FDR and Stalin: A Not So Grand Alliance, 1943-1945. - book reviews

National Review, May 2, 1994 by Peter W. Rodman

AMONG the cultural benefits of the collapse of Soviet Communism has been the cornucopia of secrets flowing out of Soviet and Soviet Bloc archives and coming through the cracks in the crumbling walls. This has yielded its tactical advantages--such as the intelligence windfall (from East German sources, by one report) that put the CIA onto Aldrich Ames, or the North Vietnamese document on U.S. POWs that Stephen Morris unearthed in Moscow--but it has also had strategic value. By this I mean the immeasurable pedagogical benefit of illuminating once and for all some core truths about the Cold War. The cynical collusion of Stalin and Kim Il Sung in launching the Korean War, for example, has already been exposed in Soviet documents. We can thank the Hungarians for the recent revelations concerning Noel Field's interrogation, which confirms Alger Hiss's guilt. A Cold War history project coordinated by the Woodrow Wilson Center at the Smithsonian has produced eye-opening studies of such topics as the Berlin crisis, Sino-Soviet relations, Soviet-Vietnamese relations, and so on.

More broadly, we can thank the general flood of new archival research for the forthright admission by a mainstream liberal historian--John Lewis Gaddis, in the January/February Foreign Affairs--that the mounting evidence about Stalin is proving our "revisionists" wrong and our "hard-liners" right about which side was responsible for the Cold War. The West's victory would be only a partial victory if our societies did not learn the right lessons from it.

One of the pioneering scholarly efforts in the field is that of Amos Perlmutter, an occasional NR contributor, who has discovered in Soviet diplomatic archives a striking new perspective on Franklin Roosevelt's wartime relationship with Stalin. Mr. Perlmutter has accomplished a remarkable feat, as much entrepreneurial as scholarly, in coaxing out of the Russians a fascinating assortment of internal Soviet memoranda and telegraphic reports on the U.S.-Soviet relationship. Mr. Perlmutter's basic conclusion will not be new--that Roosevelt naively gambled on Stalin's good will and nearly forfeited the postwar peace--but the documentation is powerful.

The files reveal that the Soviets had their ideological blinders; their characterizations of American "capitalists," "reactionaries," and other political figures are often amusing. But it seems they understood Franklin D. Roosevelt quite well. "It is beyond all question that later on he will be accessible to our influence" wrote their ambassador in Washington, Maksim Litvinov, in June 1943, observing FDR's passionate interest in dismantling the European colonial empires and governing the postwar world by a directorate of the major powers. A month later Litvinov's successor, Andrei Gromyko, reported to Moscow that Harry Hopkins had assured him that in a face-to-face meeting "Roosevelt would surprise Stalin by how far he, Roosevelt, is ready to go to acknowledge our rights, in particular on territorial issues." On pivotal questions that divided the wartime coalition--the opening of a Second Front in the West, the future of Poland, and the division of Germany--Mr. Perlmutter sheds new light on the extent to which FDR was in effect colluding with Stalin to frustrate Churchill.

There are many nuggets here. A clearer picture emerges of Averell Harriman, for example, whose vacillations on Polish independence badly tarnish his conventional image as an early Cold War stalwart. (The Washington Post reported some academic accounts in this vein a few months ago, but Mr. Perlmutter had it first.) The Soviets also showed some skill at manipulating American public opinion, as when Wendell Willkie visited Moscow in 1942 and fell easy prey to their effort to recruit him as a champion of an early Second Front.

To Mr. Perlmutter, the Soviet Union's absorption of Eastern Europe was not inevitable, as many of Roosevelt's defenders would have us assume. America's extraordinary economic and military superiority, which only grew as the war progressed, was leverage that Roosevelt utterly failed to use, or even understand, as he clung desperately to the dream of the Soviet Union as a postwar partner. It was a vision that, as Mr. Perlmutter says, was "wrong from the outset, based on an unworkable premise that poisoned any number of political-military decisions throughout the war."

The lessons of history, of course, are not of merely academic interest but inform our present actions. Once again we have an Administration enamored of international organizations as the basis of peace, and preferring conciliation to containment. The threats are different now--Third World renegades, and a Russia that, as it gets back on its feet, does not pose exactly the same kind of threat as its ideologically driven totalitarian predecessor. Nonetheless, Mr. Perlmutter's story of FDR's failure is an illuminating case study of how naivete and hubris can be an unhealthy combination for the nation on which rests the major responsibility for world leadership.