What was Stalin like?
An aggressive listener. He could take over a room just by listening. Stepan Mikoyan, who grew up in the Kremlin leadership compound and knew Stalin from childhood, told me, "Stalin was so suspicious, you had to watch your eye contact. Not enough, and he'd think you were trying to hide something. Too much, and he'd think you were overconfident and plotting against him. Managing eye contact was crucial." My God! Yet Stalin has a good sense of humor and controls every meeting he's in.
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Doesn't he charm the West?
Eden comes back in late 1941 from his trip to Moscow and says, "I tried to imagine Stalin dripping with the blood of his opponents, but the picture won't fit." All the Western leaders had some form of this problem. There's Hitler and Mussolini, ranting and raving—and Stalin's not like that at all! He's calm, seems to be reasonable, listens—and he doesn't talk very much, which is what the rest of them absolutely love to do.
So he seems like someone they can deal with.
He seems like a top-level civil servant, an apparatchik—which is where they get the idea there's someone behind him, the Politburo, pulling strings to make deals go bad. His lack of apparent ego is extraordinary in a major world figure.
How does Katyn reveal the West's moral dilemma about Stalin?
It shows beyond question what Roosevelt and Churchill know: not just that they are dealing with a prewar mass murderer, but that one of their allies appears to have murdered the entire officer corps of another of their allies, the Poles. The Nazis make huge propaganda out of Katyn, but the Allies pretend it hasn't happened or that someone else—the Nazis—did it. Moreover, they stop the Poles from publicizing what they both know to be the truth.
Does anyone admit this?
In May 1943 Sir Owen O'Malley, ambassador to the Polish government, writes a caustic memo saying the Soviets committed murder at Katyn. His career gets screwed because of this. Sir Alexander Cadogan, chief of the Foreign Office, looks at it and writes, "Oh dear, I had turned my head away from this for fear of what I would find." Which is just how Roosevelt works as well.
Meaning?
[American historian] Robert Dallek told me, "To understand FDR, imagine you're someone who 90 percent of the time has one thought: How will this play in the States?" Yet he's also got this huge Wilsonian vision: he dreams up the United Nations on the back of an envelope. He's not a cynical politician. But the amazing duality is extraordinary, and reveals itself at Yalta. Roosevelt knew what he wanted: Russian participation in the UN after the war, and Russian troops to help defeat Japan so fewer Americans would die. So when someone comes up and says, "Here's the border of Poland," he nods. It isn't important to him.
Where does that dynamic leave Churchill?
Here's his realization that the British are screwed as a major power, and he wants absolutely to be at the top table discussing the future of continents. He has two meetings with Stalin alone. In Tehran in 1943, he uses matchsticks to negotiate Poland's new borders. In Moscow in 1944, he writes a "naughty document" with percentages of influence for the Soviets and western Allies in eastern European countries. It's important that these meetings happened when Roosevelt wasn't there.
Doesn't Churchill play a double game with the Poles?
He knows in the abstract he's got to hand over half of Poland, because the facts are: one, the Soviets are there already and we ain't gonna have a war to get 'em out; and two, there's a sense that, well, they have been dying for us, haven't they? Roosevelt and Churchill talk about everything, but they never talk about the Russian losses vis-à-vis our losses: nearly 27 million vs. some 800,000. That's precisely because they know it's so core. But when Churchill meets Gen. [Wladyslaw] Anders and the Polish Division who've taken Monte Cassino, he sees the brave suffering and breaks down: "Trust us, trust us." He's got this terrible dichotomy.
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