In Uncle Joe’s Bunker

WHEN STALIN made his February 9, 1946 speech in Moscow, one of the three—the other two being Churchill’s at Fulton on March 5 and Truman’s address to Congress in March 1947— said to mark the beginning of the Cold War, he “emphasized that the Soviet Union’s industrialization prior to World War II had allowed it to prevail in the conflict, and he said nothing about assistance received from the United States and Great Britain” (John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History, 2005). But the Soviet dictator was usually forthcoming with gratitude, as long as the war was on, in conversations with the two Westerners who had got the closest to him.

British journalist and narrative historian Giles Milton’s new book, The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance That Won the War is a human story, in that it tells of a few extraordinary people going about their business and lives under abnormal circumstances while history is made and unmade with them at its heart. A Soviet defeat and the fall of Moscow would have made Hitler’s conquest of Europe complete and perhaps taken the fight out of Britain, precluding the liberation of occupied Europe, irrespec­tive of the US joining the war after Pearl Harbor. It was in the inter­est of the Western Allies to keep the Soviet Union afloat, helping it push back against Operation Barbarossa and eventually push the Germans back home. The Soviets, for their part, could not survive nor win without immediate and largescale assistance in materiel—arms and weapons, tanks, armoured vehicles, aircraft, steel, chemicals, etc—and food supplies. The problem was twofold: logistics under fire from the German U-boats in the Atlantic; and the man who ran the Soviet Union—mercurial, inconsistent, unpredictable, paranoid, psycho­pathic, tyrannical, mass-murdering (although the full extent of his crimes was neither known nor reached at the time). To help this man and his suffering country and to get him to keep his part of the bargain was not a task for everyday diplomacy (Stafford Cripps, despite being a socialist, was never entertained by Stalin during his tenure as ambassador in Moscow).

Enter Averell Harriman, railway tsar, playboy, skilled skier and the fourth-richest man in America, and Archibald Clark Kerr, maverick, so fearless he swam daily in the Yangtze while Japanese planes strafed the banks, bisexual and rumoured to have had an affair with Chiang Kai-shek’s wife. Harriman and ‘Archie’ (as he insisted even Churchill call him) would end up working, respectively, as the American and British ambassadors in wartime Moscow in a coming together of perhaps the only two Westerners who could win Stalin’s confidence and navigate an impossible alliance with him. There are other characters whose roles were significant not merely as observers/chroniclers or executors. That does not mean merely Roosevelt and Churchill or Stalin’s Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov, but Harriman’s daughter Kathy and his assistant Bob Meiklejohn, among others like the colourful Lord Beaverbrook, Churchill’s delegate and media mogul who travelled to Moscow in Septem­ber 1941 with Harriman and bantered with Stalin. Or a monster like serial rapist and killer Lavrentiy Beria, the sinister NKVD chief whom Stalin introduced as “our Himmler”. Or the clever but compromised Alexei Tolstoy, one-time critic of the Bolsheviks who helped NKVD perpetrate an elaborate hoax about the Katyn massacre.

Kathleen Harriman and Meiklejohn are not incidental. Milton’s contribution to a much-written-about ‘affair’ is the use of Meiklejohn’s voluminous notes which had been lying in the Library of Congress almost untouched by historians and Kathy’s own diaries and correspondence from her years with her father in London and Moscow. Her family, from her marriage, learnt of her participation in some of the most important chapters of 20th-century history only weeks before her death in 2011 when her son David discovered the self-same ‘diaries’. Milton, author of Nathaniel’s Nutmeg (1999), Russian Roulette (2013) and Checkmate Berlin (2021) among many other titles, in turn learnt of these wartime letters held in private hands in 2019. Both Kathy and Meiklejohn were at the right places at the right time. Their observations make this an informative, enter­taining and fast-paced book with detail of the kind that brings new insights to an old story.

When shipping to Archangel and Murmansk became unsustainable because of German U-boats sinking the convoys, Harriman built access to Russia through Persia. Clark Kerr convinced Stalin about Churchill’s sincerity—not easy since Churchill had tried to strangle the Soviet Union at birth

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Harriman arranged the assistance to the Soviet Union, with Roosevelt confidant Harry Hopkins managing things at the homeland end. ‘Industrial’ does not justify its scale. When Atlantic shipping to Archangel (Arkhangelsk) and Murmansk became unsustainable because of U-boats sinking the convoys, he built access to Russia through Iran and the Caspian Sea via the Elburz mountains, getting Roosevelt to con­vince the British to hand over the Persian railroad so that the Americans could rebuild it to the standards needed. Without this Anglo-American aid the Red Army might have ultimately defeated the Wehrmacht but it would have taken years longer, with many more millions of lives lost. Stalin knew this and at one time was not reticent about admitting it. Clark Kerr, on the other hand, convinced Stalin about Churchill’s sincerity—not easy given the Georgian’s paranoia and the fact that Churchill, his ‘class enemy’ if ever there was one, had tried to strangle the Soviet Union at birth. Conversely, Churchill had to convince his cabinet and the Commons why he needed to help Moscow.

Archie’s personality helped him succeed where Cripps had failed, starting with smoking a pipe with Stalin in the latter’s private Kremlin bunker during an air raid. He would be ambas­sador to the Soviet Union from 1942 to 1946. Perhaps the most intimate verdict on Stalin remains his: “a possum you would get very fond of, against your better judgement, but would have to keep a sharp eye on, lest he nip you in the buttocks out of sheer mischief.” Harriman could not draw any conclusion: “It is hard for me to reconcile the courtesy and consideration that he showed me personally, with the ghastly cruelty of his whole­sale liquidations. Others, who did not know him personally, see only the tyrant in Stalin. I saw the other side as well—his high intelligence, that fantastic grip of detail, his shrewdness and the surprising human sensitivity that he was capable of showing… I found him better informed than Roosevelt, more realistic than Churchill, in some ways the most effective of the war lead­ers. At the same time, he was, of course, a murderous tyrant.”

“I’m finished. I don’t even trust myself.” Those were Stalin’s words not long before his death in March 1953 (Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, 2003). The only other time Stalin had felt something similar was in the summer of 1941 when the Wehrmacht rapidly overwhelmed Soviet defences. Expecting to be arrested by his own commissars, a catatonic Stalin had retreated to his dacha but not without exclaiming, “Lenin founded our state, and we’ve f*cked it up.” Harriman and Clark Kerr had to convince Washington and London to see things from Moscow’s point of view, including the need for a second front. Yet, because they knew Stalin better than most, when the war ended, they warned their govern­ments that he could not be trusted and had designs on Europe. Warnings that were ridiculed only to be borne out by history.

An illuminating detail is how Archie’s interpreter Arthur Birse helped break the ice between Churchill and Stalin with his more articulate translation of Churchill’s words into Russian than Churchill’s original interpreter. Again, Roosevelt’s egotistical belief that he could get Stalin—who incidentally did not like being called Uncle Joe by the Americans—to open up better than Churchill led him to joke at his close friend the British prime minister’s expense and insult him at the Big Three’s Tehran and Yalta conferences. In fact, Roosevelt’s conciliatory approach to Stalin as late as Yalta “horrified” Harriman and Meiklejohn, with the latter noting: “There is no doubt that we are letting a Frankenstein loose upon Europe, and I am convinced that until Frankenstein is disposed of, there will be no peace in the world.”

Churchill had got Stalin better after all. In early 1943, he had told Clark Kerr: “You want a directive? All right. I don’t mind kissing Stalin’s bum, but I’m damned if I’ll lick his arse!” A direc­tive clear enough for Archie to build wartime diplomacy on.

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Sudeep Paul

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