World War Two: Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West

This is an interesting look at WWII in Europe from two principal perspectives: the personal relationships amongst the three main Allied leaders (Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt); and what happens when moral scruples and commitments clash with real-world politics and interests. This is a survey history

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of the events of the war, from 1939 through to 1945, but Rees focuses not only on the machinations of the powerful, but also (through extensive research and interviews) with the impact of war, death, destruction, deportation on the lives of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. In this way he gives substance and example to the brilliant observation by Albert Camus that “Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes”.

Concerning the personal relationships, what is most striking was the consistent failure of Roosevelt and Churchill to understand Stalin; both western politicians prided themselves on their ability to manage people through personal contact and to influence through the power of their personalities; both thought they had established such relationships with Stalin and both were completely wrong. What they thought of as a strength in dealing with Stalin, in fact worked to their disadvantage because Stalin had no illusions whatsoever. As a typical bully, Stalin did backtrack when faced with a stern response on certain questions, but these occasions were all too rare because Churchill and Roosevelt were constantly wrestling with the imperative of keeping the USSR in the war, obtaining its support for the post-war architecture in Europe and the creation of the United Nations, and acquiescing (despite moral commitments and strictures to the contrary) in the defacto occupation of eastern Europe by the Red Army, and all that entailed in terms of the loss of freedoms. It is interesting to note that a common refrain from people arrested and deported during the great purges in the Soviet Union was that if only Stalin knew what was going on, he would stop it, and all the abuses were the result of subordinates abusing their authority. Similarly, many British and American observers thought that Stalin’s flipflops on some issues, and his often mercurial shifts reflected his need to appease certain dark powers (e.g. political forces, the military) while in fact nothing of any import was decided, nothing was carried out without his express permission. Some observers had a clearer understanding of the heart of the Soviet system, but most did not and Stalin played them. The other interesting personal dynamic that Rees explores is the tension between Roosevelt and Churchill; their relationship was fraught with a number of difficulties given their fundamentally different views of the post-war world, and Churchill’s difficulty in accepting that he was an increasingly junior partner compared to the two industrial and military giants of the USA and the USSR.

In a conflict on the scale of WWII there would always be moral dilemmas to resolve. Rees focuses on those pertaining to Poland, the country for which Great Britain went to war in 1939 to guarantee its independence and its borders, but for which, in the end, it had to accept Soviet occupation of the eastern part of Poland (acquired nefariously under the Soviet-Nazi Pact of 1939), and the imposition of a Soviet-style of government with no freedoms. This would have been impossible to handle with grace in the best of circumstances, but the British compounded the effect when they, for example, churlishly denied Polish Army regiments a place in the victory parade in London, though many Poles fought bravely and died for the Allied cause in Europe throughout the war. The Polish “situation” was brought to a head with the discovery of the murder of thousands of Polish army officers at Katyn. It was, to any neutral observer, clear that this was the work of the Soviets after they invaded eastern Poland in 1939 and began to impose the Soviet system in those territories; but the Allies could not allow this vilification of their principal ally in Europe, the one doing all the fighting against the Germans at that time, and so they turned a blind eye to the obvious and convinced themselves, at least publically, that it was a German atrocity.

I lived in the Soviet Union in the 70s and one of the things that struck me was the truth of Orwell’s insight into manipulating the meaning of words so that two people might have a conversation using exactly the same vocabulary but, in effect, be talking completely past each other. Rees brought back these memories in a few places. For instance, when he notes that Pravada, commenting on the Yalta Conference, stated that “democracy” meant different things to different people and each country could now exercise choice over which version it preferred. Churchill was aware of this as he noted in a message to Roosevelt that he saw Poland as a “test case between us and the Russians of the meaning which is attached to such terms as Democracy, Sovereignty, Independence, Representative Government and free and unfettered elections.”

An interesting factoid from the book: at Stalingrad, Rees notes that the best estimate is that the Red Army lost nearly 500,000 people, and “to put those figures in the context of the Western Allies, in this one battle, the Soviet Union suffered more dead than either the British or the Americans did in the entire war.” An interesting observation is that as the war progressed, Stalin learned his lesson and although he remained supreme military commander, he intervened less and less on the operational side and let his marshals run the war while also curtailing the interference of the political commissars; Hitler, however, became more and more engaged, even down to the tactical level sometimes, with disastrous results.

All in all, an excellent book. A good capsule history of WWII in Europe and a thoughtful examination of the interpersonal relationships between major players and the effects these men had on the conduct of the war with all its attendant moral dilemmas, while not neglecting to consider the effects of war , deportations, rape (the orgy carried out by the Red Army) and death at the ground level of individual lives.

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