My Dear Mr. Stalin

My Dear Mr. Stalin My Dear Mr. Stalin The Complete Correspondence Between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin Edited, with Commentary, by Susan Butler Foreword by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Yale University Press New Haven and London Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College. Copyright ©2005 by Susan Butler. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Sabon Roman type by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1882–1945. My dear Mr. Stalin : the complete correspondence between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin / edited, with commentary, by Susan Butler. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-300-10854-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-300-10854-0 (10-digit) 1. Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1882–1945—Correspondence. 2. Stalin, Joseph, 1879–1953—Correspondence. 3. Presidents—United States—Correspondence. 4. Heads of state—Soviet Union—Correspondence. 5. World War, 1939–1945— Sources. I. Stalin, Joseph, 1879–1953. II. Butler, Susan, 1932– . III. Title. E807.A4 2005 973.917؅092—dc22 2005012583 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10987654321 To the 405,000 Americans and the 27,000,000 Russians who died in World War II Contents Foreword Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. ix Acknowledgments xvii A Note on the Text xix Introduction 1 Correspondence 33 Appendix 327 List of Abbreviations 331 Notes 333 Selected Bibliography 341 Document Source Notes 345 Index 349 vii Foreword It is a curiosity of scholarship that the full correspondence between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin was never published during the Cold War. That correspondence consisted of more than three hundred hot-war letters, beginning with Hitler’s surprise at- tack on the Soviet Union in 1941 and ending with FDR’s surprise death in 1945. History owes a debt to Susan Butler for the collec- tion and annotation of these exchanges. Roosevelt and Stalin met only twice—in Tehran in November 1943 and in Yalta in February 1945. They met each time with the third of the Big Three, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. By the time they met at Yalta, all three were old and tired. Chur- chill, who had spent the 1930s in constant frustration, was seventy- one. Stalin at sixty-six had governed his country for seventeen draining years. Roosevelt, who had turned sixty-three the week before the Yalta meeting, had led his country through the worst eco- nomic depression and the worst foreign war in its history. Now they were together to lay the foundation for the peace to come. Was FDR too sick at Yalta to put up a strong U.S. case? His health was poor and his energy level was low; but I do not gather from conversations with persons who were with him at Yalta that his defenses were down. Charles E. Bohlen, a State Department ix x Foreword Soviet expert who served as Roosevelt’s interpreter with Stalin, summed up the general testimony: “While his physical state was certainly not up to normal, his mental and psychological state was certainly not affected. He was lethargic but when important mo- ments arose, he was mentally sharp. Our leader was ill at Yalta . but he was effective.” I interviewed Sir Frank Roberts, later British ambassador to Moscow. “The hand of death was on him,” Roberts said, “but it didn’t impede his role at Yalta. He was in charge and achieved everything he had come to do. No problem at Yalta de- rived from Roosevelt’s illness.” As for the Soviet side, I asked Valentin Berezhkov, Stalin’s interpreter, who replied in a letter to me that Roosevelt’s health “was certainly worse than in Tehran, but everybody who watched him said that in spite of his frail appear- ance his mental potential was high. Before he got tired, he was alert, with quick reactions and forceful arguments.” “Stalin treated Roosevelt with great esteem,” Berezhkov added, “and as far as I know did not make any comment on FDR’s condi- tion. He certainly could have in private with his closest colleagues, but none of them ever mentioned it.” Frank Roberts thought that “Roosevelt and Churchill were susceptible to Stalin because he did not fit the dictator stereotype of the time. He was not a demagogue; he did not strut in flamboyant uniforms. He was soft-spoken, well organized, not without humor, knew his brief—an agreeable fa- cade concealing unknown horrors.” Roosevelt had no illusions about Stalin’s Russia. “The Soviet Union, as everybody who has the courage to face the fact knows,” he told the American Youth Congress in February 1940, “is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world.” But FDR, and Churchill too, knew how much the democracies owed the Red Army for the prospective defeat of Adolf Hitler. D-day would never have succeeded if Stalin had not detained most of the Nazy army on Germany’s eastern front. By the time the Big Three gathered at Yalta, the Red Army was forty-four miles from Berlin. Much has been made of Roosevelt’s alleged naïveté about the Soviet Union and his alleged conviction that he could charm Stalin into postwar harmony. Certainly FDR had no expert understand- ing of Leninist ideology or of the terrible internal nature of Stalinist Foreword xi society. He responded to what he saw of Soviet behavior in the world, and he never saw very far into the Soviet Union. Always an optimist, he hoped that the wartime alliance would bridge the ideo- logical chasm and create a new reality for the peace. Even with ben- efit of hindsight, this still seems a hope worth testing. It had to be tested in any case before the peoples of the democracies could be persuaded that their vital allies were in fact mortal foes. Did Roosevelt really believe that he could charm Stalin out of the tree? As Walter Lippmann has suggested, he was too cynical for that: “He distrusted everybody. What he thought he could do was outwit Stalin, which is quite a different thing.” Perhaps the Ameri- can president was not so hopelessly naïve after all. For Stalin was not the helpless prisoner of Leninist ideology. The Soviet dictator saw himself less the disciple of Marx and Lenin than their fellow prophet. Roosevelt was surely right in regarding Stalin as the only lever available to the democracies against the rigidities of Leninism. Only Stalin had the power to rewrite Communist doctrine, as he had already rewritten Russian history and Russian science. Roose- velt’s determination to court Stalin, to work on and through Stalin, was, I believe, based on the astute reflexes of a master politician. Changing Stalin’s mind was the only chance the West had to keep the peace. Authoritative witnesses—Averell Harriman, U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in the last years of the war, and Chip Bohlen and Valentin Berezhkov, the two interpreters—testify that Roose- velt retained to the end a certain capacity to influence Stalin. Harri- man contrasted Stalin’s evident “deference” to Roosevelt with his constant needling of Churchill and explained it by Stalin’s recogni- tion that “Roosevelt represented something entirely new; his New Deal was reforming capitalism to meet the needs and desires of the ‘working class.’ There was nothing like that in Communist doctrine.” A great foreign policy fear that haunted Roosevelt’s generation was the fear of resurgent American isolationism. We sometimes forget how brief an interval separated the two world wars. FDR was thirty-eight years old when the Senate rejected the League of Nations; he was only fifty-seven years old when war broke out xii Foreword again in Europe in 1939—the war predicted by Woodrow Wilson “with absolute certainty” in September 1919 if America did not join the League. During the interwar years the struggle against isolationism consumed much of FDR’s time and energy. As foreign policy spokesman for the Democratic Party, he declared in a For- eign Affairs article in 1928 that only by actions of international col- laboration could the United States “regain the world’s trust and friendship.” The experience of an internationalist movement followed by a profound and impassioned isolationist revival had engraved itself indelibly on the consciousness of the old Wilsonians. In the 1942 midterm congressional election, internationalists launched a major campaign for a “win-the-war” Congress, targeting isolationist leg- islators on a hit list. The leading isolationists in Congress survived the primaries. In FDR’s own congressional district, internationalist Republicans like Wendell Willkie and Thomas E. Dewey opposed the renomination of the bitter isolatonist Hamilton Fish, but Fish won the primary two to one. In the general election only 5 of 115 congressmen with isolationist records were beaten. The Republi- cans gained forty-four seats in the House and nine in the Senate— their best performance in years. After the election, Secretary of State Cordell Hull told Vice Pres- ident Henry Wallace that “the country was going in exactly the same steps it followed in 1918.” Hull, Wallace noted, thought it “utterly important to keep the sequence of events from following the 1918–1921 pattern because he felt if we went into isolationism this time, the world was lost forever.” For Roosevelt the critical task in 1943–45 was to commit the United States to a postwar structure of peace.

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