IN AUGUST 1942, Churchill and Stalin met for the first time. That event was the least discussed and yet perhaps the most important among the many “summits” of the Second World War.

 The entire history of World War II proves the then-supreme importance of great national leaders and of their relationships. How contrary this is to the widely accepted and trusted idea: that history and politics and societies are governed by economic and “material factors,” that the primary importance of individual persons belongs (if it ever belonged) to earlier ages. The entire history of the Second World War denies this. Its course was set by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin. Without Churchill: Hitler may have won. Without Roosevelt: Churchill may not have prevailed. Without Stalin: Churchill and Roosevelt may not have been capable of entirely conquering Hitler.

As the war dragged on, summit followed summit. From 1934 to 1944, Hitler and Mussolini met ten times, but none of their meetings was very consequential—mostly because after 1937 Hitler had the upper hand; Mussolini could not sway him. Churchill and Roosevelt had met first in 1918, neither of them heads of their governments then; Churchill forgot that encounter (this disappointed Roosevelt in 1940). They met twice in 1941, 1942 and 1943, and in 1944 once, almost always in the United States. They sat down together with Stalin two times (the so-called three-man conferences), in 1943 (Tehran) and in 1945 (Yalta). In July 1945, Stalin met Churchill and Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, in Potsdam.

 

THE EMPLOYMENT of the word “summit” to conferences of heads of state was probably Churchill’s choice. It had been, on occasion, applied to a monarch (in 1707 to Queen Anne of Great Britain). There were meetings and conferences of monarchs in the eighteenth, nineteenth, even in the twentieth centuries, and many such gatherings of their chancellors or prime ministers. One of these was the Munich “conference” in September 1938, with Hitler and Mussolini and Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier (the British and French prime ministers), a “summit” where important decisions were made (and of which Churchill disapproved, to say the least). Yet he was often in favor of personal meetings with other heads of government when he thought them useful. (In 1932, Hitler declined a chance to meet Churchill, who a few years later preferred not to meet Hitler.) Unlike in the case of that non-event, Churchill, by and large, trusted his ability to impress other important men. In such instances he was more often right than wrong. That is why his “summits” during the Second World War were important, sometimes dramatic and almost always consequential.

The most important of these meetings between Churchill and Roosevelt were those in June 1942 and January 1943, for these were the meetings that first delayed a second front in Europe (so desperately desired by Stalin), then allowed for an invasion of North Africa that increased the pressure on Germany. In 1942, Churchill was able to convince Roosevelt and the American military leaders that their plan for a landing in western France in November 1942 would be a disaster. In January 1943, he persuaded them that after eliminating all German (and Italian) forces from North Africa, the Western Allies should go on to invade Sicily and force Italy out of the war. That was the last time the British prime minister had his way with Roosevelt. For many reasons—military, financial, political—Roosevelt soon was in the position of power. Except for on minor issues, Churchill could no longer convince him and other Americans of his strategical ideas.

Other meetings of heads of state, innumerable nowadays, amounted and amount to largely ceremonial occasions, with agreements and documents signed there but prepared and agreed to before by respective experts. This was not quite so with Churchill. Of course he brought his experts and advisers with him; but it was he who mattered then and there. This was especially true of his meetings with Stalin. In 1942, as the Russians struggled with very great German forces and the Western Allies suffered stunning defeats, almost everything hinged on Churchill’s relations with the then-new Russian czar.

Churchill had his faults. But he could think far ahead: he was a visionary about many things. His understanding of history may have been even more profound than his insight into human nature—often the latter was not only inseparable from the former but a result of it. (With Hitler—and Stalin—the opposite seems to have been the case.) But then these two operative nouns may be interchangeable: his insight into history and his understanding of human nature. Both were high qualities of his mind. And—attempting to assuage Stalin—how he needed them in August 1942!

 

IN DECEMBER 1941, Churchill’s spirits had risen high. The prospect of World War II shone with new colors. The United States had—finally—entered the fray, and it was within the same week that a Russian army pushed back a German army a few miles before Moscow. At night on December 7, 1941, Churchill went to bed, relieved. He recalled this within his Memoirs of the Second World War. Britain would now live; the empire would live; Hitler would be conquered; the Japanese would be ground down to dust. Indeed, that was to happen. But it was not to be easy; and the prospects of the war would come to seem grim again.

Hitler knew that he could no longer win this world war through the lightning campaigns with which his armies conquered one part of Europe after another—and a large portion of the Russian empire. But he also knew that he was not bound to lose it. Now his entire strategy changed: from short wars to a long war, in which his Germany would prevail, strong enough so that the strange coalition of his enemy powers would sooner or later break apart. Well before that, his armed forces, victoriously, could advance further. And this was so. In the first months of 1942, his submarines disrupted the American and British avenue of the sea across the Atlantic (“A measureless peril,” as Churchill once put it). In North Africa, the British suffered defeats, and the German Desert Fox, General Erwin Rommel, came close to Alexandria and Cairo, gates of the entire Near and Middle East. In Russia, Hitler’s armies, unlike Napoléon’s 130 years before, defied the winter and then resumed their advance, now in the south, reaching the Volga River around Stalingrad and thrusting into the Caucasus.

Defeats, at times amounting to disgrace, clouded the British record and the outlook for the following year. Though America was now side-by-side with Britain, three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor the two towering British battleships the Prince of Wales and the Repulse were sunk by Japanese airplanes—all within a matter of three hours. Three weeks later, most of Britain’s imperial outposts in the Far East were given up. Another six weeks later, Singapore, the crown jewel of the empire in the region, surrendered to a Japanese army half the size of the British and Commonwealth forces there. In June, yet another British attempt to push Rommel back in Libya failed. Worse, immediately thereafter, the considerable military enclave of Tobruk, near Libya’s eastern border (and holding almost thirty thousand British and Allied troops), caved in, whereafter the German African army entered western Egypt. Even before that, Churchill’s wife, Clementine, said to Roosevelt’s messenger, Harry Hopkins: “We are indeed walking through the Valley of Humiliation.”

Her husband was well aware of that. At the news of Tobruk’s surrender he mumbled that defeat was one thing, disgrace another. Earlier that year he mused to confidants: it seemed that British soldiers during this war were not what British soldiers in World War I were. The problem was neither equipment nor direction, but morale. That appeared within England and the English as well. The British people’s resolute bravery of 1940, when they resisted the German air force’s repeated attacks on the United Kingdom, was no longer dominant: 1942 was not their Finest Hour. What still prevailed was their discipline, rather than their self-confidence. There was no need for public-opinion surveys to note this. It involved too the question of Churchill’s leadership. Criticisms of that appeared in the newspapers, here and there; and then even in Parliament. A motion for a vote of censure, of no confidence—not in his prime ministership but in his leadership as minister of defence—was brought up on July 1, soon after Churchill had returned from Washington. It was defeated by the large margin of 475 to 25.

Above all, acute in Churchill’s mind (but also in Roosevelt’s) was the question: Would Stalin stay in the war? Would Stalin keep on fighting Hitler, in spite of his dissatisfaction with his Anglo-American allies? Only three years before he had made a deal with Hitler. Would he attempt something like that again? He had had some reasons not to trust the Western powers in 1938 when France and Britain signed away part of Czechoslovakia to Germany. He had perhaps even weightier reasons now. More than two hundred Russian divisions were facing and fighting the Germans, while hardly more than six British divisions were skirmishing with a German expeditionary corps in Africa. Stalin also suspected (and rightly so) that now there would be no second front opening against the Germans in Western Europe, despite his repeated entreaties for Allied relief. Churchill knew that he had to tell Stalin that the Allies would not be coming to ease the pressure by landing in Europe soon. They would focus on the Mediterranean. There they would open up an easier route to the sea, and provide the Allies a front against Italy and the remainder of the Axis-held Continent. About his early proposition of an Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa in the fall of 1942 he wrote: “I am sure . . . that [this] is . . . the best chance for effecting relief to the Russian front in 1942.” He had to deliver the news in person. Churchill knew what that was to be like, “carrying a large lump of ice to the North Pole,” he said.

 

AND NOW the days and weeks of July 1942 stretched out, replete with more trouble. A very large convoy of ships sailing for the Far North of Russia, packed full of armor and other war materials, was disrupted, scattered and more than two-thirds of its vessels sunk by German attacks issuing from northern Norway. The British now canceled or postponed other convoys bound for Russia over the next few months. This had to be told to Stalin, together with the definite fact that the Allies had decided once and for all that there would be no American-British invasion of western France, no second front, in 1942.

Churchill informed Stalin that he wished to meet him in Russia. He would fly there from Cairo, where he was to confront his concerns about the leadership of the British Eighth Army. He suggested places in the south of Russia, at Stalin’s best convenience, to spare both of them a very long journey. Stalin answered, they’d better meet in Moscow. On the last day of that gloom-laden month, Churchill left London. Among other messages, he received a warm bon voyage letter from the king, George VI. “I feel that your visit East will be even more epoch-making than those you have paid to the West.” He was right. In his answer Churchill wrote: “In Russia too the materials for a joyous meeting are meagre indeed. Still I may perhaps make the situation less edged.” A few days later he dictated a long letter to his wife, from Cairo: “I am not looking forward to this [Russian] part of my mission because I bear so little in my hand, and sympathise so much with those to whom I go.” On August 5, he wrote to Roosevelt: “I have a somewhat raw job.” He now asked Roosevelt to send Averell Harriman (whom both of them knew well, and who would eventually become American ambassador to Moscow in 1943) with him. Churchill wanted to impress Stalin with the fact that Harriman was coming and would be talking in accord with Roosevelt’s wishes.

Years later he recalled:

[During the long flight], I pondered on my mission to this sullen, sinister Bolshevik State I had once tried so hard to strangle at its birth, and which, until Hitler appeared, I had regarded as the mortal foe of civilised freedom. What was it my duty to say to them now?

That last was a rhetorical question. He knew well what he had to do. Perhaps the question was not what but rather how:

Still . . . it was my duty to tell them the facts personally and have it all out face to face with Stalin, rather than trust to telegrams and intermediaries. At least it showed that one cared for their fortunes and understood what their struggle meant to the general war.

His travel was arduous. The aircraft carrying him to Cairo (with a stop at Gibraltar) was uncomfortable, its passengers forced to put on oxygen masks at higher altitudes. His week in Egypt was full of business and action. Rommel was near El Alamein, hardly more than fifty miles from Alexandria, and some of the British Eighth Army was in disarray. Churchill changed its command, summoning Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery from England to assume it. He took it upon himself to see as many soldiers as he could. His confidence, in retrospect, amazes: Rommel’s army must be destroyed; it will be destroyed. The British forces in Egypt were twice the size of their German enemies, in numbers and in armor, but the Germans, and especially Rommel, had been able to defeat British troops against many odds.

Nearing midnight on August 10, Monday, Churchill was flown to Tehran in a now-much-more-comfortable airplane, a new B-24 Liberator commanded by a superb American pilot, William Vanderkloot, fondly remembered many years later. They left Tehran again soon after the following midnight. Churchill brought a less-than-usually-small staff with him. Their plane was delayed and temporarily diverted; Churchill’s was not. After a very long flight he landed in Moscow at five in the afternoon on Wednesday, August 12.

 

HE AND Harriman descended from the impressive American aircraft. The scene at the Moscow airport was ceremonial (including, among other things, a military parade), more so than for previous Soviet governmental receptions of foreign guests. At least it suggested that, whatever Stalin’s ill humor and frustration with his Western Allies, he was impressed with Churchill coming to see him. The prime minister, in turn, was impressed with the lavish details of Russian hospitality, including the comforts of State Villa Number Seven where he and his staff were housed. There were two hitches. He was told to be careful, since in all probability some of the walls harbored secret microphones. (Royal Air Force Air Marshal Arthur Tedder passed a note to the prime minister in French: “Méfiez-vous”—be careful.) Churchill then chose to intone a loud tirade denouncing Communism and Communists, hoping that the secret-police listeners would get it all. The other matter was less pleasant: as was his custom, he wanted a hot bath after the long, weary aerial journey, but instead he was stung by the icy water rushing upon him from a Russian faucet he had thought contained hot. Typical of Churchill, he set his first meeting with Stalin a mere two hours after his arrival in Moscow (and a mere half hour after clambering out of that tub).

Now he was driven to the Kremlin. He and Stalin shook hands. (Others remarked later that, all of his frankness notwithstanding, Stalin rarely looked at the eyes of his conversants.) There ensued their first conference, lasting for more than four hours. It was after midnight that Churchill was brought back to his state villa. He had spoken first, and at considerable length. He began with the nub of the matter. There would be no Anglo-American landing in France in 1942. He reminded Stalin that he had told that to Russian Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov when the latter had been in London two months before. Then he went into considerable detail explaining why such an invasion would be impossible. There were not enough American troops in Britain yet, not enough armor, not enough shipping and not enough planes for an air umbrella stretching over western France, giving the Allies air superiority. Such details did not impress Stalin. Why, he said, could not the Allies at least land six divisions on the western coast of France? They could, Churchill said, but they could not stay. The Germans would crush them or, at best, force them to leave. And what good would that be? It would surely compromise his and Roosevelt’s plans for a serious invasion of Western Europe in 1943. (That there was, as yet, no such definite plan, Churchill did not say.)

Stalin, until then largely silent and glum, now became somewhat impatient, and then sardonic and bitter. Not to risk anything means not to wage war seriously enough. Why were the British afraid of fighting the Germans? He could not demand what his allies would or would not do, “but he was bound to say that he did not agree with my arguments,” Churchill wrote.¹ There came a long moment of silence. Then Churchill chose to speak at some length about the now-ever-increasing British and American bombing of Germany. So, Stalin said, there would be no landing in France, and, as Churchill heard the Russian leader, “all we were going to do” was “pay our way by bombing Germany.” Churchill—contrary to his temperamental impatience—did not reply. In his hand there was but one good card to play. That was Operation Torch, the planned American-British invasion of French North Africa, less than three months away. Its prospects were infinitely better than an uneasy and temporary descent of a handful of divisions on the western coast of France. Rommel would be struck back. Franco’s Spain would be impressed. Italy would be forced to retreat, eventually from the war itself. The Mediterranean was “the soft underbelly of Europe.” (Churchill at one point drew a crocodile, hard and rigid on the top, soft and white on the bottom.) All of this would benefit not only the prospects of the war but Russia itself. With the Mediterranean eventually taken from the Axis, the Allies would have easy access to the Black Sea to help the Russians (when and if needed), and the Russians, a better route to open waters.

Stalin seemed to pick up on the prospects of Operation Torch remarkably quickly and well. Whether he had known something of these Allied plans (mostly through American contacts and intelligence agents), we cannot be sure. He may have had an inkling but nothing that was certain. Churchill, who was impressed with the directness of Stalin’s reaction, was gratified and relieved. He now asked Stalin to meet with him again; Stalin said of course. So that momentous day—and some of its succeeding night—had passed.

 

CHURCHILL DID not retire to bed before two in the morning. He had now been up for something like twenty-six hours, interrupted by snatches of sleep during the long flight from Tehran to Moscow. Understandably he rose the next morning—Thursday, August 13—somewhat later than was his usual wont. Before him lay the prospect of a (relatively) restful day. He proposed to call on Stalin at ten that night. Stalin suggested eleven. The working day began with Churchill meeting Molotov, the latter expressionless and slab faced as usual. Then Churchill lunched and rested in his state villa during an undemanding afternoon, inspecting the garden with its fountains and goldfish which inspired his interest, and then a sumptuous air-raid shelter which did not. Late at night he was driven to the Kremlin, where only Stalin and Molotov were waiting for him, with an interpreter.

There began a very disagreeable discussion, indeed the low point of Churchill’s four days in Moscow. Churchill suspected that his and Stalin’s amiable good-bye the previous evening was not the end of the matter. He warned Molotov at noon: “Stalin will make a great mistake to treat us roughly when we have come so far.” (Molotov: “I will tell him what you say.”) Did Churchill know the old Russian practice of bargaining, which was to impress or stun or shock the opposite side by stating the maximum Russian aims or demands soon after the beginning of the conference, and then negotiate some kind of compromise later? Certainly this session began with Stalin harsh and demanding. He produced a document, handing it to Churchill, who said that he would read, study and respond to it later. The memorandum employed a standard Soviet habit of stating things that were at least arguable with their habitual phrases of surety: “As is well known . . .” “It is known . . .” And so on. “It is easy to grasp that the refusal of the Government of Great Britain to create a Second Front in 1942 in Europe inflicts a mortal blow to the whole of Soviet public opinion.” The gist: “We are of the opinion therefore that it is particularly in 1942 that the creation of a Second Front in Europe is possible and should be effective. I was however unfortunately unsuccessful in convincing Mr. Prime Minister of Great Britain thereof.” Even while this was being translated, Churchill broke in to say that he would answer it in writing, but also that the British (and American) decisions had been taken, and that there was no use arguing about them now. This did not deter Stalin, who continued to insist that the making of a second front in western France was possible; that the British were going back on their earlier promises; and that they, unlike the Russians, were afraid to fight the Germans.

During these two hours Churchill gave as good as he got, which impressed the Russian, who proposed a dinner meeting the next night, August 14. Churchill said that he had planned to leave early in the morning on the fifteenth. Stalin was stunned by this, and proposed that the prime minister remain a day longer. Churchill said yes, but that there ought to be a real spirit of reciprocal understanding and of the appreciation of their mutual alliance by the Russians. Stalin now retreated somewhat, and they went on talking about some military details. Then Churchill began asking Stalin about the Caucasus, at that very moment already penetrated by German forces. Churchill knew that if the Germans broke the Russians in the Caucasus, there loomed the prospect of a German descent into the Near and the Middle East, with the direst of consequences. Stalin said that the Caucasus would be held. Thereupon, Churchill, assisted by Harriman, suggested that British and American air units could be ferried to Russia if needed, to south of the Caucasus but also to Siberia over Vladivostok. Then Stalin made one last sardonic remark: “Wars are not won with plans.” But when they left, Stalin put his arm out and gave Churchill a warm handshake.

 

THAT WAS another long day for the latter. Churchill had a long and good night’s sleep. Then he composed his answer to Stalin’s memorandum, and drafted other telegrams and letters, to the War Cabinet and to Roosevelt. He lunched with General Alan Brooke, the chief of the Imperial General Staff. He complained of a headache, but then he rested. He was taken to the official dinner in the Kremlin, at eight in the evening.

This was a ceremonious event including almost one hundred people. Churchill was seated at Stalin’s right. (Harriman at Stalin’s left.) Stalin was amiable, at times jovial. Their conversations were somewhat hampered; the English of Stalin’s interpreter, Vladimir Pavlov, was far from perfect (which was not so with the Russian of Churchill’s now-summoned translator, Major Arthur Birse). Among other matters, Stalin attempted to please Churchill with a recollection, true or not. He said that when many years before the playwright George Bernard Shaw and MP Lady Nancy Astor visited Moscow, the name of Churchill had come up. The latter had said that Churchill was “finished,” whereupon Stalin had said (or said that he had said) that in a great crisis, the English people might turn to Churchill again.² Lady Astor had also said that the prime promoter of Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war of 1918–21 was not then–Prime Minister David Lloyd George but Churchill. That was so, Churchill agreed. As the prime minister recounted in his memoirs, Stalin “smiled amicably, so I said, ‘Have you forgiven me?’ ‘Premier Stalin, he say,’ said Interpreter Pavlov, ‘all that is in the past, and the past belongs to God.’” That was one of many occasions when Stalin (the once-Orthodox seminarian and now supposedly atheist Communist) invoked God during the four days of talking with Churchill, who thought that remarkable.

That dinner stretched on and on. Churchill was tired but also angry. He was impatient with the endless sequence of toasts and what he thought was Stalin’s insufficient attention to him. It was now beyond one in the morning, with a film about to be shown. Abruptly Churchill got up and then marched down a long corridor with his staff toward the exit. Stalin unexpectedly clumped and trotted after them. Catching up with Churchill finally, they shook hands. (He also said that their differences were but disagreements about methods.)

 

THE NEXT day, Saturday the fifteenth, was taken up by long conferences between the Soviet and British military authorities. They were largely inconsequential, the Russians again complaining about an as-yet-nonexistent second front. The British were still worried about whether the Russians could hold on to the Caucasus. Churchill was a tad more confident about this than was Brooke. At seven he was driven to the Kremlin to say good-bye to Stalin. He brought up the Caucasus again. Stalin was reassuring. They talked for an hour or less. Churchill was about to leave; he would fly off very early the next morning. Suddenly Stalin moved close to Churchill and proposed that they repair to his home for drinks. Churchill assented. They went across the empty Kremlin courtyards to Stalin’s apartment. There appeared Stalin’s daughter, briefly; and then a substantial dinner, including a roasted suckling pig which, not at all briefly, Stalin enjoyed. They now stayed together for another six hours, talking about a great variety of things. These included Stalin’s account of how difficult (and inevitable) was the forcing of the Russian peasantry into collective farms. Churchill brought up Operation Jupiter, another second-front plan involving a British invasion, perhaps with Soviet support, of northernmost Norway (this was a pet plan of his for at least another two years, scotched by the chief of the Imperial General Staff and other military and naval authorities). Before Churchill departed they read and approved a joint communiqué. Churchill came back to his residence after three in the morning on Sunday, August 16. He was to be driven to the airport less than two hours later.

Then he slept in the plane for long hours, flying over the vast gray and green tracts and fields and steppes of central and eastern Russia. When he woke up they were almost beyond the Caspian Sea, soon beginning their descent to Tehran. There, refreshed on the cool residence of the British Legation, he wrote a cordial thank-you message to Stalin, and two long accounts, to Roosevelt and the War Cabinet. His four days and nights in Moscow now slipped into the past, which, at least in the words of Stalin, “belonged to God.”

 

EIGHT YEARS after his journey to Moscow, Churchill wrote its lengthy and fairly detailed story in his history of World War II. In his account of August 1942 he suggested that this was the crucial “summit”; perhaps the most important of his five encounters with Stalin during the war. We may gather this from the very extent he chose to devote to it: almost thirty pages and two chapters, longer than any other description of his wartime meetings, except for the three-man conferences in Tehran and Yalta. They are not contradicted by other sources, including the records of those who came with him to Moscow, by his leading wartime adviser Alexander Cadogan, General Brooke, Major Birse and Churchill’s personal physician, Lord Moran. It is telling to compare the two entries in the diaries of the reserved and skeptical Brooke, who on August 13, 1942, wrote that Churchill and Stalin “are poles apart as human beings. . . . [Churchill] appealed to sentiments in Stalin which I do not think exist there.” Yet he later wrote about the visit: “Looking back on it I feel that it fulfilled a very useful purpose, that of creating the beginnings of a strange understanding between Winston and Stalin.”

The most important, nay, the decisive matter we can state about Churchill in Moscow, about Churchill and Stalin: it is impossible to imagine that any other British public figure could have appeared in Moscow and impressed Stalin as he did. For Stalin, the dominant matter was Churchill’s character. So much so that it is maybe easier to grasp what the secretive and crafty Stalin thought of Churchill than what the voluble and sometimes loquacious Brit thought of the Russian. The latter had some respect for Churchill before their first person-to-person meeting, but then this congealed rapidly during and after that initial encounter. Whatever the British armed forces did or did not do, Churchill was a fighter. And beneath all the ceremony of those days and nights ran the slow, steady, crude flow of Stalin’s temperament: his despising weakness of any kind, and his respecting (and even admiring) strength—including in those who stood up to him.³

Churchill’s assessment of Stalin, on the other hand, was primarily historical. Hence his seemingly (but, at least to me, only seemingly) contradictory views, perceptions and opinions of the man. They were sentimental, too; but also profound. Churchill is often accused of a certain hypocrisy: he needed Stalin in the war, so he was more than willing to overlook the brutalities of this Communist dictator. In other words, the Churchill who argued and fought so bitterly against appeasing Hitler was ready to go long miles in the company of Stalin. But Hitler—for Britain and Churchill (indeed, for Western civilization)—was more of a threat than Stalin. Hitler was ready to rule all of Europe; Stalin, the eastern half—and half of Europe was better than none. That was the essence, and the consistency, of Churchill’s historic and strategic vision.

Russia had been Russia, Russia was Russia, Russia will be Russia and that was that. Here was the difference between Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s views about Stalin’s Soviet Union. The American president saw it as a rough, pioneer empire, thinking that eventually Russian and American democracy might be reconcilable. Churchill saw and thought otherwise. What the Soviet Union represented was not a rough, pioneer experiment toward the mass democratization of the world. Russia was not forward, it was backward. Its strength welled up not from its vision of the future but from the atavistic traditions of its people. Churchill was convinced of that, sometimes perhaps even too much so. Hence some of his faults; his speaking and writing about Stalin in flowery phrases on occasion, attributing to Stalin wisdom that Churchill hoped would govern his war leadership and their alliance. He did not think that Stalin’s motives and purposes had much, if anything, to do with Communism. But he also knew that Stalin would employ Communists and other fellow travelers for his imperial purposes, when and because such people were unquestionably subservient to him.

Churchill saw Stalin as the czar of Russia, a new kind of czar, a peasant czar, but a czar nevertheless. He saw Stalin as a great national leader. There was a romantic and sentimental and traditional British element, Kiplingite as well as Lawrenceite, in Churchill’s vision of Stalin: an appreciation of the masculine bravery of certain Eastern chieftains, their cruelties notwithstanding, a warrior’s wisdom. This may have been—as almost always in such inclinations of the British—exaggerated. But it helped to draw the two men together.

In August 1942, Churchill left Moscow with some satisfaction: “A relationship was established,” he said and wrote; and Stalin’s personality was largely what he had hoped and suspected it would be.⁴ The impression Churchill in turn made on Stalin led to the maintenance of an alliance that secured the Allies’ victory in the Second World War.

 

THAT MUCH we know—or, at least, ought to know. In 1918, Britain and France and the United States defeated Germany even after Russia had dropped out of the war. In the Second World War this was no longer possible. No one understood this better than Winston Churchill. That explains everything of his assessment—and estimation—of Stalin that survived the war. In that war, the structure of world history was such that the personal relationships of great leaders mattered at least as much, and sometimes even more, than the material power of their states. Since then, the very structure of politics and of international relations may have changed. But we ought not be quite certain about that.

 

John Lukacs is a historian. His most recent books are The Legacy of the Second World War (Yale University Press, 2010); Through the History of the Cold War: The Correspondence of George F. Kennan and John Lukacs (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); and the forthcoming The Future of History (Yale University Press, Spring 2011).

¹ Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, The Hinge of Fate (New York: Mariner Books, 1986): 432.

² Unlikely that Stalin had said that to his English visitors on that occasion. Now he “retold” this to Churchill in order to please him. The following night, during their last meeting, he told yet another, even more unlikely, story. This was that when Molotov was in Berlin in November 1940, the British sent planes over the city for an air raid. When Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, declared that Britain was “finished,” Molotov, walking down to the air-raid cellar, said that if that was so, then why were they going to the shelter and whose bombs were about to fall? From what we know about Molotov (and November 1940), he would have never spoken (or even thought) this. Churchill recorded these “anecdotes” in his war memoirs, though without comment.

³ In this he was the very opposite of Hitler, whose hatreds grew against people who opposed him, such as the Poles and the British, thwarting his plans. Many evidences of this exist throughout his life.

⁴ The British and Canadian experimental invasion of the German fortifications in Dieppe, France, took place on August 19, 1942. For a long time it was thought that, however small, this was a demonstration of Britain’s willingness to try a second front, in order to impress the Russians. This was not so: the plans for Dieppe had been made months before and the attempt had been postponed several times. (The raid on Dieppe, too, was a failure rather than a success.)

 

Image: Pullquote: The most important, nay, the decisive matter we can state about Churchill in Moscow, about Churchill and Stalin: it is impossible to imagine that any other British public figure could have appeared in Moscow and impressed Stalin as he did.Essay Types: Essay