Joseph Stalin
TrumanJoseph Stalin is presented as both a wartime partner and the center of an expanding Soviet power that increasingly unsettles the United States and its allies. The account does not reduce him to a single encounter: diplomatic gestures, disputed agreements, military strength, and a striking indifference to delay accumulate into a portrait of a leader whose willingness to cooperate is continually questioned by the consequences of Soviet policy.
Identity and Wartime Context
Stalin enters this account in the shadow of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland, events that shaped the way many Americans, including Harry S. Truman, regarded the Soviet system. When Adolf Hitler attacked the Soviet Union along an 1,800-mile front on June 22, Truman reacted with a bluntly pragmatic observation about aiding whichever side appeared likely to lose, while making clear that he did not want Hitler to win. The remark exposed the distrust of both totalitarian powers then common in American political life; it was not evidence of a settled American policy toward Stalin, but of how sharply the Soviet Union’s new position as Germany’s enemy collided with memories of its previous conduct.
By late October, German forces had advanced to within seventy miles of Moscow. Franklin D. Roosevelt then offered Stalin supplies worth a billion dollars. The scale of that offer marks a change in strategic circumstances: the Soviet Union was under direct threat, and the United States was considering material assistance despite profound political differences. The account places this wartime cooperation beside, rather than in place of, the suspicion that persisted around Stalin and his government.
A Gesture at the Presidential Transition
After Roosevelt’s death, Stalin made a diplomatic gesture that briefly suggested continuity between the old wartime partnership and the new administration. The Soviet government had been refusing to send its foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, to the San Francisco Conference. Stalin changed course and said that Molotov would attend if the new president requested it, presenting the decision as a gesture in memory of Roosevelt. W. Averell Harriman, the American ambassador in Moscow, had urged Stalin to take this step. Truman made the request immediately, producing what seemed to be an early diplomatic breakthrough.
The appearance of progress did not resolve the underlying dispute. Harriman’s assessment was that the gesture settled none of the basic difficulties, and Winston Churchill and the British government had grown more apprehensive about the Soviet Union. That gap between a cordial diplomatic act and an unresolved political conflict recurs throughout the portrait: cooperation remained possible, but the meaning and limits of Soviet cooperation were in question.
Harriman described the Soviet position as internally contradictory. Soviet leaders, in his view, wanted cooperation with the United States and Britain while also seeking to extend their control over neighboring states in Eastern Europe. He believed that some members of Stalin’s circle mistook American generosity and readiness to cooperate for weakness, encouraging Stalin to assume that he could act largely as he pleased. Yet Harriman did not expect the Soviet Union to risk a break with the United States. Its postwar need for financial assistance, he argued, gave the Americans reason to stand firm on vital issues without abandoning the possibility of workable relations.
Disputed Agreements and Competing Judgments
Poland became a focal point for those concerns. Churchill warned in March that the Yalta agreements were breaking down and that Poland was losing both territory and freedom. Harriman also reported that American prisoners of war liberated by Soviet forces were still being held in Soviet camps under conditions he described as appalling. These reports gave the dispute a practical meaning: the question was not only whether the Soviet Union would cooperate in diplomacy, but whether agreements and the rights of individuals would constrain its power in territory under its control.
Another rupture followed an American-British effort to negotiate the surrender of German forces in Italy. Stalin sent a stinging cable accusing Roosevelt and Churchill of trying to arrange a separate peace with the Nazis. Roosevelt kept his reply moderate, but Harriman’s alarm over the direction of Soviet-American relations had already grown so acute that he wanted to return to Washington even before news of Roosevelt’s death. In an April 6 cable, he urged the State Department to make clear that the Soviet government could not expect American cooperation on terms it dictated.
Harriman later explained to Truman what Soviet control in Poland or Romania meant in his assessment: not merely influence over foreign policy, but the use of secret police and the destruction of freedom of speech. He warned that Europe faced an invasion of barbarism, while also insisting that he was not simply pessimistic. He still believed workable relations with Russia could be achieved through concessions on both sides. His account therefore held two judgments together: Stalin’s expansion of control demanded a firmer American response, but negotiation was not yet futile.
That distinction informed the proposed mission of Harry Hopkins. George F. Kennan and Harriman had urged Hopkins to travel to Moscow after the United Nations conference ran into serious trouble and Molotov prepared to leave for home. Hopkins might, it was hoped, be able to repair relations because Stalin knew him as a close associate of Roosevelt and as a persistent supporter of cooperation with Russia. He could also help arrange a meeting of the leaders of the major Allied powers. Though gravely ill, Hopkins agreed to go. The mission itself reflected how much the American government still relied on personal ties and remembered wartime partnership, even as confidence in Stalin’s conduct weakened.
From Suspicion to Open Confrontation
In a public address in Moscow on February 9, Stalin declared communism and capitalism incompatible and predicted that another war was inevitable. He called for a new five-year plan that would sharply increase production for national defense, including a tripling of defense materials, while consumer goods would have to wait for rearmament. He forecast a confrontation with the capitalist West in the 1950s, when he expected the United States to be in another depression. The speech made the military priority explicit and presented conflict not as a remote possibility but as a likely outcome of the opposing systems.
The reaction in Washington was one of shock. William O. Douglas called the speech a declaration of a third world war, while Walter Lippmann argued that if Stalin had made military power his objective, the United States had little choice but to do the same. Events surrounding the speech sharpened the alarm. The Red Army remained in Manchuria, and a Soviet garrison remained in the northern Iranian province of Azerbaijan despite an agreement requiring its withdrawal within six months of Germany’s surrender. On February 16, news from Ottawa disclosed the discovery of a spy ring accused of attempting to steal information about the atomic bomb for the Soviet Union; a member of the Canadian Parliament was among those charged. Together, these developments presented American observers with a pattern of Soviet power extending across military, territorial, and intelligence affairs.
Churchill’s speech at Fulton offered a different but compatible public framing. He expressed respect for the Russian people and for Stalin as a wartime comrade, while warning that an iron curtain had descended across Eastern Europe. The contrast captured the broader predicament: the alliance had been real, and respect for the Soviet people could coexist with alarm over Soviet control. George F. Kennan’s lengthy message from the Moscow Embassy, later known as the Long Telegram, offered a more systematic explanation of the conflict. Kennan attributed the Kremlin’s outlook to a deep sense of insecurity and argued that the Soviet regime was committed to disrupting American society and undermining the United States’ international position. His analysis was an American diplomatic interpretation of Stalin’s system, not a private confession by Stalin, but it helped define the terms in which the administration understood Soviet intentions.
The Moscow Talks and the Marshall Plan
The growing divide became personal and concrete during George C. Marshall’s visit to Moscow in April 1947. Marshall returned to Washington gravely worried after prolonged sessions with Molotov produced little progress on the future of Germany. Hoping that direct contact with Stalin might help, he paid a courtesy call at the Kremlin. Stalin responded to the absence of agreement by suggesting that the two sides might reach one later, or at a subsequent meeting, while idly drawing wolves’ heads with a red pencil.
For Marshall, the moment was consequential. Stalin’s apparent indifference made a profound impression on him. Marshall concluded that the Soviet government was content to let uncertainty and chaos continue in Europe because disorder served its purposes; he also came to believe that the Soviets did not want stability in Germany or a recovery of German prosperity. Before the Moscow meetings, Marshall had thought the Russians could be negotiated with. He left believing that he had been mistaken. The small, concrete image of the pencil and the wolves’ heads gives the encounter its force in the narrative, but the political consequence was larger: Marshall’s judgment of Stalin helped shape the shift toward a recovery program designed without Soviet participation.
Stalin rejected two conditions attached to American assistance: pooling resources in a way that would include Soviet contributions to rebuilding parts of Western and Central Europe, and openly accounting for how American funds were spent. Eventually seventeen nations took part in the program. Under Soviet pressure, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and other satellite countries in Eastern Europe did not. The division made the limits of Stalin’s cooperation visible in the organization of postwar recovery itself: assistance was offered through shared economic arrangements and financial scrutiny that his government would not accept, while the states under Soviet influence were kept out.
Narrative Role and Significance
The account constructs Stalin through the difference between diplomatic language and political effect. He could invoke Roosevelt’s memory to bring Molotov to San Francisco, yet Harriman saw no resolution of the conflicts beneath that gesture. He could meet Marshall while treating the absence of agreement as something that might be deferred, yet Marshall left convinced that Soviet policy benefited from prolonged European instability. His speeches, the continued presence of Soviet troops in disputed areas, and the exclusion of Eastern European states from the recovery program supplied further grounds for American alarm.
At the same time, the portrait preserves the uncertainty that made the early postwar period difficult to navigate. Harriman believed the Soviet Union’s dependence on financial aid could restrain it and that a negotiated relationship remained possible; the Hopkins mission was proposed in the hope that personal trust built with Roosevelt might still matter. Kennan and Marshall, by contrast, increasingly interpreted Soviet policy as a sustained effort to expand control and exploit disorder. Stalin’s narrative significance lies in this tightening contest of interpretation and power. The book shows not a single decisive break but a sequence in which gestures of partnership repeatedly fail to outweigh the consequences attributed to Soviet expansion, until cooperation becomes harder to imagine on the terms that had sustained the wartime alliance.
