School of War - Ep. 4: Sean McMeekin on Stalin and World War II

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

Biography Sean McMeekin is a professor and historian who focuses on early 20th century Europe. In addition to his latest book, Stalin's War: A New History of World War II, McMeekin is the author of The Russian Revolution: A New History, July 1914: Countdown to War, and The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908 - 1923, as well as several other books. McMeekin currently serves as the Francis Flournoy Professor of European History at Bard College in New York. Times 02:02 - Introduction 05:35 - The American understanding of Russia and Joseph Stalin in World War II 09:12 - Politics and Stalin's legacy 11:37 - Stalin's foreign policy prior to WWII 17:40 - Stalin secures the Japanese non-aggression pact 24:03 - The Soviets push for a war between Japan and the United States 27:29 - Harry Hopkins and the Lend-Lease Policy 33:58 - Stalin as an ally 37:17 - Demanding unconditional surrender 40:16 - Debate over what compelled the Japanese to surrender 42:03 - Reception of Stalin's War Recorded October 6, 2021

On Wednesday, August the 23rd, 1939, the runway at Moscow's Kodinka Aerodrome was decked out with the characteristic hammer and sickle banners of the Soviet Union, but also with swastikas. The Soviet military band played Deutschland Oborales, and as Joachim von Ribbentrop arrived to sign his infamous pact with Sergei Molotov, members of the Gestapo and the NKVD warmly shook hands. Joseph Stalin was coming to an accommodation with Adolf Hitler, which would of course unravel only a few years later, in a fashion that brought the USSR to the brink of destruction. But in the meantime, they would divide Eastern Europe between them, and Stalin would eagerly welcome a conflict that, he hoped, would lead to his imperialist and capitalist adversaries devouring one another. World War II is generally thought of as a conflict brought about by Hitler and the Japanese,

but let's spend some time considering the extent to which it was, according to the author of a new book on the subject, Stalin's War. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of war, Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. This is the School of War. I'm joined today by Sean McMeekin, the Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College.

Delighted to be in conversation with you today, Sean. You're the author of a number of fascinating books about Russia, about Europe in the 20th century, and most recently the author of Stalin's War. Thanks for joining us today. Oh, well, thanks for having me on there. It's a great pleasure. I always like to start these conversations by just asking folks, you know, could you tell us a little bit about yourself? When did you decide you, you know, you wanted to be a teacher and a historian? When did you, you know, you have this reputation as a kind of revisionist provocateur? When did you decide you wanted to be provocative in your work? Or did that just grow organically as you proceeded in your career? That's actually a good question. I can't say I'm a born provocateur or born revisionist. As far as my inspiration, It was definitely my high school history teachers. This is not just like any of the teachers I had in college or grad school. It's just by then that I was kind of cast. I'd already decided I wanted to do history and history was my passion. I had a couple of great teachers. Debbie Doyle who did AP European history. We used to call her Ma Doyle. I mean, she had a little bit of a little bit of a kind of a maternal instinct towards us all, but was also in charge of the model UN program. And we went over and did the conference at the Hague in the Netherlands. That was my first trip to Europe. For AP American, I'm I had a teacher called Brian Bell, who was in addition to unusually for a high school history teacher, he actually had a doctorate. But I think more to the point as far as his inspiration for us as students, he was a Korean War veteran. He had a great booming voice, and he would wear suspenders to class.

And he also did a class in the Vietnam War. And he could be provocative at the time. So I don't know, maybe some of it comes from him. But I suppose I've always liked a good argument. I like debate in high school. I did debate in the United Nations in the ICJ, the International Court of Justice. I did youth in government. We did kind of parliamentary debates in Albany.

I grew up in upstate New York. So that might be part of where I get, I suppose, my slightly kind of argumentative side. But yeah, as far as my interest in Russian Soviet history, I think that's pretty easy to explain. I grew up in the 80s and it's the backdrop of all the kind of colossal drama of the end of the Cold War, Reagan, and Korbachev and Perestroik and Glasnosed in the fold of the Berlin Wall. and collapse of the Soviet Union after the thwarted coup of 91. And so it was just, it was always in forefront of my mind. It took me a little while to get around to learning Russian,

but there was some fortuitous timing. I mean, I graduated high school, really the year after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And among other things, there was an exhibit that summer at the Library of Congress called Revelations from the Russian archives. And they did, of course, the work of translating a lot of the documents into English so that at least at that stage I could read them up. And I did a research project on them that summer. And ever since, it's kind of been a burning ambition of mine to tackle these files, really,

just to take advantage of the opening of the Russian archives, you know, something that had been not completely unavailable, but you kind of had to be a team player. You had to be someone approved of by the party to be able to work in the Russian archives during the Cold War. Well, let's turn to the provocation of the moment. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Stalin's War. It challenged views I've had about the war. The Russian role in the Second World War is something like as follows that, yes, there was

some regrettable decision making on Stalin's part from 1939 through 1941. But after the German invasion, you know, the Russians did their part. They played a big role in the defeat, certainly a fascism in Europe. They came into play against Japan at the end. And yes, then a lot of regrettable things followed the war. Your book, I think it's safe to say, takes a different point of view. So what are your objections to that, to that understanding of things, which I think is fairly common. Well, sure, I absorbed it too.

I mean, like you, I grew up kind of reading traditional popular histories of the war, watching the movies, reading novels. And obviously, we've all, to some extent, inherited, really the line pursued by the U.S. government, the Office of War Information, and even Hollywood, you know, which kind of was complicit in turning Stalin into Uncle Joe, as Roosevelt once even cheekily called him at the Tehran conference. But mostly, I always just thought it smelled a little bit fishy. I mean, the Soviets are allied to Hitler pretty closely. I mean, maybe they're not collaborating and everything, but they're collaborating fairly closely in carving up Europe economically and so on between 1939 and

41, the period of the so-called Molotrop-Ripendro-Pack, actually Moscow pact. And then, of course, after 1945, you have this sort of Cold War awakening, and the Soviets once more, this great geopolitical threat in the U.S. has to kind of ramp up spending and change almost into a permanent position of a forward military posture in Europe. But somehow between 1941 and 1945, the story just changed completely radically. And Stalin went from being Hitler's fellow kind of totalitarian dictator, butcher, invader of small nations into the plucky uncle Joe. I always thought it was a bit fishy. And I mean, even this idea, the Soviets pursued this idea, and I think it's just mostly been uncritically accepted in the West. When they tell the story of the war, there's this kind of excuse. Well, look, we always knew we were going to fight Hitler, and we were just trying to buy time in 1939. So they don't just invade them. They expropriate territory. They expropriate land. They expropriate property. They loot the banks. This is what communist generally did. Of course, they would go after the banks. That's what nationalization or expropriation meant. Vast numbers of people, of course, are deported into their forced labor network of camps. We now know far more than, I think it was always suspected, but we now know more less the full

truth about the so-called Katin massacre of 1940 when Stalin had nearly 23,000 elite polls, including more than 15,000 military officers executed in cold blood. This was the Stalin all along. It's just for various reasons the U.S. decided to ignore it. And frankly, when it came to the Katyn story, to lie about it. In the interests, I suppose, of diplomacy or at the very least making sure that Stalin wouldn't throw a complete hissy fit and maybe cut a separate piece with Hitler. This is in 1943 when the story really first came out.

There were always a lot of aspects of the story that just rubbed me the wrong way. I didn't understand why the West had turned Stalin into Uncle Joe and kind of turned a blind eye to his various crimes. And crimes, again, not just committed against foreign peoples, but of course against his own people. You know, that supposedly at the height of the Great Terror, we are meant to believe, according to the traditional diplomatic story, that Stalin believed in collective security and kind of international law.

And it was merely the kind of the blind prejudice of the West and not trusting Stalin that had forced him to make this deal with Hitler, that it was really the fault of Britain in France for their suspicions about communism. It wasn't that Stalin was, in fact, a totalitarian dictator, a tyrant and butcher, who murdered again, not just the top ranks of the army, famous of the army purges or the secret police or the communist party, It actually targeted Ukrainians and polls and all these other ethnic groups. It's true during the Cold War, maybe we didn't know as much about these stories, but it's not like they were completely unknown either.

It's just, I think, everyone chose to ignore them. And to treat the period between 1941 and 45 is just this distinct episode that bore no relation to what happened either beforehand or happened. What role does politics play in these receptions of the legacy of Stalin? Clearly, that's part of it. I mean, Roosevelt, like Churchill, maybe a bit less than Churchill, who actually wrote the history of war, Roosevelt and his kind of defenders and partisans were able to shape the narrative. You know, it's come into some trouble in recent years, in part because of the politics of things like the internment of Japanese, these Americans, and so on. So maybe the Roosevelt story is no longer

completely unvarnished. That is to say that there are some warts that have kind of accrued. But that said, generally speaking, Roosevelt still gets a good press. And the Roosevelt Churchill legend kind of goes together for a lot of people, the idea that they have this critical partnership and friendship. And of course, you've actually examined their relationship. It's quite fractious. And in fact, Roosevelt is quite brutal in dealing with Churchill in Britain in things like negotiating the terms of basis for destroyers or lend lease, loan repayment terms,

at times that is almost akin to blackmail, whereas for some reason, and Roosevelt took a much softer position on Stalin, you know, which is really quite surprising in retrospect when we're always told about the special relationship. I mean, there are some, you know, sour people in Britain. Now, oddly enough, the Hitchens brothers, I was rereading this the other day because I was teaching my class about Churchill in 1940 and some of the Churchill legend, although they disagreed about a lot of things, including politics, both Christopher and Peter Hitchens, have both wrote some really interesting contrarian analyses in their essays. on Churchill and the fact that it really is a myth, this whole special relationship, that there's

actually a lot of bitterness in Britain about the way in which Roosevelt kind of abused and used and manipulated and really bullied Churchill during the war, you know, whereas we've kind of been taught to suppress that aspect of the story, too. Again, while just leaving completely unanswered the question of why Roosevelt treated Stalin in such an almost entirely uncritical, generous way, quite trusting and naive and effectively agreeing to virtually all Stalin's demands. Why was he so tough on Churchill, so soft on Stalin? Your book is framed as viewing the war from Stalin's perspective as a kind of corrective to seeing it as Hitler's war, which in certain ways is obviously is.

Unfortunately, seeing it as Hitler's war underrates the culpability of Stalin. And that was an interesting perspective to me, is Stalin's role in bringing the war about. So maybe you could talk us through the objectives of Soviet foreign policy and Stalin's foreign policy in the 30s in the lead up to the war. Well, sure. I mean, there are kind of two different questions in there. I mean, maybe if I start with the 30s and then move into spring 1940 and sort of the Baku plots. Again, I think Stalin has always gotten off the hook with this idea that, you know, he was somehow a devotee of collective security and it was the fault of Britain and France for refusing to trust Stalin or really negotiate in good faith with Stalin, and particularly in all the government. 1939, where there were at least some semi-serious talks about defense plans against Germany. I think that's really fundamentally misreading Stalin's foreign policy. You know, the basic preoccupation, and some of this comes from ideology, the dialectic

and communist thinking, some of it just comes also from kind of what you might call strategic common sense. Looking back to the way that Russia had suffered in the First World War, even if, of course, the communists had ultimately been the beneficiaries, not only Stalin, but nearly all of his spokesmen in the foreign ministry, including even Litvin. who unlike Stalin did at least pretend to be interested, this is a foreign minister, you know, even though Lithvinov pretended to be or at least talked like he was interested in collective security, even Lithvinov made this point at times that Russia did not want to be dragged into the war,

that is, by the Western powers. Stalin eludes to this quite dramatically in what I call the chestnuts speech, the idea, you know, we're not going to let them take, we're not going to take the chestnuts out of the fire for them this time. And, you know, to some extent, it's a mirror image of what you might say is the view of Chamberlain and others in the West, that, of course, they don't want to be dragged into a war with Hitler, you know, without maybe the Soviet Union or some other country also being involved, or in the case of France, they have their Eastern European security parts. So some of the just basic common sense, Stalin does not want to be dragged into a war on behalf of Western interests. But of course, there's a slightly more sly and almost sinister aspect

to this, too, where it's not just that Stalin is kind of trying not to get dragged into the war, rather, he really does want the war to happen. I mean, the people who I think read him best understood this, the German ambassador, for example, at the time of Munich. Or again, the usual story is, oh, well, the West, they didn't even invite any of Stalin's diplomats to Munich. It shows they were prejudiced. They had no good faith. In fact, the perspective of the Soviets at Munich was that they were hoping that it would fail, that it would lead to war. As the German ambassador said, they were very disappointed in the outcome because they really hoped for a merry little war, which others would fight. Now, it's not that Stalin ever put this down on a notepad,

saying exactly this is my plan and this is how I wanted to happen. Rather, Stalin, as just part of his worldview, thought that this war was inevitable. And again, this is just a typical communist point of view. And you can see it in Lenin's writing and Stalin's writing, look, capitalist war is inevitable. This is the contradictions of capitalism. It's going to happen. The key is that when it happens, the Soviets want to avoid getting sucked in until they're ready to fight. And so when Hitler more or less begs by way of Ribbentrop for this summit and to come up with some kind of a deal, you know, with his invasion timetable pressing for Poland. Of course, this is just a perfect scenario for Stalin, and by then he sacked with Vinov, I mean, he was Jewish, and this is a very clear olive branch to Hitler.

In fact, Hitler and Goebbels understood this. I mean, they literally issued instructions to the German press to stop attacking the Soviet Union for a little while. You get this really strange thing where suddenly the Nazis stop attacking the communists, and then after 39, the communists stop attacking the Nazis. And things actually work out nearly perfectly for Stalin. He gets to the Nazis. the war that he wanted between Hitler and the Western powers. The only thing it doesn't quite work out as he had planned is that, of course, the Germans win far too easily, both in Poland, but then, of course, also in Denmark and Norway and France in the low countries, and they're barely weakened at all. In fact, things actually work out far more kind of closely to Stalin's

anticipated and desired scenarios in Asia that in Europe were Hitler nearly ruined all his plans by defeating the Western powers too easily. But that moment in spring 1940, you pointed to it was quite interesting because had Britain and France taken a stand, it would have actually changed geopolitics in a sense that a lot of other neutral powers might have been drawn into the war on their side, whereas in fact they were struggling at the time. Not only the United States, might not have been. I don't think the U.S. would have intervened that winter. I do think the U.S. might have stepped up supplies, both for Britain and France, possibly even for Finland, which they did do, gotten involved, at least in a material sense, kind of in the way they did about a year

later with Len Lees, but rather a lot of other neutral countries. And possibly even, I mean, this is one of the strangest what-ifs is that Mussolini's Italy was, Muslim was absolutely aghast about the Soviet invasion of Finland. And in fact, Italians were also sending arms to the Finns. I have no idea of knowing what would have happened had this intervention come about. I do know that Stalin feared it. And that's why Stalin made such an early peace with Finland and then carried out the notorious and bloody Katin massacre. Stalin's, took this seriously. And, you know, perhaps he was paranoid, perhaps not. But he thought it was actually a realistic prospect that nearly happened in spring 1940. Yeah, no, it's, it's a fact,

you know, I think in America, we don't, to the extent we think about the Second World War, we don't think that much about 1940. You know, if we do, we are probably thinking about, you know, the invasion of France, air strikes on Britain. We're not really, I don't think the Finnish war registers much in the American consciousness. In the sort of unusual detail, you know, the airstrikes on Britain, we're not really, I mean, I don't the sort of unusual details of the period, which were very real to anyone living at the time, the fact that the Italians, you know, are not firmly in the Nazi column. You know, these are things that we easily forget. Let's go to Asia for a minute then and talk about, you know, as you point out, it's in the

east where Stalin really has a series of remarkable coups. And, you know, also where his legacy is still with us today, much more so than in Europe in the form of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, North Korea. These are all, you know, outcomes of what from Stalin's perspective were, you know, successful exercises in foreign policy at the time. So let's talk about the Japanese non-aggression pact that Stalin secures. What's his thinking about that? What's the Japanese thinking? This is obviously something that is inconvenient to the Germans as they launched their own strike against Stalin. So just walk us through that, if you would. Well, I mean, it's a remarkable story, not least because the original impetus for trying to bring the Soviets and Japanese closer together in 1940 and 41 was actually coming from Germany.

You know, the revisiting, the things of 1940 that we forgot, and it wasn't just the Finnish war, it was also that Hitler and Stalin were actually still collaborating, even if there were kind of growing tensions over Balkan questions. But the summit that fall in Berlin, when Molotov actually visited Ribbentrop and Hitler and all the other leading Nazis. And even if there was not Alaska agreement, the very premise of that meeting was that the Soviets were actually going to join the tripartite pact, which is sort of this cosmetic but also potentially significant retouching up or reimagining of the old anti-commonitorne pact, which had united what we usually call the access powers, Italy, Germany, and Japan. So that it had now been styled tripartite basically to take away this anti-common term that is anti-communist anger. because it was now Britain in the United States, even the United States was still at the time neutral, who were seen as the mortal enemy, effectively, the kind of the Anglo-Saxons that they were called the maritime powers who were unfairly dominating the globe and, of course, blockading the continent and forcing Europeans to kind of trade amongst themselves without much access to world markets

and all the rest of it. Now, some of this is bluff and bluster. They're trying to intimidate Roosevelt, and they're trying to intimidate by then Churchill's in power. They're trying to kind of of intimidate Churchill and then maybe leaving the war. But they were actually seriously thinking about inviting the Soviets to join this to become full-on partners of a military lines. Now, admittedly, the Germans never coordinated things very well with either of their other two partners with the Italians or the Japanese. In fact, in some ways, they cooperated more effectively, might say, with the Soviets. The problem is they couldn't quite figure out things like Balkan questions. The Germans, however, were still interested at that time in trying to get the Soviets and

the Japanese to work more closely together. There's a contradiction here, because we know that at least by the time the Soviet-German kind of settlement started breaking down in the Balkans in November and December of 1940, and this is when Hitler kind of greenlights the first really serious plans

pointing the way towards the invasion of the Soviet Union. We call Operation Barbarossa. Of course, diplomatic and strategic logic would suggest that the Germans should have then informed the Japanese about their plans to invade the Soviet Union and try to coordinate joint operations with the Japanese. So it's both about German blindness and, frankly, diplomatic and strategic

stupidity and Stalin's kind of opportunistic exploitation of this, where, in fact, Matsuoka, when he met with Stalin twice, first in March and April, 1941, the main purpose of his trip was actually to visit Berlin. He just happened to visit Stalin en route, basically, on the way to Berlin and then back from Berlin. And when he was in Berlin, Hitler and Ribbentrop refused to actually tell him about the ongoing plan to invade the Soviet Union, but he was clever enough to kind of figure this out on his own. On the other hand, he's figure out it as possible. On the other hand, he also saw it as in Japan's interest to neutralize the Soviet threat in the Far East, which would free up Japan, of course, for more aggressive operations in China and maybe potentially operations in the

Pacific targeting British colonies and U.S. bases there. You know, from Stalin's perspective, this was absolutely brilliant. It's not the Stalin knew when it was going to Vey, Stalin certainly thought that European war was a likely prospect at some point in the future and all the Soviet military planning is focused on the European theater. He still has to keep masking forces in the east, though. By signing this neutrality pact with Monsuoka, this kind of geopolitical blood oath, and, you know, he's quite loyal to it, at least until he tore it up in August 1945. He's loyal enough to it that during the next four years, of course, it's not simply that he

refused all of Roosevelt's polite, but perhaps not firm enough requests for help against Japan. He actually kept arresting U.S. pilots who would crash land and Soviet soil after bombing raids on Japan. We're talking about triple digit, dozens and dozens of pilots who were actually interned American, U.S. pilots, interned as prisoners of war by Stalin. Now, this pact was brilliant from Stalin's perspective, not only because it paved the way towards his eventual opportunistic entry into the war, at which point Japan had been weakened, of course, by four years of bombing raids, attrition and bloody warfare. China. But also because in 1941, really a critical moment in the summer and in the fall, especially before the Battle of Moscow was being joined in October and November and December of 1941, Stalin was able to transfer crack Siberian divisions and a considerable amount of armor from the Far Eastern Theater. And some of that was also because he had his famous spy in Tokyo,

Richard Sorge, furnishing with information about Japan's plans to kind of cross swords with Britain in the U.S. in the Pacific. But it was also because of the Neutrality Pact itself. I mean, it really was just an astonishing coup that Stalin pulled off, you know, enabled in part by really German stupidity. I mean, Hitler realized far too late what he had done and then with his own suicidal act of declaring war in the United States, he then remembered that the U.S. might actually aid the Soviets materially in the war, and he requested that Japan stopped shipments of Lenley's aid to Soviet ports in the Far East, but he never got it in writing and he was only kind of half-hearted. And, you know, he had forgotten to request that back when it mattered and he hadn't trusted

the Japanese. And so, you know, they felt perfectly free to kind of stab Hitler in the back when it came to the Soviet Far East. So, yeah, some of it was German foolishness, but it was also, I think, Stalin's cunning and guile. You also make the case that Stalin wants a war between Japan and the United States to come about, that the non-aggression pact is part of that story. But you document other efforts that, you know, are evidence of this intent that Stalin has. What, what happens there? Why does Stalin want, I suppose it's fairly obvious, why Stalin would want a war between Japan and the United States, but what's the evidence that this was an objective he actually pursued? Well, again, it's not that he would ever put it down on paper quite so crudely,

as to say, you know, I desire and we must bring about a war between Japan and the United States. We have evidence both of his conversations with Matsuoka, where he sort of denounces the Anglo-Saxon powers and says, you know, I do not wish to befriend them and all the rest of this. We have these hints being dropped at the time to the Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact in certain press organs talking about the tensions between Japan and the United States and the Pacific. We also have what you might call indirect evidence in the form of this so-called Bratiazegger Operation Snow with the reactivation of Harry Dexter White. You know, we now know pretty, there are a few people might dispute this, but we now

know both that he came out regularly with Soviet intelligence agents in Washington. That is to say, he actually had handlers and they weren't even party members. I mean, they were literally Soviet operatives that he met regularly. Can you just expand on that? Oh, yeah. So Harry Dexter White, right, assistant secretary of the treasury. So he's kind of second in command to Henry Morgenthau. And there were actually another kind of half dozen agents less high ranking than Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department. Some of them would later even play a role in the crafting of the notorious Morgenthau plan regarding plans to dismember Germany and de-industrialized Germany. And that part of the plan is famous.

The part that I don't think most people, is in 1944, inked in Quebec between Churchill and Roosevelt under heavy American pressure. The part that I don't think most people understand about the Morgenthau plan where there were also very specific clauses regarding the stripping of industrial assets from Germany, which was also a Soviet policy. So, I mean, back to Japan. Now, it's true that this was not all kind of just nefarious Soviet influence operations. There were obviously very serious tensions between the U.S. and Japan, dating back to Japan's invasion of the Chinese mainland in 1937, stories about atrocities of the so-called rape of non-king, generally speaking, just aggressive and violent Japanese behavior on the Asian mainland.

There were very serious grounds for concern in the Japanese that already started making these moves somewhat. supposedly friendly or at least authorized moves into Vichy, France, and Indochina. So there are already serious tensions, but it was definitely a Soviet policy to try to tip these over the edge to do everything that could be done to exacerbate them. And there's some evidence of this shortly before Pearl Harbor just in that, you know, there were some negotiations to try to bring about a reprosh, mono reconciliation. I mean, the final, the final so called Whole Note, you know, said in the name of the Secretary of State Cordell Hall, we now know was effectively kind of authored by the Treasury Department,

and effectively it is by Herodex-Wyke, you know, which really did them out to something of an ultimatum. Again, it's more a matter of kind of shoving or pushing things in a direction they were already going, but there are clear signs that is of Soviet influence operations and helping to push them in that direction, you know, even if, again, might have happened anyway at some point under slightly different circumstances, but I think the Soviet influence operations helped to ensure that it happened when it did. And once the United States is in the war after Pearl Harbor, obviously Stalin's espionage network plays an important role in American decision-making. But in some ways, the most pro-Soviet force and source of energy in the FDR

administration doesn't appear to be a Soviet spy in any direct sense. Tell us about Harry Hopkins, who he was, what role he played in Lem Lease and how he guides FDR's policy towards Stalin. Right. Well, Hopkins takes over a really critical role in 1941. effectively as the director of Len lease operation. It's not just for the for Soviet Russia, but also for countries such as Britain, although his particular interest is in the Soviet Len lease policy. I mean, some of this is because he goes and he visits Stalin in July 1941, you know, after the Germans had already invaded when Moscow was still safe enough to visit, but also when the Soviets were really on the run. And in any when Stalin's trust,

and part of it must have just been this kind of personal relationship that they developed. some of the Stalin was just shocked that, you know, Hopkins was so exuberant about wanting to aid the Soviet Union, you know, as forthrightly and generously as possible without attaching any conditions. He makes that clear right from the start. The U.S. military out to Shea Ivan Yeaton, who was later kind of cashiered and kind of ushered on his way. He actually has an argument with Hopkins about this, saying at least the U.S. should have some type of a quid pro quote. at the very least, they should let us know how we're using American equipment and let us visit the front. And Stalin, of course, didn't want that. He never liked having capitalist spies and agents running about. And Yeaton was kind of sacked. And Hopkins made quite clear that no conditions would be applied or was, of course, any type of payment demanded. I mean, in the end, the so did settle, you know, some watered down estimate of their overall lend lease loan obligations at something like two pennies on the dollar in 1951, but nothing was demanded up front.

There was an immediate $1 billion credit line was open. They blew through that almost immediately, and then they immediately doubled it to $2 billion, and then by the end of the war, it's more than $11 billion, you know, $1940s, which is just an astonishing sum of money granted with no conditions applied, no effective payment of any kind. And, yeah, Hopkins was very enthusiastic about this policy, and you can also see him influencing decisions made in the diplomatic summits at both Tehran and Yalta, and clearly kind of just.

He's, you know, whether or not he's taking Stalin side. He certainly is taking Stalin side over Churchill's. When it comes to things like the plans for D-Day, where what Churchill famously gets kind of out-maneuvered and out-voted, is actually this really intriguing moment where Hopkins goes to inform Churchill boat that Roosevelt has already made up his mind in the timetable for D-Day and kind of ruling out other operations in the Mediterranean or the Adriatic. And he says the Soviet view is equally adamant,

which is kind of a strange thing for a U.S. government, to be telling Churchill. Now, again, this is not to say I'm trying to insinuate that he was on the Soviet payroll or something like that. As you were saying, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that he had a handler that he was operating in effect as a Soviet informant or Asia, rather that it was just this kind of natural symbiosis that developed where I think he really just personally admired Stalin and had come to kind of admire the Soviet Union and the Soviet war efforts. And, you know, and as for why, I think some of it is probably of a personal nature. I mean, he was clearly kind of on the progressive left, politically speaking.

You know, he'd originally been in Eleanor Roosevelt circle. So to some extent, sure, he'd always probably been a little bit friendlier to the Soviet Union than, let's say, someone on the right might have been. But that's it, I think it was just like it was with Roosevelt. I think a lot of it was that they had this interest and they developed this personal relationship with Stalin. And they just kind of wanted to believe in them for some reason that, you know, frankly, I find a little bit mystifying. Yeah, I find myself fascinated by these guys like Yeaton and others whom you name, you know, you talk about FDR's purges of State Department Russia hands in the late 30s. They form a kind of, you know, a tradition in those years who seemed in your account to see Stalin

for what he was or who he was and to have been sidelined and ignored at every stage. And I think in, you know, in terms of popular memory, have largely disappeared. in many cases because they weren't actually in positions of influence during the war. They were shunted aside. Yeah, I mean, they weren't purges in the sense that, let's say, Stalin conducted purges. Right, right, right, right. These people that were not tortured in. American purges.

It would be hungry for. They moved to the basement. Right. And, you know, later on, some of them got to write memoirs and they got bits and pieces of their story out during the Cold War, although by then it was kind of dismissed as kind of red scare hysteria or something like that. But, you know, I think they were just, they were honorably trying to do their duty and serve their country.

but the message they had was inconvenient. It was politically inconvenient in view of the various foreign policy priorities of the Roosevelt administration. You know, some of it was, I mean, Ambassador Bullitt himself was basically sacked from having a Soviet embassy because he had become too critical, effectively, of Stalin because he really did see through kind of Soviet rhetoric. And he said, look, they're talking about this popular front and that they're supposedly allies with the French. But no, they're still communist. You know, they still believe in world revolution. they say it every day. And you didn't really have to be a genius to see this. You just had to read the

press releases and just not ignore them. But of course, far too many people in the West did ignore the press releases and, you know, the quite clear evidence of Soviet behavior. I mean, they would literally boast in Pravda about like the number of banks they looted in occupied Poland and Bessarabian places like this. You just had to be sort of alert enough to be paying attention to this stuff. And we can tell this, not just in the policies they pursued, but of course, in the absolute flood of propaganda that the U.S. public is deluged with during the war. Again, turning Stalin, you know, entirely into this kind of, this, this likeable pipe-smoking Uncle Joe character, you know, who becomes almost kind of a legend. And, you know, in retrospect,

it is. It's kind of a little bit surprising. But at the time, that was the priority. And anything that didn't fit the narrative had to be either cut out or removed from the corridors of power and influence. So what do you say then to the sort of obvious response to an analysis like this? And one could imagine people making it at the time. And I think in some form it was made at the time, which is this is just a choice. For strategic reasons, this is just a choice. And the choice is Stalin or Hitler. You know, you can't be enemies with them both practically. We are enemies with Hitler and with Japanese imperialism. Stalin is our partner. And just get on board. Get on board.

Everything else is a distraction. Certainly that's an argument. That is the argument they make. and that's still the argument that I think probably the majority of mainstream historians of a war agree with. I simply believe that you have to unpack history as it unfolded in real time and look at the various choices that were made. I do think there was a good argument in 1941 and 1942 when the Soviets were under a genuine serious threat of going under. That a certain level of perhaps prioritizing the Soviets over the British at the time, as far as Lenley's age shipments, made a certain amount of sense. where I think the policy starts to make less sense and, in fact, it become increasingly divorced from strategic reality and interest is after 1942, particularly after 1943, when the Soviets, after Stalingrad, after course, are clearly no danger of going under. And in fact, begin their long blood-soaked march to Berlin. At that point, the Len Lease Aid could have either been curtailed, slow down, perhaps conditions applied to it, some type of negotiation, you know, at least help us against Japan, at least stop arresting the pilots.

who land on your soil, make some concessions regarding the future of post-war, Poland, or Yugoslavia, or the Balkans, or Eastern Europe. Or frankly, you know, you're kind of on your own now that you're under danger. If you read the original Lenny statutes, I mean, the argument was supposed to be that it was some compelling strategic or defense interest urgency in the United States. And once the Soviets are marching on Berlin, you can't really make that argument. That is, that the U.S. should be prioritizing the needs of the ever more mobile, army as it's crashing into Poland, among other things, as Stalin is actually re-gifting things like

Lenley's jeeps and studebakers and even Harley Davidson motorcycles to his Polish communist stooges who are going around and rounding up Polish patriots, we call the Home Army or the AK fighters. The policy becomes increasingly divorced from any conceivable U.S. interest in Eastern Europe. You know, that's it. You can still defeat Hitler or you could have made different decisions at Tehran for example, that the U.S. and Britain could have tried to be more in the Mediterranean or the Adriatic. The risk was always, and I have heard this counter argument made, the risk was always that had the U.S. applied pressure to Stalin, he would have maybe just cut a separate piece with Hitler, and to which I say, well, I think that just kind of proves the type of statesmen you're

dealing with in Stalin, who had made an agreement between 939, 940, he was capable of doing it again. He was perfectly hard-headed, and the U.S. could have, of course, done the same thing, perhaps, by supporting some of the anti-Hitler resistance, which Roosevelt refused to even talk about doing in 1943 or 1944, or the U.S. could have been just as cynical as Stalin and again trying to cut their own self-interested deals with German resistance figures, supporting plots against Hitler, showing more flexibility on unconditional surrender, all kinds of ways in which the U.S. could have been about a more desirable outcome on the ground. So let's talk about unconditional surrender for a second, because I have to say, I think I found that to be the most

shocking part of your argument. You make a really energetic case that the ultimate beneficiary of this demand and commitment to unconditional surrender is Stalin and his slave empire, as you put it, I think rightly. So was demanding unconditional surrender a mistake? Well, I think ultimately it was. There was obviously good kind of diplomatic, you might say, and even to some strategic logic for it at the time. But people forget that it was, it was kind of Roosevelt's baby. I mean, it was Roosevelt's idea, and Churchill was blindsided by it. Churchill didn't like the idea. Even Stalin didn't really like the idea. I do think that indirectly, yes, he was the ultimate beneficiary. But that is the idea that no possible negotiation of any

kind that effectively you have to have your enemy just utterly destroyed, humiliated on their knees, begging for submission. It was both unconditional surrender and I think Roosevelt's decision, not just not to work with any of these German figures, including the head of German intelligence, who was almost begging Roosevelt to work with him, Admiral Canaris. And in addition to that, even forbidding the U.S. press from even talking about a German resistance for the last two years of the war. I mean, these were, in fact, even more extreme than Stalin's own views. And I do think they helped to prolong the war to make it bloodier, to, you know, kind of inject even more life and morale into the Germans, particularly in 1944.

you can look at the bulge. That also has to do with some of the other things in the book I talk about, such as the Morgenthau plan. But when you look at Asia, just very briefly, Herbert Hoover, who we mentioned earlier, along with former ambassador to Japan, Joseph Kruh, and many others, particularly after Roosevelt dies in April, and they think maybe Truman will lend them a slightly more curious ear. Now, they're all saying that, look, there's no reason you have to be obedient to the holy writ of unconditional surrender. And particularly when it came to this question of the one condition surrender, leaving Emperor Hirohito potentially on his throne as a kind of stop to Japanese pride. Had the U.S. been willing to negotiate with Japan? And you can see why Truman, once he learned that they detonated the A-bomb, wanted to use his kind of his secret weapon, and was no longer secret after he used it, of course, but this powerful weapon to bring about unconditional surrender. In the end, the result of this was both to prolong the war with Japan,

but also to allow Stalin to get into it at the last minute, to carve out this massive empire in Asia. Truman, by then, is trying to keep the Soviets out of the war if possible. But of course, a far easier way to keep the Soviets out of the war would have been to negotiate some type of peace with Japan before the Soviets got into that war in August, 1945. Not least, of course, the U.S. also did not have to send 8.25 million tons of war material across the Pacific through Japanese waters to Stalin free of charge, including vast quantities just in the last 14 months of the Pacific War, the material that Stalin actually used to conquer Asia was, of course, largely the provisions were largely made in America and sent to Stalin for free.

It's not really, I think, a theme of your book, but this is sort of in the spirit of since I have you, and since we're talking about the moment, you know, an ongoing debate and question that's always interested me is what ultimately compels the Japanese surrender. Where do you come down on that debate? Well, I don't entirely disagree with the idea that the Soviet entry in the war was decisive. That isn't bringing about unconditional surrender. It's just that the way the question is framed, I don't always necessarily think is the most helpful. That is to say, it's a question of either dropping the A-bomb or not dropping the A-bomb,

a question of what was necessary to compel unconditional surrender. I think that the actual problem was in the policy of unconditional surrender itself, which is to say that given that policy, then yes, even the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima might not have been sufficient. We know this because Japan applied where else. They applied, of course, to the Soviet Union for mediation, only to be told that the Soviet response to Japan's request for help is to say, well, we're about to invade you and crush you. That to me is a little bit shocking. That is to say that the utter cynicism and duplicity of the Soviet policy, but in defense, again, of the Soviet position in August, Truman had cut them out of

the Potsdam Declaration. I mean, the way I see it is Truman had kind of boxed himself into a corner. He'd almost outsmarted himself. Again, if his aim was, to bring about an end to the war without Soviet intervention, then instead of cutting the Soviets out of the declaration and launching this kind of race to see whether the A-bomb or a Soviet intervention would be decisive, the U.S. should have simply negotiated from a position of strength that in some way would have solved some semblance of Japanese pride, again, short of the need to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. Let's be forget, of course, the second bomb, I mean, happened literally the same day the Soviets enter the war. So it is literally a one-two punch on the same

day of August, August 9th, 1945. So how has your book been received? We'll say broadly out there amongst critics, and then specifically within the academy. Oh, well, it certainly stirred the pot. I mean, there's been an interesting bifurcation, which, you know, I may be expected this in part. I didn't expect to be quite so strong where the reviews have been far sniffier in Britain than in the United States overall. On the other hand, I kind of got more of them in Britain, I suppose, was because I did stir the pot. And some of this might have been my own fault for launching a sort of attack on Churchill

in The Spectator last spring, which was obviously meant to be a spin-off, but just kind of taking a different attack on Churchill than people were used to focusing on his relationship with Stalin. And this is the kind of thing, you're obviously kind of on sacred ground with either Churchill or Roosevelt. To some extent, you know,

a book about the Second World War, its natural audience, are going to be people who are kind of admirers of Churchill and Roosevelt. So you're inevitable to be going to get some points. pushback from them. There's been, I think, in general, a far more positive reception in the U.S. among kind of critics and reviewers. Now, in the academy, I mean, they're always going to be specialists who object to this. And there haven't been maybe that many reviews by academics yet. Some of those are kind of like a little bit slower in coming. And I'm not expecting them to be especially friendly. I mean, this is simply the case whenever one takes a kind of provocative

and revisionist approach to a subject. But, you know, I do think the book has been treated respectfully. And it's certainly been taken seriously. I mean, I think ultimately the greatest compliment, you know, a book can be given is to be taken seriously and to launch these kinds of arguments. But no, I wasn't expecting that, of course, the book would go over well with everyone. I was kind of expecting a good amount of pushback. And I think I've gotten out. I think it stirred the pot and, you know, ignited, I think, a pretty serious and hopefully productive conversation. Well, I found Stalin's War to be a fascinating read. I certainly commended to our listeners.

And this was a great conversation. Sean McMeekin, thank you very much. Thanks for having me on, Aaron. It's great fun. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.