Sexing up the Cold War: New Evidence on the Molotov–Truman Talks of April 1945

Abstract

This article presents and examines new evidence from the Russian archives on the Truman–Molotov talks of April 1945. This new evidence undercuts the conventional story that this was a rough and tough meeting that led to a significant deterioration of Soviet–American relations. The turn to Cold War came much later, and it was only in that context that the Molotov–Truman encounter came to be looked upon as a particularly negative event. That retrospective view fed into postwar memoirs and then into the historiography, thereby creating one of the mythical, emblematic events of the early Cold War.

Notes

I would like to thank Svetlana Frolova for checking my translation of the documents, and Albert Resis for advice on some of the phrasing. The research was conducted with financial assistance from the Arts Faculty, University College Cork.

 1. The Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam Conferences: Documents (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), p.138.

 2. Harry S. Truman, Year of Decisions 1945 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955), p.85.

 3. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp.204–5. To be fair to Gaddis, his treatment of this episode is more circumspect in his subsequent writings.

 4. Terry H. Anderson, The United States, Great Britain and the Cold War, 1944–1947 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981), p.59.

 5. Deborah Welch Larson, Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985) pp.152–7.

 6. Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and National Security State (London: Penguin, 1978), p.83.

 7. Wilfried Loth, The Division of the World, 1941–1955 (London: Routledge, 1988), p.88.

 8. Walter LaFeber, for example, quotes the ‘angry exchange’ in his main text but adds the following footnote: ‘This precise exchange was possibly created by Truman's imagination. These words are not reported in the official records of the conversation. They doubtless suggest, nevertheless, the tone of what Truman did say’. (America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945–1990, 6th edn. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991), p.17, n.21).

 9. Foreign Relations of the United States 1945, vol.5: Europe (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1967), pp.237–41.

10. Ibid., pp.237–51. For the Soviet records of these discussions: Arkhiv Vneshnei Politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter AVP RF) F.06, Op.7b, Pap.60, D.1, LL.1–5; F.06, Op.7b, Pap.60, D.4, LL.1–11.

11. Ibid., pp.256–8.

12. C.E. Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), p.213.

13. See the Clemens article cited in n.24 below.

14. W.A. Harriman and E. Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin 1941–1946 (New York: Random House, 1975), pp.453–4.

15. Andre Gromyko, Memories (London: Hutchinson, 1989), pp.95–6.

16. Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and the Origins of Arms Race, rev. edn. (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), pp.160–64. According to Sherwin, Stimson briefed Truman with the aim of steering him away from any confrontation with the Russians.

17. This was also a prominent theme of the ‘revisionist’ critique of American foreign policy and the origins of the Cold War. For example, D.F. Fleming: ‘There are some who think the Cold War did not begin until around 1947, but it is clear from this episode [the tough talk with Molotov – GR] that President Truman was ready to begin it before he had been in office two weeks. … From the eminence of eleven days in power, Harry Truman made his decision to lay down the law to an ally which had contributed more in blood and agony to the common cause than we had’. (The Cold War and its Origins (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961), vol.1, p.268).

18. Molotov Remembers (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), p.55. Despite their frequent citation as such these tendentious and inaccurate ramblings cannot be deemed memoirs except in the loosest sense. For example, according to Molotov (p.51) he was on a train in the United States, on the way to San Francisco when he heard about Roosevelt's death. He was actually in Moscow.

19. Pavlov's records are Molotov's ‘diary reports’, i.e. the record of the conversation that would either be sent to Moscow via the diplomatic bag or submitted (to Stalin) on return to Moscow. In addition, there would have been a coded telegram to Stalin reporting on each of the meetings with Truman. Access to Foreign Ministry cipher telegrams of the 1940s is currently prohibited to foreign scholars. However, it is unlikely that the texts of the telegram and diary reports differ in any significant respect. During the course of his London–Washington trip in 1942 Molotov was upbraided by Stalin for not submitting full enough telegram reports on his meetings with Western leaders. It was not a mistake he ever made again.

20. Stalin's Correspondence with Churchill, Attlee, Roosevelt and Truman, 1941–1945 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1958), vol.2, docs.289 and 293.

21. For records of the ‘Polish Commission’: Harriman Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, container 178, chronological files for March–April 1945.

22. In social settings, however, Molotov could be quite a charmer. Kathleen Harriman, who accompanied her father to Moscow in 1943–45, thought that ‘Moly’, as she called him, was the nicest of the Russian leaders. Shortly after arriving in Moscow she wrote to her sister Mary that ‘M's got a helleva swell sense of humour and nice twinkling eyes’. Kathleen Harriman's wartime letters are to be mainly found interspersed in the chronological files of her father's papers in the Library of Congress.

23. The prevailing assumption in the literature is that this meeting took place before Molotov's meeting with Truman on the 23rd. However, the text of Molotov's diary report on the meetings contains a reference to him having met Truman only twice, presumably referring to the meetings on 22 and 23 April. Davies' account of his meeting with Molotov is recorded in his diary in an entry dated 30 April 1945, which relates a conversation that he had with Truman that day. Notwithstanding some grandstanding on Davies's part, his account of his conversation with Molotov tallies with that recorded by Pavlov. This diary entry of Davies is more famous, however, for its record of Truman's account of how he had spoken to Molotov on 23 April. ‘It was a straight ‘one-two to the jaw’,’ said Truman, ‘I let him have it straight’. Molotov was ‘visibly shaken, blanched and went pale.’ ‘Did I do right?’, Truman asked Davies. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Papers of Joseph E. Davies, Box 16. I am grateful to Dr Eduard Mark for supplying me with the text of Davies' diary entry.

24. Diane S. Clemens, ‘Averell Harriman, John Deane, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the “Reversal of Co-operation” with the Soviet Union in April 1945’, International History Review 14/2 (May 1992). Clemens is suitably sceptical about the famous angry exchange and quotes (n.51, p.305) William E. Pemberton's Harry S. Truman: Fast Dealer and Cold Warrior (Boston, 1989): ‘Truman often described harsh verbal exchanges that in fact did not take place’.

25. Wilson D. Miscamble, ‘Anthony Eden and the Truman–Molotov Conversations, April 1945’, Diplomatic History 2/2 (Spring 1978). Miscamble points out that without Eden's initiative Truman's meeting with Molotov on 23 April would not even have taken place.

26. For example, Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power; National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp.30ff.

27. Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conference of Berlin 1945, vol.1 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1960), pp.21–62.

28. For evidence on Molotov and Stalin's assessment of Potsdam see the reports of the Yugoslav ambassador in Moscow cited by L. Ya. Gibianskii, ‘Doneseniya Ugoslavskogo Posla v Moskve ob Otsenkakh Rukovodstvom SSSR Potsdamskoi Konferentsii i Polozheniya v Vostochnoi Evrope’, Slavyanovedeniye 1 (1994).

29. On Soviet preparations for the CFM: AVP RF F.0431/1, op.1, D.1–4 and F.0431/1, Op.1, Pap.5, D.31–6. Also G.A. Agafonova, ‘Diplomaticheskii Krizis na Londonskoi Sessii SMID’, in I.V. Gaiduk and N.I. Egorova (eds.), Stalin i Kholodnaya Voina (Moscow, 1998).

30. The evidence that Stalin pushed very hard at Yalta for a policy of dismemberment is contained in unpublished sections of the Soviet record of the conference. Chapter and verse is cited in Geoffrey Roberts, ‘Stalin at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam: The Unpublished Record’, Cold War International Project Bulletin (forthcoming). After Yalta Stalin rapidly abandoned dismemberment (a) because it was not a feasible project in the face of Western resistance; (b) for propaganda reasons (in the German context); and (c) in order to pursue an alternative project of a territorially much reduced but united Germany under Soviet influence.

31. The Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam Conferences (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), pp.325–7. In his analysis of the discussions at Potsdam Marc Trachtenberg (A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp.15–33) argues that Stalin came to accept that Soviet reparations would only come from the Red Army's zone of military occupation in Germany. But that argument does not fit with persistent Soviet efforts to obtain their share of reparations from the Western zones. Even more unconvincing is Trachtenberg's argument that because Stalin had little faith in the prospects for a postwar political transformation of Germany Soviet support for postwar German unity was purely propagandistic. In fact, a united Germany under Soviet influence, if not communist control, was precisely Stalin's aim in 1945, although he later came to abandon it in favour of more realistic goals. The course of Soviet policy towards Germany from 1941 to 1948 may be followed in the three volumes of documents published in the series SSSR i Germanskii Vopros, ed. J. Laufer and G. Kunin (Moscow 1996, 2000 and 2003).

32. On Stalin's reaction to the atomic bomb: David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (Yale University Press, 1994), chapters 6 and 8.

33. AVP RF, F.0431/1 Op.1, Pap.5, D.26, LL.13–24.

34. One expression of this view was the discussions within the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformburo) about the changing conditions and tasks of Soviet propaganda after the war. In 1945 Solomon Lozovskii, the deputy head of Sovinform, penned a series of letters and reports highlighting the renewed ideological campaign against the USSR being waged in the Western press, including by Western governments. See Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial'no-Politicheskoi Istorii (RGASPI), F.17, Op.125, D.315, 386, 387 and 388.

35. Documents on British Policy Overseas, series 1, vol.II (HMSO, 1985), pp.635–927.

36. J.F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), p.61.

37. As this article was going to press I came across this reference to the Truman – Molotor ‘confrontation’ in Carl Marzani's We Can Be Friends: Origins of the Cold War (Topical Book Publishers: New York 1952): ‘ Washington gossip had it that Molotor had walked out on Truman. According to foreign correspondent Edgar A. Mowrer, Molotar had said, “No one has ever talked like this me befor”.’ (p.187) In this light it seems likely that what Truman remembered about this meeting with Molotor in his memories were the press reports and rumours of what had supposedly happened!