Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin in Yalta, 1945 (Department of Defense, US National Archives 531340, via Wikimedia Commons)

David Reynolds is a professor of international history at Christ’s College, Cambridge, while Vladimir Pechatnov works at the Russian State Institute of International Relations in Moscow (MGIMO). Their joint book – a fashionably monstrous size, too heavy to hold comfortably in one hand – constitutes a publication in full of the major part of the Stalin–Churchill–Roosevelt correspondence from 1941 to 1945, showing alterations in successive drafts and accompanied by a detailed running commentary drawing on multi-archival research in the Russian Foreign Ministry and Presidential Archives, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park New York, the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge and elsewhere. It builds on an earlier (1957) Soviet publication of the correspondence initiated by Stalin in 1950 with the aim of presenting the Soviet side of the story, notably the decisive military role played by the Soviets. Churchill, of course, pursued a similar aim on behalf of himself and the British with his six-volume memoir-history, The Second World War, published between 1948 and 1964.

The long-running drama underlying this correspondence concerns Stalin’s persistent efforts to get the Western Allies to open a second front in France to take some of the heat off the Soviet Union, and Churchill’s attempts to stave him off with promises. Churchill was afraid of excessive casualties (something that rarely bothered Stalin), but he also had his own idée fixe about the advantages of a Mediterranean/Middle East alternative. On this issue, Churchill was the one prevaricating and on the defensive. The authors, like Stalin and Roosevelt, show signs of becoming ‘infuriated by his endless procrastination about “Overlord”, exacerbated in recent weeks [1943] by blatant deception’. The impression left by their commentary is that it would have been to the advantage of the whole war effort, not just Soviet interests, to have opened a second front in France long before the actual D-Day invasion in June 1944.

Ironically, however, it may be questioned in retrospect whether an earlier second front would in fact have served Soviet interests. Ivan Maisky, having lobbied mightily for a second front during his term as Soviet ambassador to Britain, wondered in his diary, after the turning point of Stalingrad, whether the Soviets might not be better off getting to Berlin first, with all the attendant glory and international prestige, than sharing the military victory in Europe. He had a point. It was, rather, the Red Army’s long solitary march through eastern Europe in 1943–45 – in other words, the absence of a second front – that put this region unarguably under Soviet control in the postwar settlement.

Churchill would later claim that, ‘Stalin always kept his word with me.’ He was thinking particularly of Stalin’s postwar observance of Churchill’s notorious ‘naughty list’ allocating percentages of Soviet and Western influence in countries of Eastern and southern Europe. Up to a point, perhaps, but he also told Churchill some whoppers. On the Katyn massacre of thousands of Polish officers, for example, blamed by the Germans (correctly) on the Soviets and the Soviets (mendaciously) on the Germans. Stalin not only lied outright to Churchill but also waxed indignant about the ‘vile fascist calumny’ perpetrated by the London Poles against the Soviet Union.

Churchill accounted for any inconsistencies in Stalin’s dealing with him with his theory of ‘two Stalins’, the one who personally liked him, and the other a prisoner of ‘dark forces’ in his Politburo. The Foreign Office was justly sceptical of this, as later historians have been, but Reynolds and Pechatnov do not make the mistake of therefore concluding that Stalin – unlike his Western colleagues – operated in a domestic vacuum. Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s Foreign Minister and effective No. 2 man in these years, is a vital presence in this account, which illustrates clearly the nuances of interpretation and approach between the two men shown in their respective editing and drafting of correspondence.

Discussions on the location of the Big Three’s meetings in 1943 and 1945 provide a remarkable example of Stalin’s ability to get his own way when he dug his heels in. Tehran and Yalta were his choices, based largely on his personal fear of flying, but also on his wish to have the Allied leaders come to him rather than the reverse. With regard to the Tehran meeting, Roosevelt – a sick man, whose polio-induced paralysis was compounded by the arteriosclerosis that would kill him in April 1945 – ‘tried all sorts of ploys to avoid travelling 6,000 miles to the Iranian capital – most of all touting the demands of the US constitution, which he chose to interpret very strictly, but also supposed pressure from his Cabinet’, though never mentioning his own physical infirmity. ‘Stalin simply turned these arguments back on the president – we also have a constitution, my colleagues are equally insistent – and also played his trump card: my war is bigger and more important than yours.’ It was Roosevelt who finally gave in (the meeting followed in November–December 1943).

‘While we are alive, there is nothing to fear. We will not allow dangerous disagreements,’ Stalin assured Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta in February 1945. Churchill and Roosevelt may well have exaggerated the success of their own wartime personal diplomacy. On the other hand, as the authors point out, ‘at a basic level, the Big Three’s anti-Hitler coalition worked, whereas the Berlin−Rome–Tokyo Axis did not’.

Stalin seems to have genuinely mourned Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, and he retained something like affection for Churchill, even after the latter’s Cold War speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. The three of them had become used to working together during the war, if not with total trust (an impossibility in foreign relations) then at least with a degree of confidence based on familiarity. With Roosevelt dead and Churchill out of power from mid-1945, that was lost – and it was a loss that perhaps exacerbated Stalin’s suspicious intractability towards the West in the postwar years.