and night fell and the ducks were plucked, dressed, and cooked for dinner. There was nothing Stalin enjoyed better than sitting around a dinner table for hours, talking but also listening to his inner circle far into the night, their conversation loosened by the constant flow of liquor and food. This day Stalin thought he had taken a huge step to safeguard—at least in the near future—his country from attack. He believed he had bought off Hitler with the promise of not joining forces against him. This day Stalin, remembered Khrushchev, was brimming with information about the draft of the Friendship and Nonaggression Treaty. Ribbentrop had brought it with him, and with some changes, Stalin informed them, it had just been signed in the Kremlin. The relaxation of the tensions that had consumed Stalin for almost a year—since Munich—was marked; he was expansive and happy. He “was in a very good mood and was joking a lot.” He told the assemblage that “when the British and French representatives who were still in Moscow found out about the treaty the next day, they would immediately leave for home…[They] didn’t really want to join forces with us anyway…Of course it’s all a game to see who can fool whom. I know what Hitler’s up to. He thinks he’s outsmarted me, but actually it’s I who have tricked him.”
Stalin believed that he had bought time, that Hitler would dispose of Britain and France before he turned on Russia.
FDR, TOO, DECIDED to go on vacation. His home in Hyde Park, in the Hudson River valley, was scarcely cooler then Washington. He left the morning of August 12, bound for New York City to board the USS Tuscaloosa for a cruise in Canadian waters the same day the negotiations at Spiridonovka Palace got under way. He was planning to visit his house on Campobello Island, in New Brunswick, Canada, where he had spent so much time with his family. He had been felled by polio there in August 1921 and had not seen it since. Before polio he was a tall (six feet one), slender, handsome, stylishly dressed man, whom Woodrow Wilson described as “the handsomest young giant I have ever seen.” After being crippled by the disease, he didn’t look like the same person. Nor was he. “It was exactly as if all trivialities in life had been burned [out] in him. A steel had entered his soul,” observed Sumner Welles. He had been taken off Campobello more dead than alive.
The USS Tuscaloosa was a very grand ship, fit for a president. It was a heavy cruiser of the New Orleans class, commissioned in 1934, sixty-one feet wide, almost six hundred feet long, manned by seven hundred sailors.
With him were his usual traveling companions, Pa Watson and Ross McIntire, plus the naval aide Daniel J. Callaghan. However, given the grave international situation, planning had turned the ship into a command center so that FDR would be able to deal with whatever political crisis occurred. For this purpose also on the Tuscaloosa were three secretaries to take dictation, help write a speech, or issue a press release, Dorothy Brady, Henry Kanee, and Bill Hassett; the White House telephone operator Louise Hachmeister, uniquely able to locate key people by telephone (no mean trick in those days); and Dewey Long, chief of the White House Transportation Office.
FDR was intent on fishing, relaxing, sitting in the sun, as well as visiting Campobello Island. Traveling northeast, anchoring first at Halifax Harbor, Nova Scotia, the cruiser arrived at Campobello Island at 1:00 p.m. on August 14. FDR quickly left the ship, presumably in one of its whaleboats, visited his house, which he must have found a distressful experience—to be at the site of where personal tragedy struck—and he was back on the Tuscaloosa three hours later. The Tuscaloosa steamed farther east, to Sydney Harbor on Cape Breton Island.
Watson, McIntire, Callaghan, and FDR fished off the back of the Tuscaloosa until they reached the Bay of Islands, Newfoundland, then, in the late afternoon, FDR and the others, lowered into whaleboats, fished for salmon in the Humber River for a few more hours. At 7:44 a.m. the next day the Tuscaloosa reached Petitpas Point, where FDR wanted to fish in another section of the Humber. The fishing must have been excellent, although there is no record of what was caught, because FDR and his friends fished for five hours before returning to the Tuscaloosa. They had planned to continue north through the Strait of Belle Isle to look at a large grounded iceberg, then circle Newfoundland, but heavy fog made that inadvisable. It was decided to start back to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Along the way the Tuscaloosa anchored off Bird Rock Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence so the president and his companions could have a last chance to fish for salmon in the whaleboats, but they were back aboard and the Tuscaloosa was under way for Halifax at twenty knots an hour and a half later. Monday at 3:00 p.m. they were anchored in Halifax Harbor. A courier from Washington, the U.S. postal inspector Leo DeWaard, came aboard with a special mail sack for the president. FDR was due back in Washington on Friday morning, August 25.
Monday evening German radio broke the news, interrupting a musical program, with the announcement that Germany and Russia had decided to sign a nonaggression pact. The next day, August 22, the tenth day of Roosevelt’s cruise, the news made headlines in the German press.
Roosevelt and Hull and Davies had not only been discussing and trying to head off such an outcome for most of the summer; they had been looking toward the next step: dealing with it, which, they had decided, meant doing nothing to drive the Soviet Union even more tightly into Hitler’s arms. The New York Times gave the best description of the administration’s reaction because its reporter had been briefed by the State Department. According to the Times, the announcement of the nonaggression pact “caused little surprise in State Department circles. Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s willingness to sell Russia war materials…had been taken as a tangible demonstration by Herr Hitler to Joseph Stalin that Germany no longer planned a direct assault on the U.S.S.R., and it was thought that Joseph Stalin desired, if possible, to play a passive part in Europe.”
It reflected Roosevelt’s singularly accurate, sympathetic view.
FDR queried Hull and Welles as to whether he should rush back to Washington. They advised no. Roosevelt ignored their advice and ordered the ship’s captain to prepare for a 6:00 a.m. departure the next morning, August 22, heading the Tuscaloosa for Annapolis. That afternoon Harry Hopkins came aboard for a secret, unscheduled visit to give Roosevelt the latest news. Presumably, Hopkins had with him drafts of the messages that would go out over Roosevelt’s name two days later to Adolf Hitler and President Ignacy Mos´cicki of Poland urging them to seek a peaceful solution.
Roosevelt’s cable, issued at midnight to Hitler on August 23, emphasized world peace and asked him to agree to “refrain from any positive act of hostility for a reasonable and stipulated period” and to submit “these controversies to an impartial arbitration in which they can both have confidence.” To President Mos´cicki of Poland, FDR suggested that “the controversy between the Government of Poland and the Govern ment of the German Reich might be made the subject of direct discussion between the two governments,” or it “might be conciliation through a disinterested third party.”
To save time, the Tuscaloosa, heading south at top speed, proceeded to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, instead of Annapolis, anchoring there at 8:00 a.m. on Thursday, August 24. By early afternoon, well rested, FDR was back in the White House talking to Welles and Hull, working out how to deal with his worst nightmare: the alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union. The president’s messages to the two leaders were released.
Mos´cicki cabled his polite but discouraging reply the next day. He thanked FDR for his “important and noble message.” Direct negotiations between governments, he wrote, were “the most appropriate method of solving difficulties which may arise between states,” but “the method of conciliation through a third party as disinterested and impartial as Your Excellency” was also “a just and equitable method in the solution of controversies.”
FDR cabled Mos´cicki’s response to Hitler immediately, noting that “the Polish government is willing, upon the basis set forth in my messages to agree to solve the controversy which has arisen…by direct negotiation or through the process of conciliation.” “All the world prays that Germany, too, will accept.” Hitler never replied. Within days of the pact’s announcement, the French government had seen to it that all the paintings in the Louvre’s Grande Galerie and exhibition rooms were packed up and moved to the Château de Chambord in the Loire valley. Only the sculptures, heavy and difficult to transport, remained. The British embassy advised its citizens in Poland to leave as soon as possible, “in view of the considerable danger of a rupture in German-Polish relations.”
In England the news of the pact was received with stunned amazement. English newspapers didn’t let the government entirely off the hook. The Daily Herald, for instance, commented on the “criminal hesitation on the part of the British and French governments in their relation with Russia,” adding, “But it can provide no excuse for what is a bigger betrayal of peace and of European freedom even than Munich.”
Lord Ismay, who would the next year become Churchill’s chief of staff, admitted, “I had never expected that our belated and low-powered mission to Moscow would achieve anything,” but, like many others, he was amazed at the speed of the negotiations between Hitler and Stalin. The treaty was struck, it seemed, overnight.
A treaty with Hitler was so bizarre for the Soviet Union, even to Politburo members, given that Hitler had said so many times that his master race would crush the Slavs and that Soviet leaders were the scum of humanity, that the pact was never mentioned at party meetings nor referred to in talks in public. “We couldn’t admit outright that we had reached an agreement on peaceful coexistence with Hitler. Coexistence would have been possible with the Germans in general, but not with the Hitlerite fascists,” explained Nikita Khrushchev. The hope they all expressed privately was that before he turned on them, Hitler would, because of the treaty, attack Britain and France.
Nine days after the treaty was signed, on September 1, the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. After eighteen days of fighting not a single Polish division was left: 450,000 troops had been taken prisoner; eight hundred airplanes had been destroyed or captured. On September 17, the Red Army entered eastern Poland: Poland ceased to exist.
The United States chose to see the Russian invasion, as Hull wrote in his Memoirs, as Stalin’s way “to keep Hitler’s legions from approaching too close to Russia…We [FDR and Hull] did not wish to place her on the same belligerent footing as Germany, since to do so might thrust her further into Hitler’s arms…Hitler had not abandoned his ambition with regard to Russia.”
Privately, FDR was furious. He referred to Communism in a message to Joseph Kennedy, U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, as “the Russian form of brutality” and passed on to him a joke: “Suppose you had two cows. The Socialist would take one and let you keep one. The Nazi would let you keep both cows but would take all the milk. The Communist would take both cows.”
Within weeks Roosevelt had convened a special session of Congress to repeal the neutrality law, allowing countries (England and France) to buy military weapons. Immediately, the Wilhelmstrasse charged Roosevelt with being “unneutral.” Hitler had a healthy respect for FDR, tinged with fear, according to William L. Shirer; within a year Hitler would regard FDR as the strongest enemy in the way of his path to world domination.
Roosevelt’s moderate reaction to Stalin’s pact with Hitler would bear fruit in the fall of 1940. Hitler wanted Stalin to send Molotov to Berlin to discuss future plans for world domination at the expense of Britain. Stalin, resisting Hitler’s pressure, insisted that Molotov’s visit to Berlin not take place until after November 5, the date Roosevelt would be reelected for his third term.
Stalin made a remarkable admission to the Turkish foreign minister a short while after signing the pact: “The English and French, especially the English, did not want an agreement with us, considering that they could manage without us. If we are guilty of anything it is of not having foreseen all this.” Thirty-five years later Khrushchev would still defend the rationale for making the treaty: “If we hadn’t made that move, the war should have started earlier, much to our disadvantage. As it was, we were given a respite.”
It is interesting to note that Stalin received messages that summer of 1939 from Hitler and from Roosevelt, but he received no messages from either Chamberlain or Daladier.
Hans Frank, the German governor-general of occupied Poland, on October 31 announced, “The Poles do not need universities or secondary schools; the Polish lands are to be turned into an intellectual desert…The only educational opportunities that are to be made available are those that demonstrate to them their hopelessness or their ethnic fate.” And indeed, the Germans kept their word: when the Red Army liberated Poland, it found no buildings usable as schools, no school equipment, no scientific material, no laboratories. What the Germans could not destroy they shipped back to the fatherland.