Stalin, Ruzvel’t, Trumen: SSSR i SShA v 1940-kh gg (review)

In a series of books and articles published since the mid-1990s, Vladimir Pechatnov has established himself as the foremost chronicler and interpreter of Soviet-American relations in the 1940s. His new book is the culmination of this body of work. As one has come to expect of Pechatnov, his research in the Russian party and state archives is peerless and his access unrivaled. Particularly welcome are his extensive quotations and references to Josif Stalin's correspondence and conversations, gleaned from materials in the Russian Presidential Archive. Pechatnov offers no startling revelations but adds significant detail to our picture of Stalin at work as a war leader and peacemaker. Pechatnov's research in American archives is equally extensive and impressive. This is a history of relations from the American as well as the Soviet point of view. Pechatnov handles the differing perspectives with equal empathy and admirable judiciousness—no mean feat in a field of study still bedeviled by Cold War polemics and partisanship.

Pechatnov's starting point is the Soviet-American wartime détente, which, he reminds us in his conclusion, "brought victory over a terrible common enemy and removed a dire threat to all humanity. It helped lay the democratic basis of an international legal order that prevails to this day" (p. 658). Despite various problems and controversies, this wartime alliance was as deep as it was far-reaching. After the Tehran conference the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman, enthused that "Stalin felt right at home with the President. Our views are closer to the Russians than [to] the English. . . . Stalin treated the President like an old friend, doing everything he could to find out what was on his mind" (p. 123). In June 1944 Stalin told the head of the U.S. chamber of commerce that if he (Stalin) had been "born and brought up in America he would probably have become a businessman" (p. 670 n. 28).

But why, then, did this grand alliance collapse so rapidly after the war? Much of the book is taken up with answering this question from different angles. One suggestion concerns the impact of early postwar difficulties on expectations. In a comparative analysis of U.S. and Soviet wartime thinking about the postwar world, Pechatnov points out that although Soviet leaders expected and planned for better relations with their wartime ally, their U.S. counterparts assumed that relations would worsen and get more difficult in the aftermath of victory (p. 257). In the end, Soviet optimism was dashed, and the discourse in Moscow shifted to a search for the dark forces that were supposedly seeking to deny the USSR the fruits of its wartime victory. On the American side the early cracks in the Grand Alliance confirmed the worst fears of the pessimists who foresaw both power conflicts and culture clashes with the Soviet Union. The picture was further complicated by struggles within both camps between proponents of détente and those advocating unilateralist strategies for postwar security. But the most important factor undermining the alliance was the contradictory interlocking of postwar domestic politics in the two states. In a striking formulation, Pechatnov argues that for the U.S. government the continuation of a friendly relationship would have been costly in terms of public opinion, whereas in Moscow the main obstacle was Stalin's desire to reinstate harsh political and social controls, which would have been more difficult if the alliance had continued. According to Pechatnov, "the policy of détente was too complicated and contradictory for the political systems of both countries because of the peculiar 'logic of simplification' that gravitated each toward a more one-dimensional policy" (p. 641).

In the Soviet case the wartime partnership with the United States was, paradoxically, too successful and too deep. It eroded the ideological discipline of the Soviet system and facilitated the penetration of Soviet society by an array of Western influences. At the end of the war Stalin juggled with...