732 Chapter 27 War and Peace, 1941–1945
the Soviets were fighting America’s battle as well as
their own. Even before Pearl Harbor, former
Ambassador Joseph E. Davies wrote in his best-selling
Mission to Moscow(1941) that the communist leaders
were “devoted to the cause of peace for both ideolog-
ical and practical reasons.” Of Stalin, who had ruth-
lessly executed thousands of his former comrades,
Davies wrote the following: “His brown eye is exceed-
ingly kind and gentle. A child would like to sit in his
lap and a dog would sidle up to him.”
Such views of the character of Joseph Stalin were
naive, to say the least, but the United States and the
Soviet Union agreed emphatically on the need to
defeat Hitler. The Soviets repeatedly expressed a will-
ingness to cooperate with the Allies in dealing with
postwar problems. The Soviet Union was one of the
twenty-six signers of the Declaration of the United
Nations (January 1942), in which the Allies promised
to eschew territorial aggrandizement after the war, to
respect the right of all peoples to determine their own
form of government, to work for freer trade and
international economic cooperation, and to force the
disarmament of the aggressor nations.^1
In May 1943 the Soviet Union dissolved the
Comintern, its official agency for the promulgation of
world revolution. The following October, during a
conference in Moscow with the Allies, Soviet Foreign
Minister V. M. Molotov joined in setting up a
European Advisory Commission to divide Germany
into occupation zones after the war. That December,
at a conference held in Tehran, Iran, Roosevelt,
Churchill, and Stalin discussed plans for a new league
of nations. When Roosevelt described the kind of
world organization he envisaged, the Soviet dictator
offered a number of constructive suggestions.
Between August and October 1944, Allied rep-
resentatives met at Dumbarton Oaks, outside
Washington. The chief Soviet delegate, Andrei A.
Gromyko, opposed limiting the use of the veto by
the great powers on the future United Nations
(UN)Security Council, but he did not take a delib-
erately obstructionist position. At a conference held
at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945 Stalin joined
Roosevelt and Churchill in the call for a meeting in
April at San Francisco to draft a charter for the UN.
“We argued freely and frankly across the table,”
Roosevelt reported later. “But at the end, on every
point, unanimous agreement was reached. I may say
we achieved a unity of thought and a way of getting
along together.” Privately Roosevelt characterized
Stalin as “a very interesting man” whose rough exte-
rior clothed an “old-fashioned elegant European
manner.” He referred to him almost affectionately as
“that old buzzard” and on one occasion called him
“Uncle Joe” to his face. At Yalta, Stalin gave
Roosevelt a portrait photograph, with a long Cyrillic
inscription in his small, tightly written hand.
The UN charter drafted at the 50-nation San
Francisco Conference gave each UN member a seat in
the General Assembly, a body designed for discussion
rather than action. The locus of authority in the new
organization resided in the Security Council, “the
castle of the great powers.” This consisted of five per-
manent members (the United States, the Soviet
Union, Great Britain, France, and China) and six oth-
ers elected for two-year terms.
The Security Council was charged with responsi-
bility for maintaining world peace, but any great
power could block UN action whenever it wished to
do so. The United States insisted on this veto power
as strongly as the Soviet Union did. In effect the char-
ter paid lip service to the Wilsonian ideal of a power-
ful international police force, but it incorporated the
limitations that Henry Cabot Lodge had proposed in
his 1919 reservation to Article X of the League
Covenant, which relieved the United States from the
obligation of enforcing collective security without the
approval of Congress.Allied Suspicion of Stalin
Long before the war in Europe ended, however, the
Allies had clashed over important policy matters. Since
later world tensions developed from decisions made at
this time, an understanding of the disagreements is
essential for evaluating several subsequent decades.
Much depends on one’s view of the postwar Soviet
system. If the Soviet government under Stalin was bent
on world domination, events fall readily into one pattern
of interpretation. If, having at enormous cost endured
an unprovoked assault by the Nazis, it was seeking only
to protect itself against the possibility of another inva-
sion, these events are best explained differently. Because
the United States has opened nearly all its diplomatic
records, we know a great deal about how American for-
eign policy was formulated and about the mixed motives
and mistaken judgments of American leaders. This helps
explain why many scholars have been critical of
American policy and the “cold warriors” who made and
directed it. The Soviet Union, for many years, did not
let even its own historians into its archives.
It is clear, however, that the Soviets resented the
British-American delay in opening up a second front.
They were fighting for survival against the full power
of the German armies; any American invasion of north-
ern France, even an unsuccessful one, would have
relieved some of the pressure. Roosevelt and Churchill
would not move until they were ready, and Stalin had(^1) These were the principles first laid down in the so-called Atlantic
Charter, drafted by Roosevelt and Churchill at a meeting on the
USSAugustaoff Newfoundland in August 1941.