Early Differences and the Formation of the Grand Alliance, 1917-42

I'm Dr Andrew Johnston.

I'm an associate professor of American history at the University of Leicester.

And today I'm talking about early tensions between East and West.

One of the biggest questions

about the Cold War

is Where do you start?

When does the Cold War begin?

Of course, there was no formal declaration of a Cold war at any point.

An awful lot of histories of the Cold War begin

in 1945 at the end of the Second World War.

But in my view, you cannot fully understand the Cold War.

If you start in 1945 you need to go further back.

You need to go not only into World War Two, not only before World War Two,

but to understand the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union.

You need to go back even further, really,

to the first world war and the origins of the Soviet Union.

And this is necessary because U S Soviet relations had never been good.

They were never good, right from the very start

in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution,

there was an enormous fear in the United States of Communist ideas.

I was just communist ideas, Communist ideas, socialist ideas,

anarchist ideas, radical ideas of any kind.

And this period is often known as the first Red Scare, and in particular,

the year 1919 saw the American government crackdown

on radical ideas in the United States.

More broadly, communism has always been seen as un American.

If the United States, as a nation, represents

individual freedoms

and free markets,

then the idea of a one party

communist state

it represents all Americans. Biggest fears

about big government

and really very little changed for the next decade and a half.

As the Soviet Union evolved as Stalin took control after the death of Lenin,

the United States and the Soviet Union had no formal diplomatic relations.

They recognise each other's existence.

The United States only formally recognised the Soviet Union in 1933

and even then the suspicion

of the Soviet Union remained through the 19 thirties.

The continued existence of the Soviet founded

and Soviet run Comintern did not help,

as this was an organisation that basically was

designed to spread communism across the globe.

Americans worst suspicions seemed to be confirmed in 1939

when the Soviets signed a nonaggression pact, the Molotov Ribbentrop pact

with Nazi Germany.

This was a pact that enabled both countries to carve up Poland,

and it, of course, saw the outbreak of war in Europe.

The Soviets then moved to attack Finland.

This was a winter war that saw the

vast majority of Americans sympathise with the fins.

And even then,

Americans still believed that communism was a huge threat to the United States,

not physically or militarily, but in terms of ideas.

Opinion polls from the end of 1939 suggests

that 70% of Americans thought that Congress should

prioritise investigating communist ideas that we're trying to

subvert the United States over Nazi ideas.

So again, you know, many Americans,

even after war had broken out in Europe in 1939

so that the Soviet Union is a bigger threat.

1940 progressed.

The American government and the American

public became increasingly concerned about Nazi Germany

following the Nazi blitzkrieg the spring of 1940

in its aftermath,

the United States increasingly gave aid to Britain in its fight against Germany.

But in June 1941

Germany attacked the Soviet Union through Operation Barbarossa.

This rejected the nonaggression pact of 1939.

And while the American response to the Nazi

blitzkrieg in 1940 had been one to sympathise,

uh, with victims of aggression,

Americans weren't really sure how to respond to Operation Barbarossa.

The difference of views is reflected, I think, uh,

if you look at some examples and in particular,

this sort of harsh view against the Soviet Union

was most accurately portrayed by Senator Harry Truman.

Truman said that if Germany is winning well to help Russia,

and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany and in that way,

let them kill as many as possible again.

This reflects the attitudes of many Americans that the communist Soviet

Union was really no better or no different than Nazi Germany.

It also reveals a lot about how Truman would view the

Soviet Union once he became president a few years later,

but the actual president in 1941 Franklin Roosevelt,

he took a rather different view.

Essentially, Roosevelt's view was that my enemy's enemy is my friend,

and within days Roosevelt took the decision to supply aid

to the Soviet Union through the Lend Lease programme,

which had been initiated in March to provide aid to Britain.

Now it would provide aid,

and it would continue to do so through the war to the Soviets.

And this again begins a relationship between the United States

and the Soviet Union that would last throughout the war.

Shortly after this, in August 1941

Roosevelt

and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter.

The Atlantic Charter was effectively a joint declaration of war aims,

despite the fact that the United States wasn't even at war yet.

And the Soviets certainly weren't involved in the context of

the war men that Stalin could not possibly attend.

But among other things,

the charter promised that the United States and

the United Kingdom sought no territorial aggrandisement.

It promised that all nations had a right to self determination,

and it basically

promised that there would be global economic cooperation to ensure that there

wasn't a repeat of the Great Depression of the 19 thirties.

All of these issues were likely to cause

consternation in Moscow with the Soviet Union.

The Soviets wanted sympathetic governments

in Eastern Europe.

They did not want to be part of an open global economic system.

They wanted a closed off communist system.

So even before the United States joined the war, uh,

there are problems that are being set up in terms of thinking

about how the world would be shaped after the war is over.

And indeed,

after the United States entered the war following

the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941

Obviously at this point the United States and the Soviet Union become

more formally allied.

But even then,

the Americans weren't sure if the Soviets

would hold out against the Germans militarily.

The war is going very badly for the Soviets in late 1941 and through 1942

and when Stalin began talks with the British in December 1941 and argued

that he wanted to keep hold of the Baltic states of Estonia,

Latvia and Lithuania and the part of Poland that he

carved up with Hitler in 1939 after the war,

well,

the wartime alliance was off to a rocky start.

On a more positive note,

the Soviet Union signed up to the Declaration of

United Nations in January 1942 which formalised the wartime alliance

and promised that no separate peace would be made.

So this is the situation. At the beginning of 1942

the wartime alliance began in earnest,

and what has become known as the Grand Alliance

of the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom was formalised,

led by the Big Three leaders of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin.

This alliance and these great leaders have been the

focus of a huge amount of historical writing.

But was this grand Alliance anything more than a grand illusion

for our purposes in particular,

did the United States and the Soviet Union have anything in common

aside

from a shared desire to defeat Germany?

Yes, they were allies. But was this merely an alliance of convenience?

How would this grand alliance function?