For as many years as Stalin had tried to fend off a German invasion, he had tried to fend off one by Japan, Russia’s other dangerous enemy, which had defeated it in 1905. In the spring of 1941, a bare two months before Operation Barbarossa, he had succeeded in negotiating a brilliant coup. Hitler was on the move, Belgrade had just surrendered, and the Japanese foreign minister, Yōsuke Matsuoka, was in Moscow. Japan was preparing for war with the United States, and wanting to make sure Stalin did not pounce on Manchuria, Matsuoka sought a treaty with the Soviet Union. Foreign Ministers Matsuoka and Molotov finalized the details and put their signatures on the Japanese-Soviet Nonaggression Pact on April 13. The signing of the pact had been such an enormous relief to Stalin that his self-control vanished: he was seen drunk. Following the signing, he and Matsuoka drank throughout the night and into the morning. At 6:00 a.m. the two were seen at the Yaroslavsky station staggering arm in arm toward Matsuoka’s train. “We’ll organize Europe and Asia,” the happily drunk Stalin was heard to say, as he put Matsuoka into the train. He remained on the platform until the train pulled away.
At Tehran in November 1943, Stalin had said to FDR, who welcomed the statement, “Once Germany was finally defeated, it would then be possible to send the necessary reinforcements to Siberia and then we shall be able by our common front to beat Japan.” Stalin had first transmitted this thought to Roosevelt via Averell Harriman, who although not yet ambassador, was in Moscow in August 1942. Stalin told Averell Harriman to tell FDR that Japan’s defeat was essential: “Eventually she [Russia] would come in…Japan was the historic enemy of Russia and her eventual defeat was essential to Russia’s interests.” With this background, the U.S. military was ready with battle plans for a joint U.S.-U.S.S.R. war with Japan: it was just waiting for the right moment to present them to Stalin. It had come at Tehran; FDR gave the premier the Joint Chiefs of Staff document outlining planned U.S. operations against Japan, which was predicated on a joint U.S.-U.S.S.R. attack: “With a view of shortening the war, it is our opinion that the bombing of Japan from your Maritime Provinces, immediately following the beginning of hostilities between the USSR and Japan, will be of the utmost importance, as it will enable us to destroy Japanese military and industrial centers.” The United States planned a force of from one hundred to one thousand four-engine bombers, the number to depend on the facilities Russia could make available in the Maritime Province. Stalin had scanned the document and agreed to coordinate the offensives of the two countries, but there was no further discussion: it was just, basically, a thought for the future.
Molotov brought the matter up with Harriman the month after the Tehran Conference, as Harriman was settling into life in Moscow as the new ambassador. The way he did it indicated just how worried he and Stalin were that the Japanese would get wind of the plan.
Harriman had tried hard to avoid the posting to Moscow. Roosevelt had asked him to take over as ambassador from Steinhardt in 1941, but Harriman had refused, pleading that he would be more useful to Roosevelt as a roving ambassador. “I had just seen what a hopelessly restricted life the foreign diplomats led in Moscow, the way they were fenced in,” he admitted. But Admiral Standley, the ambassador chosen, had not worked out, and when Roosevelt asked Harriman again, Harriman reluctantly said yes.
On December 26, Harriman had his first big news to give to Roosevelt. Molotov, he notified FDR, nervously (“reading from a paper which he preferred not to give me in writing”) told him “that the Soviet Government was ready to begin cooperation in regard to the Pacific war.
“I replied that I knew you would be glad to learn that the Soviet government was ready to begin cooperation in regard to the Pacific war…Molotov interrupted me to say that Stalin had made this quite clear.”
Molotov’s nervousness stemmed from fear that Japan would find out: its powerful Kwantung army was as always deployed on the Man churian border, presumably ready to attack. It could cause great mischief, if provoked, by sabotaging the Trans-Siberian Railway, Russia’s link with the Maritime Province, which at its eastern end ran within a few miles of the Manchurian border.
In February 1944, Stalin met with Harriman a number of times to define what he meant by Soviet participation. At their first meeting he told Harriman “categorically” that the Soviet Union would provide facilities in the Far East for three hundred U.S. heavy bombers. When Harriman told him General Arnold contemplated there might be as many as a thousand bombers, Stalin replied, “Then we must build new fields. We will see what is possible.”
Stalin continued, “When German resistance in the West begins to weaken, divisions will be sent to the Far East…As soon as these forces are transferred, the Soviet government will cease to fear Japanese provocation and may even provoke the Japanese itself. It is too weak to do so now.” He said that the GKO had started reequipping the Soviet air force: four infantry corps of twenty to twenty-two divisions would be transferred to the Far East.
Stalin also volunteered that a Soviet officer had recently been approached by the chief of the Japanese general staff seeking an audience with him, saying, by way of explanation, that the Germans meant nothing to the Japanese. Stalin related that he had refused to see the man, adding, “Let them go to the Devil.” He also wanted FDR to know that he had been told that the Japanese were reported to be evacuating plants and machinery to Manchuria and Japan, building a new inner defense line that would run around the islands, and that, if pressed, they would not defend their outer perimeter and Indonesia.
Shortly after D-day FDR asked Harriman to query Stalin again as to his specific plans for entering the war. When Harriman saw Stalin on June 10 he told him the president “was anxious to know how soon Stalin would be ready to initiate secret talks on the use of American air forces on Soviet bases in the East and also coordination of naval plans.” Stalin said he expected Russia to play a more active role in the war and saw “one of joint cooperation in waging war on land and sea as well as in the air,” that he had already discussed the matter of Soviet bases with the commander in chief of the Red Far Eastern Air Force, that there were twelve suitable airfields for four-engine bombers in the area between Vladivostok and Sovetskaya Gavan, and that the United States could expect to receive the use of six or seven of them for their bombers. Stalin emphasized, as was usual when the subject was Japan, the need for utmost secrecy, explaining that the Japanese were not interfering with Russian shipping in the Pacific, with the result that supplies, including fuel, were being accumulated in Vladivostok “legally.” Stalin asked about the possibility of receiving several hundred four-engine planes. “The president,” said Harriman, “would like nothing better than to have combined American-Soviet air operations against the Japanese.” Roosevelt hoped, Harriman continued, that discussions between U.S. and Soviet military as to preparations would start immediately. “No time should be lost and the sooner the discussions started the better it would be,” said Stalin. Stalin also inquired about FDR’s health. Harriman reported that he replied that the president always had sinus trouble in the winter months, but “as to the present status of the president’s health I said that he was very well and in full strength and vigor.”
In August, FDR wrote to Stalin urging joint cooperation in the Pacific “when you are ready to act…There is nothing we could do now that would be of more assistance in preparing to bring the Pacific war to a speedy conclusion.” Stalin replied, “I have received your message on the Pacific Ocean matters. I understand the significance you attach to these matters…I am confident at the same time that you are well aware to what an extent our forces are strained in order to secure success for the unfolding struggle in Europe. All this allows us to hope that the time is not far off when we shall attain a solution of our urgent task and will be able to take up other questions.”
In September, Stalin, evidently having expected to hear more specifics from FDR about the Pacific war, was worried, Harriman reported, as to whether or not the United States was going to allow Soviet participation. “Stalin inquired,” Harriman cabled, “whether we wished to bring Japan to her knees without Russian assistance or whether you still wished as you suggested in Tehran Russian participation…what were the plans for the defeat of Japan, and particularly what part the Allies desired to assign to Russia.” He “appeared anxious to know specifically what role we would want Russia to play. He gave every indication of being ready and willing to cooperate but did not want to be an uninvited participant.”
On October 15 and 16, 1944, meetings were held at the Kremlin at which the U.S. military, the Russian military, and the British discussed the first moves against Japan. Present was the young, able general Aleksei Antonov, chief of Soviet operations; General Shevchenko, chief of staff of Soviet Far Eastern forces; General Deane, head of the U.S. military mission in Moscow; Harriman; and the British generals Brooke and Ismay, who were there for information and support. (Churchill was also in Moscow, there to bring Stalin up to date on Allied decisions. It was at this time that he and Stalin concurred on their percentages deal in Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece.) Stalin stated to the assembled military chiefs, “Sufficient supplies could be accumulated in three months to maintain the Soviet forces [in the Far East] for a period of one and a half to two months. This would be sufficient to deal a mortal blow against Japan.”
For a moment his mind suddenly wandered to a humiliating moment in Russia’s past. It became obvious that what was driving him was history: “There was no similarity between 1904 and 1944,” he said abruptly. “Russia was alone in 1904, and the Japanese were free to move where they wished. Russia was no longer alone.” No one had mentioned the 1904 war between Russia and Japan, which had ended so badly for Russia. He had been twenty-six at the time, and it obviously had made a great impression on him. The war had ended in the disastrous Battle of Tsushima in the Sea of Japan in May 1905. In that struggle, which must rate as the most decisive and humiliating battle in the history of naval warfare, the Japanese navy, in the space of a few hours, sank, captured, or put out of commission all of Russia’s warships—twelve battleships, seven cruisers, five minelayers, and three transports—while losing only three small torpedo boats. Russia had been forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Portsmouth, which gave Japan the southern half of Sakhalin Island and granted it control of the rail system Russia had built in Manchuria, as well as Port Arthur and Dairen, the warm-water ports on the Liaodong Peninsula.
Stalin quickly returned to the subject at hand. He said again Russian operations against Japan could commence “three months or several months” after the defeat of Germany, adding that he thought it would be a short war and therefore a three-month supply for sixty divisions would be sufficient.
At a meeting the next day Stalin said that when he and Roosevelt next met, he believed the two of them would be able to come to a joint agreement on the war with Japan and that until then the question should be studied from a military and political point of view. The group then settled down to work. General Deane presented an outline of America’s general strategy. America had bombers—the biggest, the most lethal bombers in the world, he said: it needed airfields in the Maritime Province to service these bombers so they could wreak the greatest damage on Japan.
The Soviet Union had the largest army in the world, and Stalin, basically, was volunteering it. He now described what his army would need in the way of food, armaments, and logistical support. He presented his needs in terms of a two-month war, the food and fuel and vehicles necessary, he calculated, for the force of 1.5 million men he would supply: three thousand tanks, seventy-five thousand motor vehicles, and five thousand planes—all deliveries to be completed by June 30, 1945.
He commented that in the initial stages of the war it would be necessary to bomb Japan from the Vladivostok and Primorye area. It would be more feasible, however, “to bomb northern Japan from Komsomolsk and Sakhalin.” Pursuit planes would be used primarily to protect the Trans-Siberian Railway. The Japanese would of course attack the railroad by air during the first stages of the war, but when the Russian invasion proceeded southward there would be less need to protect the railroad.
Stalin then launched into a detailed discussion of Soviet strategy, beginning with “his” weakness in the event of a premature Japanese attack (Molotov’s great worry), and then outlined the general plans for a strong land offensive to encircle and knock out the Japanese forces in Manchuria. He spoke without notes and without hesitation.
He asked General Deane what the chiefs of staff thought Soviet objectives should be. Deane gave them as follows:
1. To secure the Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Vladivostok and Komsomolsk area.
2. To establish a United States–Soviet Strategic Air Force.
3. The Soviet land operations to destroy the Japanese forces in Manchuria.
4. Concurrently, to secure the route across the Pacific in order to safeguard supplies and to open up the port of Vladivostok.
In response to a question from Stalin, Deane said only Soviet land operations in Manchuria were contemplated.
Stalin replied, “We cannot be limited to the Manchurian region. We shall strike direct blows from different directions in Manchuria. But to have real results we must develop outflanking movements—blows to Kalgan and Peking…The problem that faces us is to prevent the Japanese from withdrawing from China into Manchuria…Regarding the other objectives set forth by General Deane—I have no objection.” It was evident Stalin feared Japanese troops would be moved from China to the Manchurian border if Peking was not attacked, a parallel thought to the American fear that Japanese troops would be moved from the Manchurian border to Japan proper if the Red Army did not engage them.
In response to a question from Deane, Stalin indicated on a map that there would be outflanking movements through Ulan Bator and Kalgan, following “the old Mongol route.”
“What about the Kurile Islands?” Harriman asked. “Would it be of interest for U.S. forces to occupy the northern Kurile Islands in order to secure the supply route?” The marshal replied that would be of great interest, that all the sea positions should be strengthened and then the North Korean ports should be occupied by Soviet land and sea forces. The Japanese, he continued, would probably make their first attack on Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk to secure the airfields there.
Harriman said U.S. plans were being prepared for naval action and seizure of the northern third of the Kurile Islands. Because these islands, now Japanese, had belonged to Russia in the nineteenth century, the idea that they would be wrested from Japan, and therefore would again become Russia’s possession, was welcome news for Stalin.
General Deane announced that American battle plans contemplated the invasion of Japan in the closing months of 1945, and then he asked a crucial question: Did the Russians place higher priority on the buildup for the ground forces or on strategic bombing? Stalin replied, “Both at the same time…The Americans would cut off the Japanese garrisons on the southern islands and the Russians would cut off the land forces in China.” Stalin once again stressed the need for secrecy to prevent the Japanese from embarking on “premature adventures.”
Harriman inquired about the delivery of bombers. Stalin said fields and facilities would be ready in about two weeks and he wished to receive ten to twenty bombers as a first installment.
On a map Stalin outlined the planned Red Army offensive that would start in the Lake Baikal area and sweep through Outer and Inner Mongolia to Kalgan, Peking, and Tientsin, thus keeping separate the Japanese forces in China and Manchuria. Obviously pleased at the way the discussion was proceeding, Stalin said it was a “grand undertaking…We must break the Japanese spine.”
It was agreed that General Deane and General Antonov would talk with their naval opposite numbers.
On December 14, Harriman had another long meeting with Stalin. They covered general information on shipping and delivery of U.S. goods to the Far East and the upcoming meeting—wherever it would take place—Stalin was to have with Roosevelt and Churchill. Harriman told Stalin that American plans included preparations for supplying Petropavlovsk, which would become a very important base for navy and air force operations, and that information would have to be exchanged between their opposite numbers. (Harriman reported to FDR of the meeting that Stalin “was in general well pleased with what has so far been promised. I assured him that both you and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were anxious to do everything possible both as to supply and shipping. I stressed the need for detailed planning…He gave me his assurance that he would authorize the General Staff promptly to begin discussions.”)
At Tehran, Roosevelt had mentioned only that the warm-water port of Dairen, now known as Dalian, could possibly be returned to Russia, knowing this was not all Stalin would ask for in return for Soviet participation in the war. Now the price had to be settled. Harriman was requested to meet with Stalin and find out what it was, to say FDR “was anxious to know what were the political questions indicated by him which should be clarified in connection with the entry of the USSR into the war against Japan.” Harriman put the question to him in his office. Stalin walked into the next room, returned with a map in his hands, and said that Lower Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands should be returned to Russia and that Russia would like to lease the ports of Dairen and Port Arthur. In addition, said Stalin, he “again” wished to lease the Chinese Eastern Railway lines in Manchuria from Dairen to Harbin, northwest to Manzhouli, and east to Vladivostok. Stalin, gratifyingly, reported Harriman, “specifically reaffirmed his intention not to interfere with the sovereignty of China in Manchuria,” adding that he was interested in maintaining the independence of Outer Mongolia. Stalin was asking for the territories Russia had ceded to Japan by treaty in 1905, plus the Kurile Islands, which Russia had owned at an earlier time.
Previously, in discussions about future bomber strikes, Antonov and Stalin had cautioned that U.S. planes could not in any case arrive on airfields in the Maritime Province and Kamchatka until ten days before war commenced. Suddenly, on December 17, General Antonov announced, “After careful calculation we have determined that the Soviet forces will need all the air and naval bases in the Maritime Province and that therefore American air and naval forces will be unable to operate from there.” Harriman seemed to take this change of plans as a personal affront, as another instance of Stalin’s arbitrariness, telling FDR about it in a cable on December 29: “It is fair to say that almost all our requests generally are turned down out of hand without explanation. In no sense can I report that our military mission is being treated as that of an ally…[T]hey are persistent, overbearing.” However, at the same time, continued Harriman, Antonov informed him that the United States could use and commence surveying Kamchatka. No explanation was forthcoming—normal Soviet behavior—but FDR’s knowledge of geography was encyclopedic. (Once during the war he had stunned Deputy Prime Minister Walter Nash of New Zealand during a conference: Nash had suggested American forces occupy a small Pacific island near New Zealand. FDR said, “No, not that island; an island nearby called Mangareva would be better.” Nash had never heard of the island. “Oh, it’s in the Tuamotu Archipelago, in the postal zone of Tahiti,” FDR informed him. “I know the place because I am a stamp collector.”)
The president would have realized, as Harriman did not, that the Maritime Province was too close to Japan for Soviet comfort, forming, in fact, the eastern Manchurian border; it would be hard to keep U.S. activity there a secret: the abrupt change was likely because of the Soviets’ mortal fear that the Japanese, discovering the American presence, would attack before the Red troops were armed and ready. General Curtis LeMay was using the Marianas as his base for the B-29s that were bombing Tokyo to smithereens, so although Kamchatka was a good deal closer to Japan, airfields there were not crucial.
Harriman’s complaints were followed by his admitting, “My personal relations with Marshal Stalin, Mr. Molotov and other members of the Foreign Office are pleasant.”
FDR BACKTRACKED ON TWO COMMITMENTS he had made to the Soviet Union, both sensitive issues with the Russians, who were always suspicious even in the best of circumstances, given their distrust of all foreigners. Both incidents reveal American paranoia to have been on a par with Russia’s, although better hidden.
In November 1943, FDR and the War Department had authorized Brigadier General Donovan, legendary head of the OSS, to set up an OSS intelligence mission in Moscow in return for a matching Soviet intelligence liaison mission in Washington. Such a setup would ease problems that were arising during joint operations between the two countries. Britain had such a mission exchange with Russia in place: four NKVD officers were stationed in London; British Special Operations Executive personnel were stationed in Moscow. Such an action did not mean that any seriously compromising material was exchanged.
Donovan met first with Molotov, who, favorably impressed with OSS intelligence operations, sent him on, accompanied by General Deane, to the Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the NKVD headquarters. There the two men met with Lieutenant General Pavel Fitin, chief of the External Intelligence Service. Fitin was blond, blue-eyed, thirty-six, with a pleasing smile, according to Deane, while Major General Alexander Ossipov, head of the section dealing with subversive activities in enemy countries, looked to be a suitable companion for Boris Karloff. Donovan charmed the Russians, volunteered descriptions of suitcase radios, plastic explosives, and other special spy equipment the OSS had developed, and described how the OSS introduced agents into enemy territory. Donovan also discussed the types of training U.S. agents received. Fitin liked the idea of the intelligence exchange, according to General Deane, citing how desirable it would be if the United States could be informed if Soviet agents were preparing to sabotage an important German industrial establishment or railroad, and the reverse. But Fitin then darkly asked Donovan if he had come to the Soviet Union “solely for the purpose of offering cooperation or whether he had some other intentions.” “I could not help but snicker at this further evidence of Soviet suspicion,” wrote Deane (unaware that his own country was even more suspicious). Donovan neutrally replied to Fitin that he had no other intentions.
Their relationship changed entirely upon agreement to the exchange of personnel. Previously, when Deane had business with Fitin, he first had to phone Fitin’s assistant, who would take his time before passing on Deane’s message to Fitin. The awkward and time-consuming process took hours or sometimes days before Deane finally succeeded in speaking to Fitin. But after the meeting Fitin gave him the telephone numbers for himself and for Ossipov. “It was my first telephone number in Russia and I felt that I had achieved a tremendous victory,” Deane later wrote. For the first time Fitin and Ossipov accepted an invitation to dine at the American embassy. By January 5 the four had agreed on the size and composition of the personnel exchange: Colonel John Haskell and a small team would come to Moscow to represent Donovan; Colonel A. G. Grauer together with his assistants would represent Fitin and Ossipov in Washington.
The spy chiefs had finished most of the details of the exchange, as Donovan explained to Harriman:
I have arranged with Government agencies here engaged in intelligence and subversive activities as follows:
1. The Soviets will establish a liaison with OSS in Washington and I have agreed to set up a unit here reporting to the Ambassador and the Military Mission, and agreed to designate Col. John Haskell Chief Representative.
2. There is agreement on exchange of intelligence material.
3. Also regarding reciprocal examination and exchange of special devices and equipment.
4. Joint operations in such theatres as may be agreed.
Donovan was aware there were U.S. worries, particularly among the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about whether or not the action would expose America to Soviet spies. He went about quelling their suspicions. In March he sent a clear, persuasive memo to Admiral Leahy, always privately wary of Soviet intentions, whom he knew to be lukewarm about the idea:
The Attorney General in his talk with me suggested that the impression might be created in this country that this was an invitation to the OGPU to come to America. As I answered your question, however, that already happened when Amtorg established its offices here. [There were twenty-five hundred Soviets working at Amtorg in New York and an equal number in Washington.]…It does seem an invalid argument to say that the addition of four or five other representatives on an open basis to work with OSS on matters concerning our joint operation against the common enemy would provide any greater facilities for undercover activities…For the first time, we have an opportunity to find out just how our strongest ally carries out important agencies in its war effort…It is as essential to know how your allies conduct their subversive work as to know how your enemy does it.
In mid-March, Harriman received a bombshell: FDR called off the project. A cable came from the president that gave evidence of careful thought (FDR’s handwritten changes in italics) telling him the exchange had to be canceled and ordering him to inform Molotov. FDR couched it in personal terms in an attempt to take the sting out of it, aware that Stalin had been told numerous times of the anti-Soviet sentiment in the United States:
The question presented has been carefully examined here and has been found to be impracticable at this time.
Please inform Stalin the Marshal when you have an opportunity that for purely domestic political reasons which he will understand it is not appropriate just now to exchange these missions. The timing is not good.
Harriman tried to change FDR’s mind in a long cable:
The Soviet acceptance of the idea was perhaps welcomed by us all the more because it was the first tangible evidence of the spirit of cooperation which was voiced at the conferences in Moscow and Tehran.
We were received cordially by Molotov…We were informed that after consideration the Soviets accepted Donovan’s proposal for an exchange of missions…The Soviet Mission, consisting of Colonel Grauer and about six assistants plus the usual wives are ready to leave for Washington…
For the last two and a half years we have unsuccessfully attempted to penetrate sources of Soviet information and to arrive at some basis of exchange and mutual confidence. We have now, for the first time, penetrated one intelligence branch…But if we now close the door on this branch of the Soviet Government, I cannot too strongly express my conviction that our relations with the Soviet Government will be adversely affected in other directions.
J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, had gotten wind of the project and as always, seeing all Russians as dangerous spies, threatened FDR, warning him that if he didn’t cancel the exchange, there would be “an unfavorable public reaction” if it became public knowledge. With Hoover strongly against the idea, and his implied threat that it would become public knowledge in an election year, the idea was dead. (Hoover saw Communists everywhere; he would a few years later warn Truman that his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, was the head of a Communist cell.) FDR responded to Harriman’s plea by cabling him, “The domestic political situation was the predominant factor in my decisions,” and noting that it “may” be helpful if Harriman reemphasized to Stalin that the exchange of missions “had to be deferred because of timing.”
J. Edgar Hoover also compromised another project. At Tehran, FDR had asked Stalin to facilitate improvement of radio communications between their two capitals by allowing the establishment of a U.S. radio station in Moscow and a Russian radio station in Washington. Because of atmospheric and other problems, cables to and from Moscow and Washington were taking days instead of hours to reach their destinations. Britain had already set up reciprocal radio stations with the U.S.S.R. in their respective capitals. General Deane, working with the Red Army staff, had gone to work in the months after Tehran, spending December and January setting up the U.S. radio station in Moscow. Then, in March, the War Department suddenly informed him that under U.S. law no foreign government could be given the privilege of operating a radio station in the United States. This was such a great setback in terms of efficiency as well as personal relations that Harriman thereupon suggested to Roosevelt that he use his wartime powers and get around the provision by extending the privilege for the duration of the war only. He pointed out how important better communications were for the furtherance of Allied plans (the air force was about to send in a thousand men to operate U.S. bombers for a shuttle-bombing operation at three Soviet airfields). But in any form the idea drew the ire of J. Edgar Hoover, historically paranoid about and on the lookout for Communist conspiracies. The FBI chief declared it “a highly dangerous and most undesirable procedure.” On March 15, FDR wired Harriman to drop it, with the excuse that the military staff had (after all the months of pushing for better communications) suddenly found out that communications were quite all right the way they were: “The Joint Chiefs of Staff are of the opinion that the establishment of a Soviet radio station in Washington and an American station in Moscow is at the present time unnecessary. Therefore please take no further action toward the establishment of a Soviet radio station in Washington.”
Because more efficient, reliable communications between the two countries were so necessary and so lacking, Deane suggested to the Russians that a relay through Algiers would at least improve the situation. But Molotov and Stalin were annoyed: if a Soviet radio station in Washington was not possible under American law, said Molotov, “the Soviet Government is unwilling to consider any other alternative.”
Deane went to work on Molotov, pushing the idea of a hookup through Algiers as a viable alternative that would improve communications; both knew something had to be done. The Red Army staff, aware that relaying through Algiers would at least be an improvement, was also working to change Molotov’s—essentially Stalin’s—mind.
Would U.S. paranoia prevent even this setup? Harriman wrote questioning FDR about it; FDR wrote him back, this time determined to get results: “With reference to radio communications between the USSR and the United States…I understand that this matter is still under negotiation.” He added to it in his own hand “and is proceeding toward a satisfactory conclusion.”
Harriman later learned that indeed J. Edgar Hoover had objected, as had Chief of Staff Admiral Leahy, both using the argument that if it became known the president had sanctioned a Soviet radio station in Washington, his enemies and the right-wing press would tag him as a Communist. In fact, the specter of adverse publicity was a threat disguised as advice: if FDR went ahead, Hoover could make it known to the broad band of isolationists, America Firsters, and those many Americans afraid of Communism that FDR had permitted the installation of a Soviet radio transmitter in Washington, and he might, as a result, lose the next election.
STALIN SEEMED ABLE and motivated to brush aside questions about Roosevelt’s basic reliability just as Roosevelt brushed aside questions about him. Now, after these two incidents, the exchange of secret agents and setting up radio stations in each other’s capitals, where FDR had changed his mind and backed away, Stalin said of him, “The president is my friend, we will always understand each other.” This remark, which was repeated to FDR in July, perhaps prompted FDR’s remark about Stalin to the assembled delegates of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference at a reception at the White House the following month: “At Tehran the Marshal and I got to know each other. We got on beautifully. We cracked the ice, if there ever was any ice; and since then there has been no ice.”
By the spring of 1944, the Red Army had liberated more than three-quarters of occupied Soviet territory. Stalin’s May Day speech underlined the importance of the alliance: “We must follow hot on the heels of the wounded German beast and finish it off in its own lair…[W]e must deliver from German bondage our brothers the Poles, the Czechoslovaks and other peoples of Western Europe…It can be accomplished only by the joint efforts of the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States of America, by joint blows, delivered in the East by our troops and in the West by the troops of our Allies.”
Stalin made a widely quoted comment about Roosevelt to Milovan Djilas on the eve of D-day—that he wouldn’t slip a kopeck out of your pocket, whereas Churchill would. The comment is usually misinterpreted, because it is in the middle of a long diatribe about Churchill, and, usually when quoted, stands alone and out of context. Stalin had been speaking about Great Britain and said, “They [the English] find nothing sweeter than to trick their allies. During the First World War they constantly tricked the Russians and the French. And Churchill? Churchill is the kind who, if you don’t watch him, will slip a kopeck out of your pocket. Yes, a kopeck out of your pocket! By God, a kopeck out of your pocket! And Roosevelt? Roosevelt is not like that. He dips in his hands only for bigger coins. But Churchill? Churchill—even for a kopeck.” He continued on about English duplicity.
The Normandy invasion took place on June 6. On that day 160,000 men hit the Normandy beaches, within weeks to be joined by a million more men, transported there by the largest armada ever assembled. The next day Stalin cabled FDR that the Red Army would perform as promised: “The summer offensive of the Soviet troops…will begin in the middle of June…The general offensive will develop in phases by successive throwing in of armies into the offensive operations…I pledge to give you timely information about the progress of the offensive operations.” At roughly the same time, Stalin said to Harriman, “We are going down a good road.”
There was no public word out of Stalin for a week as U.S. and British forces battled German fortifications up and down the French coast. Finally, on June 13, Stalin gave his allies unqualified public praise in Pravda: “After seven days’ fighting in Northern France one may say without hesitation that the forcing of the Channel along a wide front and the mass-landings of the Allies in Northern France have completely succeeded. This is unquestionably a brilliant success for our Allies. One must admit that the history of wars does not know of an undertaking comparable to it for breadth of conception, grandeur of scale, and mastery of execution.”
On June 21, Stalin gave FDR more details abut the major Russian offensive that would pin down German divisions, promising, “Not later than in a weeks time will begin the second turn of the summer offensive of the Soviet troops. In this offensive will participate 130 divisions, including armored tank divisions…I hope that our offensive will render substantial support to the operations of the Allied troops in France and Italy.”
A few days later, when the U.S. embassy showed the first motion pictures of the invasion, two Soviet marshals plus some two hundred high-ranking officers showed up. “The interest was intense.” On July 4, Molotov went to lunch at the American embassy—the first time he was ever known to dine at a foreign embassy.
FROM FDR’S POINT OF VIEW, one of the most important messages he sent Stalin was the one that had gone out on February 23, 1944, on the subject of postwar international monetary collaboration and the “possible” convocation of a United Nations monetary conference. International monetary instability had been a major factor behind the two world wars and the Depression.
U.S. plans for the Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the United Nations Stabilization Fund had been in the works since the week after Pearl Harbor, when Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau had requested Harry Dexter White to be the architect and create plans for international monetary instruments. White, special assistant to Morgenthau, who would become the driving force behind the agreement, worked for the next year more or less in constant contact with his British counterpart, John Maynard Keynes, adviser to the British Treasury, who was also working on a blueprint for postwar economic cooperative organizations, but necessarily from the point of view of protecting the British Empire. Those involved—Morgenthau, White, and Keynes—wanted to start publicizing their work and enlisting the support of foreign governments in the spring of 1943. Roosevelt, always sensitive to tipping his hand before he had to and giving enemies (in this case isolationists) time to marshal their arguments, stopped Morgenthau, telling him it was “too early…We haven’t begun to win the war.”
After leaks regarding the project—stemming from the many conversations and memos that had been sent out to the governments involved—made further secrecy impossible, White’s draft was sent out to the finance ministers of the Allied governments, including the Soviet Union, in late April. The idea by that time had been widely discussed and acclaimed. Fortune magazine did a major article endorsing the need for postwar international monetary cooperation between countries. Gromyko assured Morgenthau that the Soviet Union was “keenly interested” in the proposals being developed for both the fund and the bank. In December, White gave two copies of the “final” preliminary draft agreement relating to the bank to the Soviet embassy secretary, Vladimir Bazykin, noting to him that this draft was also being sent to Britain, China, and Canada, also noting that FDR’s most difficult problem would be getting the measure through the Senate. In January 1944, the first Russian monetary technicians, as they were called (the International Monetary Fund required technical knowledge), finally arrived in Washington.
FDR’s message to Stalin asking him to take part in the meeting to hammer out postwar international economic collaboration went out a month later. Stalin answered, in the affirmative, three weeks later: “I consider as quite expedient the establishment at the present time of a United Nations apparatus for the working of these questions.”
Stalin had an excellent grasp of economic theory. “What is the main task of planning?” Stalin had asked at a meeting of Russian economists early in 1941. The meeting had been called to update official Soviet economic texts. At this meeting Stalin had commented on the latest Soviet textbooks explaining Communist economic theory. Minutes of the meeting show Stalin’s analysis of the drafts of two books that government economists had submitted to him to critique. Mainly, his comments were that those in charge of the books should concentrate on saying everything clearly, simply, without exaggeration. He gave them an example, “The planned economy is not our wish; it is unavoidable or else everything will collapse. We destroyed such bourgeois barometers as the market and trade, which help the bourgeoisie to correct disproportions,” changing it to “The planned economy is as unavoidable for us as the consumption of bread…The main task of planning is to ensure the independence of the socialist economy. This is absolutely the most important task.”
In the midst of this conversation with economists (a lecture not expected to see the light of day outside the Soviet Union), which showed Stalin deeply involved in analyzing and rephrasing passages, he had, the minutes show, suddenly veered off the subject into mentioning FDR in a favorable light: “I had Wells [the British author H. G. Wells] into this office and he told me that he didn’t want the workers in power and didn’t want the capitalists in power. He wants the engineers to rule. He said that he is for Roosevelt whom he knows well and speaks of as an honest man committed to the men of the working class. They are disseminating the ideas of the reconciliation of classes with the petit-bourgeoisie.” Then Stalin had returned to the task at hand, urging the economists to write more simply and to clarify the relationship of socialism and capitalism, reminding them, “There is no need to forget that we emerged from capitalism.”
A world where Russia would be safe to continue rebuilding itself, which seemed likely if Roosevelt were at the helm—a period of world economic stability—was certainly to Stalin’s liking. He took steps to signal his wish to be part of the planning. Not only did he agree to take part in the conference, but he invited the quintessential proponent of capitalism, Eric Johnston, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to visit Soviet Russia. Johnston was approvingly quoted in Pravda in February as saying that American businessmen wished to sell and export goods and services and “not ideologies and political concepts.” Nor did Stalin stop with Johnston. In roughly the same time period, The Foundations of Marxism, a major Russian economic journal, published an article officially lowering the tone of opprobrium to capitalism, thereby opening the way to making competition between socialist and capitalist economies ideologically acceptable.
The plan that White drew up had sections that neither the British nor the Russians were happy with, but Roosevelt, with his fine sense of timing, felt that the monetary conference must convene that summer and that the differences would be ironed out by the conferees when they met. Morgenthau needed both Britain and Russia to sign on to the joint statement if the conference was going to be effective and a new world economic order created. At first Stalin was lukewarm. After reading the preliminary documents, he thought the questions intrusive. He wanted a provision for unilateral Russian definition of the gold value of the ruble and objected to White’s requirements for Soviet gold payments into the International Monetary Fund. It looked as if the Soviet Union would not sign on to the joint statement. Morgenthau worriedly appealed to Gromyko in Washington and Harriman in Moscow to press Stalin to agree to it, falsely (taking what he later described as “an awful chance”) advising Harriman to tell Stalin that the British had already signed on to the draft, thereby taking an unusual step that probably saved the future of the conference. Stalin agreed. Molotov requested Harriman to come to his office at 11:30 p.m., at which time he read to him the following: “The government of the USSR has not yet succeeded in studying fully the basic conditions in question. However, if it is necessary to the government of the United States to have the voice of the USSR to secure due effect in the external world, the Soviet government agrees to give instructions to its experts to associate themselves with the project of Mr. Morgenthau.”
Morgenthau was naturally gratified, as he reported to FDR: “Yesterday I called up both Harriman in Moscow and Gromyko here to put all the pressure I could on them to get the Russians to come along…I thought you would be most pleased that the Soviet government decided to go along with us ‘to secure due effect on the rest of the world.’ In other words, they want to be associated with us in the eyes of the world.” As Morgenthau said to Harry Dexter White, “England and Russia have to make up their minds on two vital things for them…1. Is Russia going to play ball with the rest of the world on external matters, which she has never done before and, 2. Is England going to play with the United Nations or is she going to play with the Dominions? Now, both of these countries have to make up their minds, and…I am not going to take anything less than a yes or no from them.” Presumably, both countries gave in, realizing that what Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau was aiming at was not simply U.S. hegemony but helping all countries get back on their feet after the war and develop and grow through trade and investment.
On April 21 the “Joint Statement by Experts for the Establishment of an International Monetary Fund” was finally ready. Morgenthau informed FDR he would send out invitations on May 1, commence informal drafting on May 10, and convene the first session at the end of May. “Well done. You are hereby authorized to go ahead,” replied FDR.
The Mount Washington Hotel, a sprawling 350-bedroom white stuccoed Western version of a Spanish Renaissance castle located in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, cool, accessible, famous, was chosen as the venue. FDR approved the draft of the invitation, the list of American delegates presented, and the title, “The United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference.” “That’s good,” he remarked. “Here’s where you get a medal, Henry.”
Roosevelt convened the conference; forty-four nations sent delegations.
The hotel, closed for three years, less than ready, was described by one of the participants as a mixture of luxury, chaos, and inefficiency. Participants found that the windows in their rooms didn’t always open or close and the taps ran irregularly. However, the days were warm, the evenings were cool, the food was good, and a sprawling veranda running the length of the hotel encouraged mingling and conversation. The American delegation included Henry Morgenthau, the chair; Harry Dexter White; the president of the First National Bank of Chicago; Dean Acheson from the State Department; the chairman of the Federal Reserve; a Vassar economics professor; and, to make sure Congress would be supportive of the outcome, two congressmen and two senators.
From the outset it was apparent that although it didn’t “show” in the negotiations, which were difficult because so many countries were involved and so much was at stake for each one of them, it was the consensus of most members of the American delegation that even though the country was devastated and its loss of life astounding, “Russia doesn’t need the Fund…It has a complete system of state trading—state industry.”
“But the Fund needed Russia,” White said. Senator Charles Tobey, a member of the delegation, agreed. “World cooperation must have Russia,” he said.
The Soviet delegation consisted of M. S. Stepanov, the deputy people’s commissar of foreign trade and the head of the delegation; the deputy commissar of finance; the head of the Monetary Division of the Commissariat of Finance; a doctor of economics; and the head of the Monetary Division of the Commissariat for Foreign Trade.
In spite of their numerous objections, in the off-hours the Soviet delegates were quite friendly. Twice there were volleyball games between the American delegates and the Russian delegates, both of which the Russians won. The Russians also socialized at the late-night Bretton Woods Hotel nightclub, where everyone, well lubricated, would congregate and sing each other’s songs.
The members of the Soviet delegation objected to the quota allotted their country in the International Monetary Fund, on the basis that its trade with America was going to greatly increase after the war. They expected a quota equivalent to 10 percent of the fund, which would give them 10 percent of the votes, but they were now told they would have $800 million, which was less than a tenth. Said Stepanov, “The proposed formula was based upon past economic data such as foreign trade and that since it was hoped that the foreign trade of all countries would be increased, particularly that of the Soviet Union and the United States, the calculations for the quotas should be based on future prospects rather than past statistics.” Stepanov then came to the crux of his argument: the Soviet quota should equal the British.
He also pointed out that Soviets were of the opinion that countries occupied or devastated by the Germans should receive a reduction in their gold contribution to the international fund.
The American delegation proposed to Stepanov a quota of $1.2 billion on condition there were no more concessions.
Stepanov replied that he had only asked for a reduction of 25 percent in initial gold contribution and couldn’t “decide…without the consent of Moscow.” He held that the Russians would have “especially heavy” reconstruction expenses and therefore couldn’t go with Morgenthau’s wish for a subscription of $1.2 billion. He could only agree to a Russian contribution to the bank of $900 million. Not having the authority to change his figure, he cabled Moscow for direction.
Russia’s position caused worldwide concern. “Still awaiting a reply from Moscow on the amount of gold it is willing to pay into the proposed $8,500,000,000 international monetary fund, the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference remained stalled,” reported The New York Times on July 14. More days went by.
Meanwhile, Eric Johnston was in Moscow being given the VIP treatment by Stalin. He was allowed to visit parts of the Soviet Union that had not been seen by an American since 1926 and given a long “conversation” with the premier. The timing of his visit, from the standpoint of demonstrating to the countries of the world that Russia expected to become a responsible member of the postwar world, was absolutely perfect. The New York Times, under the headline “Chamber Head Says Stalin Appears Intent on Building Nation and Its Trade,” quoted Johnston as saying there was “a feeling of definite need for a long period of peace…induced by the necessity to rebuild Russia after the terrible destruction of the war.” Praise from Johnston, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, the organization representing the greatest concentration of capital wealth in the world—what could top that?
Still, at Bretton Woods, all waited for the answer to the question of Russia’s contribution into the fund. Finally, word was gotten through to the Kremlin that their indecision was causing a definite crisis: Harriman, in Moscow, was instructed to meet with the commissar of finance and tell him that unless Russia responded immediately, Morgenthau was going to announce the final, definitive report without Soviet participation. Evidently, Stalin was scoping out the issue. Within three hours of Harriman’s meeting with the finance commissar, Molotov was cabling the details to Stepanov. There was an hour to go before the final plenary session; it was seven in the evening in New Hampshire: Stepanov called Morgenthau to tell him “the answer is that he is happy to agree to your proposition…to increase our quota…to one billion two hundred million dollars.”
It was a huge step, as well as another instance of Stalin’s bending to FDR’s will. With the inclusion of the Soviet Union, the conference succeeded in getting every one of the forty-four nations to agree to set up an international monetary fund to stabilize postwar currencies, stimulate world trade, and prevent economic rivalries that might endanger world peace. Stepanov was quoted in newspaper accounts as saying his country “was very anxious to cooperate with the rest of the United Nations in post-war matters and felt there was special need for some stabilized monetary system after the war.”
The next day Morgenthau exultantly wrote to FDR that Molotov’s agreement to lift the quota showed the Russian “desire to collaborate fully with the United States. Dean Acheson has just said that this was almost unbelievable…a matter of great political significance.” Keynes, in a sense, went further. The Russians, Keynes wrote to a friend, “want to thaw and collaborate.”
THE DAY BEFORE the conference ended, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg came close to assassinating Adolf Hitler during a conference at Hitler’s Rastenburg headquarters. Stauffenberg had placed a briefcase containing a bomb, timed to detonate ten minutes later, under the conference table where Hitler was working and exited the building. The bomb went off, killing four of the staff, but Hitler escaped with scorched clothes and burns on his arm and leg. Stauffenberg was apprehended and shot; his co-conspirators were rounded up and hanged. General Donovan, head of the OSS, knew of Stauffenberg’s conspiratorial group because they had come to him for OSS assistance. If the assassination was successful, it was to have been followed by an uprising of the German underground, according to Donovan. However, the group had made plain to the OSS chief that they were strongly anti-Soviet and believed a peace dictated without Russia would be best for Germany. Donovan had gone to FDR to ask if the OSS could help the conspirators. FDR told the OSS chief, “If we start assassinating chiefs of State, God knows where it all would end. If the Germans dispose of Hitler, that is their prerogative, but the OSS must have nothing whatsoever to do with it.” The president also told him, “The United States would never act without previous consultation with the USSR.”
ANOTHER CHANGE STALIN MADE, in line with FDR’s way of thinking, also happened in July. In a public relations move hailed at home and abroad, Stalin created the Council for Religious Affairs to act as liaison between the government and all religions except the Russian Orthodox Church, which had already been rehabilitated. This was the final step in the process of rehabilitating religion in Russia. Catholic churches were permitted to repair their buildings, buy printing presses, and generally function. Theological schools, closed since 1917, were permitted to reopen. The prestigious Moscow Theological Institute, housed in a four-hundred-year-old monastery, was the first to take advantage of the new law, but Gregorian Armenians were about to open a seminary near Yerevan, and the council was reported to be considering allowing Muslims in the Uzbek republic to open a school for mullahs. In Moscow the council was given a big beige-painted stone building for its headquarters, the gateway of which was identified by a gold-lettered black plaque with its name on it. It didn’t mean any change in Stalin’s thinking—a Communist who expected to rise had to be an atheist—but as a step to make the people newly grateful to him as supreme leader and to impress the world with his humanitarian rebirth, it made a great deal of sense.
No comment by Roosevelt has been discovered on this final loosening of the strictures against religion nor on Stalin’s earlier relaxation of antireligious practices. Presumably, FDR just uttered a sigh of relief.
As the summer progressed, final arrangements were made for the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, where FDR’s four policemen—America, Britain, Russia, and China—would meet to discuss how to form a world security organization. Dumbarton Oaks, which dated from the early nineteenth century and had once been the home of U.S. senator and vice president John C. Calhoun, had been transformed by Robert Woods Bliss, a career diplomat, into an exquisite Georgetown brick mansion. It was set in the midst of an unusual sixteen-acre garden designed by Beatrix Farrand that included pebble walks, lily ponds spanned by bridges, and stunning flower gardens. The interior, equally tasteful, contained a Renaissance music room where, on August 21, delegates from America, Britain, and Russia assembled. They sat around a U-shaped conference table covered with blotter pads and pencils as they decided upon the broad outlines of the postwar peacekeeping organization. The Russian ambassador, Andrei Gromyko, aided by a complement of Soviet experts on international law, headed the Soviet delegation; Alexander Cadogan, permanent undersecretary for foreign affairs, headed the British delegation; Undersecretary of State Edward R. Stettinius led the American delegation. Much to their chagrin, because of the ever-present Russian fears of provoking the Japanese, the Chinese delegation could not be seated until the Russian delegation had departed.
Gromyko, traveling with the Russian delegation, survived a grueling five-day plane trip that took him across Siberia and the Soviet Far East to Alaska, then across Canada and down into the United States. The group was delayed by hurricane-force winds, stranded in the tiny Siberian settlement of Uelkal in Chukotka on the edge of the Bering Sea. When they finally arrived at National Airport, they found, waiting to greet them there, Stettinius and the American delegation and Cadogan and the members of the British delegation. Having survived the trip, Gromyko was extremely sanguine regarding the conference. In fact, by Russian standards, ecstatic. Just that it was taking place made him optimistic. As he wrote to Stalin, “There are all grounds to believe that the USA will be interested in maintenance of peace…It is only in this light that we can interpret the readiness of the USA to take an active part in the international peace and security organization.” As he wrote later, “Our approach was clear. We were determined to create such an organization and we were determined that it should be effective.”
Because Roosevelt’s basic concept of the four policemen as the most powerful international force to keep unruly nations in line had been discussed with Molotov and Stalin when Molotov visited Washington in June 1942, agreed to at the Moscow Conference in October 1943, and again discussed at length with Stalin at Tehran, the Russians found no surprises: the concept was now very familiar to everyone concerned, indeed was considered essential by both the British and the Russians.
The final document presented at Dumbarton Oaks was the result of five years of fine-tuning by FDR and the State Department. The four policemen were now the four permanent members of the eleven-member Security Council. The permanent members, acting together, constituted the UN Military Staff Committee that was in charge of all UN military enforcement actions. There was the General Assembly, to which all nations belonged, the International Court of Justice, the Economic and Social Council, the Secretariat, and various subagencies.
After some discussion initiated by Gromyko, France was agreed to as the fifth permanent member. As Stephen Schlesinger, author of Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations, noted, Roosevelt was advocating a six-member permanent Security Council—the sixth member to be Brazil, the largest country in South America, which was pushing its cause. Stettinius, aided by Leo Pasvolsky, director of State’s Committee on Postwar Problems, successfully persuaded the president to drop the idea.
Stalin instructed Gromyko to fight for an absolute veto in the Security Council. Gromyko recalled it as an anxious time for him: “The work was exceptionally intense.” It had been agreed among the three powers that a veto was necessary to block any military action against one of its members, even if that member was the aggressor. But Gromyko was instructed to demand that the veto be absolute: any world problem that one of the members did not want to discuss could be suppressed. This was unacceptable to both Britain and the United States, because it would mean any nation could control the agenda—in effect be the censor. The Soviet position, according to Gromyko, was based on the fear that the capitalist nations might gang up on the Soviet Union—the single socialist member of the council—and he wouldn’t budge.
Not being able to resolve this impasse, that unanimity with the right of veto had to be a principle of the Security Council, Hull and Stettinius decided to invite Gromyko to have breakfast with FDR, to see if the president could change his mind. Such a thing—such an intimacy as breakfasting with the president—was viewed as indicating the extraordinary level of friendship extended by FDR. Stettinius asked Gromyko if he would be willing to discuss the matter with FDR over breakfast: of course he said yes. The meeting was held the next morning, September 8, with Stettinius present.
FDR immediately put things on a personal footing. He handled the meeting in such a way that he not only explained the U.S. position to Gromyko but gave Gromyko the feeling that he was “on the inside”—being present as he gave instructions to his undersecretary of state. He began by telling Gromyko some of his plans for his upcoming meeting in Quebec with Churchill, his hopes of another conference of the three chiefs of state as soon as possible, and his delight with the way things were going on both the Russian and the Allied fronts. He then read a wire from General Pat Hurley in China, which said that Molotov had told him that the Soviets were not interested in the Chinese Communists, that they were not really Communists anyway. Roosevelt commented that he himself thought they were agrarians.
FDR, often in a loquacious mood, took a leisurely while to get to a point. This trait served to disarm many people, but it made Stettinius restless. “The president finally came around to Dumbarton Oaks,” he wrote. Gromyko, in the interest of security, had previously, in discussion with Cadogan and Stettinius, objected to the Economic and Social Council because his government was afraid the proposed peace organization might dissipate its energies on extraneous issues. He had also advocated the establishment of a permanent, always-ready international air force that could deal immediately with infractions. Now he said that if the United States objected to these positions, his country would drop them. But Gromyko “indicated pretty clearly” that though he could yield on these points, the one really difficult point was the voting question.
Roosevelt then got down to work to change Gromyko’s mind on the voting question, persuasively rolling out arguments. First he cast the problem in personal terms: “Traditionally in this country, husbands and wives when in trouble never have the opportunity to vote on their own case, although they always have an opportunity to state their case.” Then he threw in a bit of American history, stressing the American concept of fair play originating with the founding fathers. Then he pointed out how the Soviet proposal would give him problems in the Senate and finally wound up by saying that he thought “the issue of quick and immediate force” in the Senate could be met. Nothing worked. Gromyko explained to the president that “we did not have room to retreat from our position, just as our troops at Stalingrad knew that they could not retreat further east than the Volga.” But he accepted FDR’s remarks gracefully, according to Stettinius, and there was a discussion of “the way he could explain our position clearly to his people at home.”
Would Gromyko consider it helpful if a message went out to Stalin? asked Stettinius, who could now be seen to be ready for just such an eventuality. In his hand he held a cable from FDR to Stalin outlining the difficulty of the voting question, stressing the traditional concept that in America parties to a dispute never vote on their own case, that an international organization that violated this concept would not be supported, and that smaller nations would feel the same way. Stettinius read it out.
FDR said he liked the message but wanted it redrafted to include his husband-and-wife simile “and be sent to Miss Tully [his secretary] for transmission.”
Then, as was his style, to keep participants from getting bogged down in details, and as much for Gromyko’s benefit as for Stettinius’s, FDR became peremptory: the whole matter should be wrapped up by the end of the following week, he said. “I want at that time the document signed and a report from you that great success was achieved. This is an order to you.”
As he finished, according to Stettinius, “Gromyko squirmed in his chair as I did in mine.”
In spite of their basic disagreement, Gromyko still felt FDR’s goodwill, felt that the president was looking for a way of removing difficulties to come to an agreement. He even thought that Roosevelt might give in on the veto, because he had agreed that all Security Council proceedings, other than “matters of procedure,” must be agreed upon unanimously. But matters of procedure included the agenda, which meant any country could bring up any subject. This was not quite clear to anyone. Ten days later Gromyko said to Stettinius, “The Russian position on voting in the Council will never be departed from.”
Even long afterward, Gromyko remembered how FDR had managed to project a feeling of respect and friendship, writing, “As the president was clearly concerned to find a means of reconciliation, I felt hopeful that the search for agreement would succeed.”
The breakfast had an impact on Gromyko. The Soviets’ thinking, as a result of their experience of invasions by Poles and Germans, was narrowly concentrated on preventing future invasions, thus they focused exclusively on the creation of what Gromyko was calling, tellingly, an international organization not of peace but of safety. Having given no thought to social and economic issues, the Russians at first thought them distractions. But significantly, later in the day of the breakfast, Gromyko agreed to the Economic and Social Council, and as a quid pro quo Stettinius and Cadogan agreed to reinstate the expulsion proposal Gromyko had been pressing for.
Deciding on details was hard work: by midnight even the name of the organization had come under serious scrutiny. In his book Memories, published in 1989, Gromyko uses “cosy,” a very odd word to describe stately Dumbarton Oaks. (“The three delegations met in a cosy house in Dumbarton Oaks.”) As applied to this large, elegant mansion, it is a singularly inappropriate word. It is a distinctly emotional recollection linked to his time with Stettinius, Cadogan, and Roosevelt. Evidently, Gromyko, while working out the details of the plan that would keep the world at peace and punish aggressors, felt for the first time that he was part of a close-knit team and was comfortable with the knowledge, as he wrote, that “the participants all must reach agreement.”
There was still one major time bomb, however, at Dumbarton Oaks, which neither the president nor Gromyko wanted to even touch upon, and that was Stalin’s demand, relayed by Gromyko the first day of the conversations, August 21, and which he agreed not to bring up again, that all sixteen Soviet republics, which had been granted sovereignty just the year before, be members of the General Assembly. Stettinius had told the president about it immediately. Roosevelt had responded, “My God,” and instructed Stettinius to tell Gromyko privately that he could never agree to it. FDR wrote to Stalin in the same vein, telling him that to raise this question at the conversations would imperil everything. His solution was to offer Stalin a carrot, the question could be raised later, after the organization was formed: “The Assembly would then have full authority to act.” Stalin, who also did not want to imperil what he considered Roosevelt’s project, wrote back agreeing to postpone the issue: “I hope to have an opportunity to explain to you the political importance of the question brought up by the Soviet delegation at Dumbarton Oaks.”
FDR planned to talk Stalin out of the sixteen votes when they met, but Stettinius was so afraid that knowledge of the Soviet demand would derail further discussion on the composition and details of the world organization he omitted it from the regular minutes circulated to the delegates; it appeared only in a second set of minutes that he locked in his safe.
Following the breakfast Stalin wrote a thoughtful cable to FDR:
I also hope that these important discussions may end successfully. This may be of serious significance for the further strengthening of cooperation of our countries and for the whole cause of future peace and security…The initial American proposal that there should be established a special procedure of voting in case of a dispute in which one or several members of the council are directly involved, seems to me correct…Among these powers there is no room for mutual suspicion…I hope that you will understand the seriousness of the considerations expressed here and that we shall find a harmonious solution of this question as well.
Preparing Soviet citizens for what was to come with peace, Soviet newspapers gave the Dumbarton Oaks conversations extensive coverage, printing important sections of the draft agreement, emphasizing “almost exclusively” the necessity for concord and unanimity among the great powers responsible for the enforcement of peace. The Soviet press also reflected a new awareness of Russia’s role in the world. Subjects such as the postwar administration of colonies and the future status of the Kiel Canal were featured. Soviet citizens were being groomed for the future, for when their country would take its rightful place at the peace table.
At the same time, Stalin and by extension the Russian public, uneasy with the thought that possibly FDR might not be reelected in November, continued steadfastly to identify with Roosevelt and urge his reelection. As Stalin said to Harriman, “The president would be reelected. Dewey was no match for him and no American of sound mind would wish to change the head of the government in the middle of a war. There was no comparison between Dewey and the President. Dewey was an ignorant man—the president was a first class politician on a world scale. The president was sure to be reelected.”
Just to make sure that their several differences of opinion did not scuttle plans for a world organization before they met—which would not be until after Roosevelt’s State of the Union address in January—Roosevelt told Harriman to advise Stalin that even if he continued his objection to the voting procedure, he “did not wish a ‘no’ but wanted the matter kept open for further discussion.”
In spite of the disagreement over the veto Stalin was unusually happy at the prospects for peace that the new world organization promised. In his annual eve of anniversary speech of the great socialist revolution on November 6 he made this clear:
What means are available to prevent fresh aggression on the part of Germany, and if war breaks out nevertheless, to strangle it at the very outset…Apart from the complete disarming of aggressor nationsthere is only one means of achieving this: to set up a special organization consisting of representatives of the peaceful nations, for the protection of peace and for ensuring security; to place at the disposal of the leading body of this organization the minimum of armed forces necessary to prevent aggression, and to make it the duty of this organization to utilize these armed forces without delay…This must not be a replica of the League of Nations of sad memory, which possessed neither the powers nor the means with which to prevent aggression. It will be a new, special, fully-empowered international organization, which will have at its disposal all that is necessary for protecting peace and preventing fresh aggression.
Further, he stated that comity among nations was key:
Can we count on the activities of this international organization being sufficiently effective? They will be effective if the Great Powers who have borne the brunt of the burden of the war against Hitler Germany continue to act in a spirit of unanimity and harmony. They will not be effective if this essential condition is violated.
As Christmas approached, Roosevelt asked Stalin to meet with an officer from Eisenhower’s staff to coordinate the efforts of the Red Army on the eastern front and the Allied armies on the western front, promising to maintain “complete secrecy.” Eisenhower’s armies were fighting the Battle of the Bulge, as it was called, Hitler’s last counterattack, which was causing the bulge in the Allied line, while at the same time the Red Army had crossed the Vistula and was making giant strides toward Berlin. Stalin wired back immediately, “Naturally, I agree with your proposal as well as I agree to meet the officer from General Eisenhower and to arrange an exchange of information with him.”
FDR HAD DECIDED to see the New Year in with champagne from Stalin. It was just a small gathering of friends and family, including children and grandchildren, upstairs in FDR’s study at the White House. There was “much anticipation” as the first bottle of champagne from the case, which came, the accompanying note explained, from Stalin’s home republic of Georgia, was poured into everyone’s glass.
The shock was that everyone hated it, agreeing it was “too sweet,” “awful,” “quite undrinkable.” But midnight had arrived—there was nothing else—so they all raised their glasses. Then everyone, including the president, toasted “Uncle Joe.”