The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance That Won the War
“Milton’s book reminds us that the exigencies of international politics, especially in time of war, constrain the options and shape the decisions of political leaders.”
Wars make strange alliances—none more strange than the American-British-Soviet alliance that won the Second World War. Each ally entered the alliance with the same immediate goal: the defeat of Nazi Germany and its European allies and, later, Japan. But the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union differed in their long-term goals. U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted four great powers in control of the United Nations to keep the postwar peace. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wanted to salvage what remained of the British Empire. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin wanted eventually to communize the world.
The British popular historian Giles Milton’s new book The Stalin Affair explores the origins, maintenance, and ultimate collapse of that wartime alliance. Milton’s narrative history focuses on American and British efforts to placate Stalin, whose armies contributed the most to defeating Hitler in Europe. This, of course, was partly Stalin’s fault who began the European phase of World War II as Hitler’s ally with the signing of the non-aggression pact in August 1939, a pact that contained secret clauses that divided Poland and other Eastern European nations between the two totalitarian powers.
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Churchill, who for two decades had been a vociferous anti-communist and outspoken critic of the Soviet regime, pledged to help Soviet Russia in its battle with Germany—the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Roosevelt, whose country was not yet a belligerent in June of 1941, soon extended Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union over the objections of some in the State Department. FDR had by then already begun helping Great Britain at sea and with supplies. The U.S.-British-Soviet alliance was from the very beginning an alliance of convenience that was destined not to outlast the end of the war.
American efforts to aid Britain and the Soviet Union were led by FDR’s roving ambassador Averell Harriman and FDR’s close confidant Harry Hopkins. Britain’s effort to aid Stalin was led by Archibald Clark Kerr, who previously served as an envoy to Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. Harriman and Kerr dominate Milton’s narrative. He credits them with being most responsible for holding together a fragile alliance. And to their credit, both Harriman and Kerr recognized toward the end of the war that Stalin would pose a threat to the postwar world.
FDR and Churchill sought to forge personal relationships with Stalin, and both—especially FDR—at times forgot that they were allied to a monster who climbed to power over the dead bodies of communist party officials, ruthlessly purged real and perceived political enemies at home, forcibly starved millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s, and institutionalized and expanded a slave-labor empire known by its acronym GULAG.
But the decision of America and Britain to aid Stalin was necessary to win the war. Milton notes that at the end of the war, Stalin privately admitted that the Soviets would have been defeated if the United States and Britain did not come to their aid. War creates its own necessities. The Second World War in Europe was won on the eastern front. The North African, Italian, and northwest European campaigns were in the end important but secondary theaters of war. Harriman and Kerr understood that. So, too, did Stalin.
Milton’s engrossing narrative covers the initial German invasion of the Soviet Union and Stalin’s temporary incapacitation thereafter; America’s initial efforts to aid Great Britain; Britain’s sea convoys to the Soviet arctic region; the frequent interactions between Harriman and Churchill, Harriman and Stalin, and Kerr and Stalin; the meetings of the “Big Three” (FDR, Churchill and Stalin); the personal lives of Harriman and Kerr; the growing rift between FDR and Churchill over how to deal with Stalin; the disputes over and cover-up of the Katyn Forest massacre of Polish officers; the celebrations of victory; and the growing mistrust of Stalin at war’s end and afterward.
Harriman, Milton notes, considered Stalin “in some ways the most effective of the war leaders,” yet he also called him a “murderous tyrant.” Anglo-American aid saved Stalin’s regime and thereby set the stage for 45 years of Cold War. But there was really no alternative in this imperfect and tragic world. In World War II, the Americans and British aided an evil regime to defeat what was at the time considered a greater evil. Milton’s book reminds us that the exigencies of international politics, especially in time of war, constrain the options and shape the decisions of political leaders.