Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War 1939-1953

Military Review, May-June, 2008 by Robert F. Baumann

In detailing the transition from Roosevelt to Truman, Miscamble looks closely at the influence of central actors such as Joseph Davies, the U.S ambassador to the USSR from 1936 to 1938, who shaped Roosevelt's perception of Stalin as a man with whom it was possible to seek mutual accommodation. But for Davies' impact in softening the American view of Stalin, more skeptical realists such as George Kennan, who would author containment doctrine under Truman, might have held sway years earlier.

Thus, it was the composite influence of international circumstances, domestic politics, and key players in competition for the president's ear more than any predisposition on Truman's part that molded presidential decision-making. Ultimately, Truman found that U.S. policy objectives could not be reconciled with Stalin's. In Miscamble's estimation, Cold War revisionism, which would assign equal or greater responsibility to the United States for the outbreak of the Cold War, simply cannot withstand patient analysis of Truman's earnest search for a way to deal with the Soviet dictator. The consequent handling of American security policy was on the whole rational, measured, and essential.

My Dear Mr. Stalin, a compilation of correspondence between Roosevelt and Stalin edited, with comment, by Susan Butler, offers yet another thoughtful glimpse at the most important political relationship of World War II. Both leaders seem to have understood from the beginning of their long-distance partnership that it was necessary to look beyond the defeat of Germany and Japan and to prepare for a new postwar order. Roosevelt sought a security system based on the combined might of the U.S., USSR, Britain, and China. Stalin, too, wanted a stable order, but one that ensured preeminent position for the USSR in European and Asian affairs. Driven together by wartime imperatives, Roosevelt and Stalin forged a common language of sorts. Each could be remarkably charming in person, and their correspondence reflects a sense of how to get along while deftly pursuing political aims that were often divergent.

For instance, in a message to FDR dated 7 April 1945, just a month before Germany surrendered, Stalin voices confidence in the faithfulness of the president and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, yet goes on to explain at length the disturbing inferences that a thoughtful observer could make from German behavior. In particular, a suspicious Stalin points out that German resistance is feeble in the West, while in the East, where 147 divisions remain, the Germans fiercely defend every inch of ground: "They continue to fight savagely with the Russians for some unknown junction Zemlianitsa in Czechoslovakia which they need as much as a dead man needs poultices, but surrender without any resistance important towns in central Germany ..." Without making any explicit accusations, Stalin went on to observe that intelligence provided by General Marshall about German intentions in February 1945 proved entirely false.