The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  After the initial successes of Operation Barbarossa, most foreign officials and observers were pessimistic about Russia’s chances, and they recognized that if their pessimism proved justified, the wider implications would be truly frightening. In the August 4, 1941, issue of Life magazine, Hanson W. Baldwin, the country’s most authoritative military writer, published “Blueprint for Victory.” Despite its upbeat headline, the article amounted to a desperate plea for the United States to enter the war precisely because the Soviet Union’s prospects looked so bleak.

  “The future depends in large measure upon the Russian campaign,” he wrote. “A two to four months’ victory in Russia (by ‘victory’ I mean annihilation of the bulk of the Red Army) will put Germany in a far stronger strategical position than before.” By controlling the resources of the Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union, he argued, Germany would be “immune to blockade” and would have “completed the conquest of Europe.” “Hitler’s ‘New Order’ will be free to grow to its political and economic fruition,” he added.

  Baldwin did acknowledge that another outcome was theoretically possible. “On the other hand, if the German drive into Russia bogs down into Napoleonic futility, Hitler himself may face eventual defeat,” he wrote. But he wasn’t betting on that. At best, he believed, Hitler would win in Russia only after a long campaign that would sap German strength and give Britain more time to build up its forces. “But on the basis of all past experience—on our limited knowledge of the Red Army, on the operations of the first month—the world can anticipate in Russia another quick and decisive Germany victory,” he somberly concluded. The result would be unequivocal for Britain. “If Russia and its resources fall easily within the Nazi orbit, victory is clearly beyond Britain’s grasp,” he wrote. “The best she can hope for is a negotiated peace.”

  Granted, Baldwin was making this case in order to urge his country to join the war effort to stop Hitler, insisting that nothing short of such action would provide hope for success. But his pessimism about Russia’s chances was genuine and widely shared at the time. On the eve of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which the Western powers knew was coming but Stalin refused to see, the conventional wisdom was that this was a disaster in the making.

  On June 16, 1941, Sir Stafford Cripps, the British ambassador to Moscow, informed the War Cabinet in London that the consensus among diplomats in the Soviet capital was that Russia could not hold out against the German onslaught for more than three or four weeks. After Cripps’s briefing, John Dill, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, told Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that the Soviet side might be able to resist a little longer but it would be unwise to count on more than six or seven weeks of fighting. Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London, was aware of his hosts’ pessimism. British defense officials, he wrote, were convinced that the Germans would “go through Russia as a knife through butter,” allowing Hitler to become “master of Russia.”

  Still, Churchill and his ministers were eager to see the Germans concentrate their firepower on the Soviet Union and so force Stalin to join the anti-Nazi alliance after nearly two years of ostensible friendship with Germany. The morning of June 22, Churchill’s butler appeared in Eden’s bedroom and presented him with a large cigar on a silver platter. “The Prime Minister’s compliments and the German armies have invaded Russia,” he announced. As Eden noted later, “We savored the relief, but not for me at that hour the cigar.” Instead, he and Churchill immediately began discussing how to react, leading to the first of a long series of overtures to the new and, as immediately became apparent, difficult ally.

  As the fighting came closer and closer to Moscow, British, American, Japanese and other diplomats in the Soviet capital sent home increasingly gloomy reports about the chances that the German assault could be stopped. But not everyone agreed on the prognosis, and long-simmering tensions between colleagues within some of the missions burst into the open. Moscow was a pressure cooker assignment in the period leading up to the war, with embassies prone to fierce internal battles based on differing assessments of Stalin’s regime. The looming prospect of the German conquest of the city only exacerbated them. With the fate of Moscow hanging in the balance, the diplomats, along with top officials in London and Washington, found themselves debating not only what would happen but also how the West should respond to Soviet appeals for help.

  While focusing on the pressing question of what Western policy should be, those debates contained explicit or implicit assumptions about the nature of the Soviet system and the personality of Stalin that could be traced back to the very first encounters between Western envoys and the Kremlin leadership. And the ongoing debate about those assumptions and their policy implications would carry on right through the war and beyond. They would all begin to come into focus at Moscow’s moment of greatest peril.

  Unlike his Republican predecessors, Roosevelt was anxious to reach out to the Kremlin, ending the long period when the United States and much of the West still treated the Soviet leaders as representatives of an illegitimate, dangerous, and quite possibly transient regime. On November 16, 1933, the president signed an agreement with Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov establishing diplomatic relations between their two countries. He then appointed William Bullitt the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union. Bullitt would also become the first, and not the last, envoy that Roosevelt dispatched to Moscow who would quickly gain a perspective on the Soviet regime that would put him at odds with his boss in Washington.

  Born into a wealthy Philadelphia family in 1891 and educated at Yale, Bullitt was eager to serve the president he so greatly admired and he was delighted to be tapped for such an important post. He had visited Moscow with his mother in 1914, just as World War I broke out. Right after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, he joined the State Department and quickly became a fervent advocate of recognition of the Soviet regime, which he viewed as a promising experiment in a new form of government. Sent to Russia on a fact-finding mission in November 1919, he expanded his brief to help negotiate an armistice in the civil war directly with Lenin. The Bolshevik leader, he reported, was “a very striking man—straightforward and direct, but also genial and with a large humor and serenity.” By any measure, Bullitt appeared to be just the kind of envoy that Roosevelt wanted: someone who shared his positive assumptions about the Soviet Union and belief that a new era of cooperation and progress would be possible.

  Less than a month after the Roosevelt-Litvinov agreement was signed, Bullitt arrived for a preliminary short stay in Moscow with the plan that he would then return to the United States to make his final preparations before actually moving and setting up the embassy there. He took along as his aide and interpreter George Kennan, a young foreign service officer who had been working hard on his Russian language skills. Kennan would later describe Bullitt as “charming, brilliant, well-educated, imaginative, a man of the world capable of holding his own intellectually with anyone.” But he also noted that this “fine ambassador” was extremely impatient. “He came to Russia with high hopes, and he wanted to see them realized at once.”

  Those high hopes were on full display during his initial visit to Moscow in December 1933. At a lengthy dinner with “perhaps fifty toasts,” as Bullitt recalled, the envoy found himself feted by Stalin and the top Kremlin brass, all there to impress upon him the importance that they attached to the new relationship with Washington. After Stalin promised him a good site for the new embassy, Bullitt recounted, “I held out my hand to shake hands with Stalin and, to my amazement, Stalin took my head in his two hands and gave me a large kiss! I swallowed my astonishment, and, when he turned up his face for a return kiss, I delivered it.”

  But awed as he was, Bullitt didn’t fail to register other, less flattering impressions of the Soviet leader. He had expected “a very big man with a face of iron and a booming voice” but found himself facing someone who was “rather short, the top of his head coming to about my eye level
, and of ordinary physique, wiry rather than powerful.” And Bullitt was struck by the contrast between Stalin and his predecessor. “With Lenin one felt at once that one was in the presence of a great man; with Stalin I felt I was talking to a wiry Gypsy with roots and emotions beyond my experience,” he noted.

  Still, the new envoy was in an upbeat mood when, after concluding his rounds in Washington, he returned to Moscow in March 1934. He was convinced that the welcome he had received in December would translate into a friendly relationship between the two countries and, in particular, between the Soviet authorities and the staff of his fledgling embassy. Instead, Soviet officials seemed to go out of their way to disabuse him of that notion. They turned down his requests for a reasonable ruble exchange rate so that the embassy wouldn’t have to follow the example of other missions of buying rubles abroad and bringing them in by diplomatic pouch. They also restricted his use of a small plane he had brought with him to a nine-mile range, making it virtually useless. And on larger issues, such as Russia’s debt to the United States left over from tsarist times, he couldn’t make any progress, although the idea was to take care of this matter to facilitate the extension of credits to the Soviet regime.

  The young and eager embassy staff found itself fighting daily battles just to function, both in initial temporary quarters at the shabby Savoy Hotel and at the new ambassador’s residence known as Spaso House, a former fur merchant’s mansion badly in need of repairs. Besides Kennan, they included another future ambassador to Moscow, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, and Charles Thayer, a West Point graduate who would go on to write books about Russia. While Bullitt and his team tried to expand their contacts with Russians, they were often frustrated in those efforts and bluntly rebuffed by those who were part of—and, in many cases, soon to be victims of—the hellish regime.

  Karl Radek, a revolutionary who would lose his life in the purges, told Bohlen: “You Westerners will never understand Bolshevism. You consider Bolshevism as a hot bath whose temperature can be raised and lowered to suit the bather. This is not true. You are either a hundred per cent in the bath and a hundred per cent for it, or you are a hundred per cent outside and a hundred per cent against it.”

  Such attitudes, combined with the daily struggle to provide for the most basic needs of the embassy, made the Americans feel isolated and embattled. “We regarded ourselves as a lonely and exposed bastion of American governmental life, surrounded by a veritable ocean of official Soviet ill-will; and we took pride in our accomplishments precisely because of all this adversity,” Kennan recalled.

  Bullitt soon realized that the embassy also had to worry about maintaining security in a state obsessed with spying on everyone, including the diplomats in its midst. He was followed at all times by four plainclothesmen; whenever he was at his residence, they sat outside. Soviet officials blandly insisted that they were there for his protection and refused to get rid of them. As a result of Bullitt’s efforts, six Marines were sent to Moscow to guard the embassy, beginning a practice that would later spread to American embassies all over the world. But that action produced problems of its own. As Bohlen recounted, he witnessed “a highly painted Russian woman” entering the Savoy and declaring to the clerk that she wanted to go up to the room of Sergeant O’Dean, one of the Marines. When the clerk asked why, she replied: “I am his Russian teacher.” Bohlen reported that security was improved when the embassy moved to its new site on Mokhovaya Street, but it certainly wasn’t the last time that Russian women would be used to compromise Marines on duty in Moscow.

  Bullitt was soon completely disillusioned with the regime that he had once seen as inspirational. He wrote Roosevelt that “the honeymoon atmosphere has evaporated,” and he became so frustrated by his dealings with the Kremlin that he informed Secretary of State Cordell Hull that “perhaps it would be best to bring all commercial and financial relations to a standstill” until the Soviet side adopted a more positive attitude. With Roosevelt, he argued that while maintaining as friendly personal ties with Soviet officials as possible, the Americans should “let them know clearly that if they are unwilling to move forward and take the carrot they will receive the club on the behind.” In other words, Washington shouldn’t accommodate Stalin’s regime at any price.

  It wasn’t only the bilateral issues that produced Bullitt’s new thinking. Like Kennan, Bohlen, and others, he found the purges and the heightened atmosphere of paranoia and xenophobia increasingly alarming and depressing. In March 1936, he wrote in a letter to a friend that he was stunned by the scope of the arrests, and he noted that those victims he knew personally “were without question loyal to the Soviet regime.” A month later he warned Secretary Hull that it was Soviet policy to make friends with democrats “in order the better eventually to lead those democrats to the firing squad.”

  But Roosevelt wasn’t pleased with Bullitt’s new perspective and his recommendations for a tougher policy. He didn’t want to believe that Stalin’s regime had gone as far down the path of arbitrary terror as the evidence indicated, since he clung to the notion that the Soviet Union would eventually develop more democratic institutions and abandon its more aggressive notions of spreading communism elsewhere. The president was much closer to the views of the one embassy staffer who consistently accepted Soviet propaganda at face value. Colonel Philip Faymonville, the chief military attaché, reported that the purge victims were guilty as charged and believed that there had been only “individual instances” of violence against peasants during Stalin’s brutal forced collectivization campaign. As Bohlen saw it, Faymonville’s “definite pro-Russian bias” made him the “weak link in the staff.”

  In fact, Faymonville actively undermined his own ambassador, making it clear to Soviet officials that he disagreed with his policies. Those officials, in turn, complained openly about Bullitt, while praising the military attaché. Yevgeny Rubinin, a senior Foreign Ministry official, noted that government agencies took a “most friendly attitude toward Faymonville.” Back in Washington, Roosevelt decided that he wanted someone to run the embassy who would receive the same kind of praise. By late 1936, he had found his man: Joseph Davies, who would quickly embrace Faymonville as an ally and radically change the tenor of the mission’s reporting from Moscow.

  A presidential friend, golf partner and—thanks to his second wife, General Foods heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post—major campaign contributor, Davies had no Russian expertise. This suited Stalin’s team just fine. Foreign Minister Litvinov was cheered by the report from the Soviet ambassador in Washington that “Davies understands nothing about our affairs but that he is full of the most sincere desire to work with us in complete co-operation and to carry out strictly Roosevelt’s instructions.”

  To Kennan and others at the embassy, all of this was distressing news. “Had the President wished to slap us down and to mock us for our efforts in the development of Soviet-American relations, he could not have done better with this appointment,” Kennan stated. Along with several of his colleagues, Kennan briefly considered resigning in protest, but they backed off, feeling that the new man had to be given a chance to prove himself. Nonetheless, Davies recognized from the start that he faced internal opposition. While praising Kennan’s performance in a report to the State Department, he engineered his transfer to Washington by arguing that he had been in Moscow “too long for his own good.”

  From the vantage point of the Kremlin, Davies was a dream ambassador—someone who was blind to what was happening right in front of him and willing, even eager, to accept the most transparently absurd rationalizations of the regime for its actions. His observations about the Soviet leaders were nothing short of fawning. “Stalin is a very strong, able man who is practical, with a lot of common sense and wisdom,” he wrote in his diary on March 11, 1937. “Molotov is an exceptional man with great mental capacity and wisdom.” In a letter to his daughter on June 9, 1938, as he was preparing to leave Moscow, he continued in that vein. “He [Stalin] has a sly hum
or. He has a very great mentality. It is sharp, shrewd, and above all things else, wise, at least so it would appear to me. If you can picture a personality that is exactly opposite to what the most rabid anti-Stalinist anywhere could conceive, then you might picture this man.”

  Davies attended many of the most infamous purge trials, sending reports to Washington that varied only slightly from the Soviet propaganda accounts of those events. Reporting to Secretary Hull about the trial of Bukharin and other top Bolshevik leaders, he wrote, “It is my opinion so far as the political defendants are concerned sufficient crimes under Soviet law, among those charged in the indictment, were established by the proof and beyond a reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of guilty of treason and the adjudication of the punishment provided by the Soviet criminal statutes.” In other words, Stalin’s regime was perfectly justified in executing them.

  In an earlier message to Hull about the execution of Marshal Tukhachevsky and other Red Army generals, Davies asserted that most of Moscow’s diplomatic corps was convinced “that the accused must have been guilty of an offense which in the Soviet Union would merit the death penalty.” And he concluded: “The Stalin regime, politically and internally, is probably stronger than heretofore. All potential opposition has been killed off.”

  In fact, many other diplomats were far less credulous about the Soviet rationalizations of the wave of executions and were startled by Davies’ behavior. A German embassy staffer recalled that even his country’s ambassador, Count von der Schulenburg, felt “indignation and bewilderment” when he heard about Davies’ attendance at the show trials. Charles Bohlen, who had returned to the American embassy after a stint in Washington, was appalled by Davies’ reports and tried to fathom his motives. “He ardently desired to make a success of a pro-Soviet line and was probably reflecting the views of some of Roosevelt’s advisers to enhance his political standing at home,” he wrote. And while Davies was claiming that Stalin was strengthening his country, Bohlen came to the opposite conclusion. “I could not understand why Stalin chose, at a time when the Soviet Union was imperiled by both Germany and Japan, to wreck the structure of officialdom that he had erected and to destroy the leadership of the Red Army.”