that the West was deliberately prolonging the war
to weaken the Soviet Union in the bloodbath of
the eastern front in order to dictate the future
from a position of strength. The longer European
Russia remained in German hands, the more dif-
ficult it would be to re-establish communist
autocracy over the non-Russian peoples. Hence it
became for Stalin almost a test of Britain’s good
faith that Russia’s right to its 1941 frontiers
should be accepted by Britain and the US and not
become a matter of negotiation after the war was
won. The 1941 frontiers included the additional
territory the Soviet Union had acquired as a result
of the deal struck with Nazi Germany: eastern
Poland, the Baltic states, Bessarabia and northern
Bukovina, and also the territories taken from
Finland after the Soviet–Finnish War.
The British position at first was to reject any
frontier changes until after the war was over and
peace negotiations took place. Roosevelt, mindful
of his own Polish minority in America and of the
condemnation of the ‘secret deals’ of the First
World War, at first resisted even more firmly
European frontier discussions. But Churchill and
Eden were anxious to appease Stalin at a time
when the Red Army was bearing the brunt of the
war on land. An Anglo-Russian agreement for
jointly waging war against Germany had been
signed in Moscow on 12 July 1941; on 26 May
1942 it was replaced by a formal twenty-year
alliance. Churchill also responded courteously to
Stalin’s angry and wounding messages about the
lack of a second front. But there was much appre-
hension in London that Stalin might lose confi-
dence in his Western allies and strike a deal with
Hitler. Everything was avoided that might add to
his suspicions. This had one important conse-
quence. Discussions with emissaries from the
German resistance, or with representatives sent by
Himmler’s SS to bargain over the lives of the
Hungarian Jews, were avoided for fear that they
would compromise Britain and lead Stalin to the
wrong conclusion that a separate peace was being
considered.
Among Hitler’s entourage were advisers and
allies who urged him to seek a separate peace with
the Soviet Union. But the struggle against the
Bolsheviks and Jews lay at the core of his ideology.
He rejected peace with his arch-enemies though
he admired Stalin’s ruthlessness. His barbarity in
Russia and the carrying through of the Final
Solution while the war was being lost militarily
show that ideology ultimately dominated Hitler’s
actions when Realpolitikwould have served the
interests of the Third Reich. As for Stalin it is pos-
sible that he welcomed the West’s belief that he
had an alternative to war with Germany for it
would make Britain and the US more willing to
accede to Russia’s military and political demands.
The question of the future of Poland was
the most difficult for Britain and the US to solve.
The Polish government in exile demanded that the
independence of its state be restored within the
frontiers of 1939, that is of pre-war Poland.
But Stalin had already annexed and incorpo-
rated in the Soviet Union the portions of Poland
occupied in September 1939 and insisted on a
post-war Poland ‘friendly’ to the Soviet Union.
With the Red Army inevitably overrunning
Poland there was, in effect, little the US and
Britain could do to force Stalin to renounce ter-
ritory which he claimed as Soviet already. The
Polish government in exile in London was in a
hopeless situation. General Sikorski, who headed
the Polish government in exile in London, had at
first tried to work with the Russians. He had
signed an agreement for Russo-Polish coopera-
tion with Stalin in 1941 but, from the first, two
issues clouded Polish–Soviet relations: the ques-
tion of Poland’s eastern frontier and the thou-
sands of missing Polish officers who should have
re-emerged from Russian prisoner-of-war camps
after the 1941 agreement had been concluded.
The corpses of Polish officers found by the
Germans near Smolensk in the Katyn forest pro-
vided a grisly explanation for their disappearance
and ruptured relations between the Polish gov-
ernment and the Kremlin in April 1943. The
Russians formed their own Polish military units
and an embryonic rival Polish government, the
Union of Polish Patriots.
The fate of Poland was virtually decided at
the first summit conference when Roosevelt,
Churchill and Stalin met in Teheran in Persia
from 28 November to 1 December 1943. There
was no formal agreement, but Churchill agreed