“They who seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Many have increasingly come to terms with the reality that today’s multipolar system led by Russia and China has premised itself upon the defense of international law and national sovereignty as outlined in the UN Charter signed into law on June 26, 1945.

The Imperial Roots of the Rules-Based-Order

The opposing paradigm which emerged with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992 has taken the form of a security doctrine entitled Responsibility to Protect (R2P) which set the tone for the Unipolar “rules based order” of the Anglo-American establishment which has incrementally sought to replace all traces of nation states with supranational mechanisms that render the UN Charter and all associated legal structures built upon it null and void.

This post-nation state paradigm was most recently outlined in the absurd “New Atlantic Charter” co-signed by President Biden and Prime Minister Johnson on June 10, 2021.

While the original August 12, 1941 Atlantic Charter co-signed by FDR and Churchill framed international sovereignty and self-determination as its organizing principle, the new Atlantic Charter attempts to establish adherence to NATO’s Collective Defense, “Open Society” and “Rule of Law” as primal. Under these conditions, any attempt to maintain a veneer of harmonious co-existence on earth is less than meaningless.

It isn’t much of a wonder that this Rules-Based Order” should unwelcoming for the vast majority of UN member states and why it is a direct attack on the UN Charter itself (which had itself been drafted only two days after the Atlantic Charter was made public on August 14, 1941).

Since R2P’s cancerous growth in world affairs, the unipolar system has masqueraded behind humanitarian bombing campaigns, supranational regimes that demand submission to new decarbonization protocols and new international banking regimes that demand national sovereignty be replaced by something called “shareholder capitalism” where private corporations, big tech, intelligence agencies, civil society groups, and shadowy teams of technocrats managing a dumbed down society in lieu of those irresponsible democratic institutions that we are told gave rise to all the evils of the last 200 years.

What is the UN Charter and Why Must it be Defended?

Since Putin and Xi Jinping have called out this fraud and made their choice to stand for win-win cooperation over Hobbesian Zero Sum thinking, and since their entire strategy is premised upon the UN Charter, it is worth taking the time to briefly examine this legal document, how it came into being and why its beautiful principles were sabotaged while it was still in the cradle.

Let us start by reviewing the first four sections of article one of the charter, where we find that the new organization was mandated:

1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;
2. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;
3. To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and
4. To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.

And just in case any imperially minded legalist wished to read the charter loosely, Article two quickly made it clear that “the Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.”

These and other articles contained within this historic document which should be read in full here, are a clear break from the earlier League of Nations created in the wake of World War I and which demanded a total dissolution to the national sovereignty of all members. While patriotic forces across the world rallied to block the League of Nations from implementing its imperial agenda by the mid-1930s, the young United Nations established was premised on the intention to extend capital intensive infrastructure across the world in the form of an international New Deal.

These were programs designed to give economic vitality and meaning to the post war age as hundreds of international delegates from India, Latin America, China, Russia and Africa outlined great infrastructure programs at Bretton Woods. These projects enjoyed the full support of the American delegation led by Harry Dexter White and Henry Morgenthau on the one hand and the disdain of the British imperial delegation led by Lord Keynes and his Bancor-loving fellow British delegates loyal only to the City of London and Bank of England.

Despite the fact that this history should be common knowledge to all, 80 years of revisionism does wonders to confuse the zeitgeist and so the question should still be asked: was FDR’s intention to dismantle the British Empire only a ruse to create the Anglo-American special relationship in a new US-led reconquest of the world, or was his plan genuine?

As FDR’s son Elliot Roosevelt outlined in his 1946 book “As He Saw It”, a telling 1941 confrontation took place between his late father and Winston Churchill. In the course of this clash, FDR’s intention for a post-world of win-win cooperation drove his strategic thinking to Churchill’s chagrin.

Elliot recounts his father telling Churchill of the need to let go of 19^th century methods in favor of 20^th century methods of governance saying:

“Whichever of your ministers recommends a policy which takes wealth in raw materials out of a colonial country, but which returns nothing to the people of that country in consideration. Twentieth-century methods involve bringing industry to these colonies. Twentieth-century methods include increasing the wealth of a people by increasing their standard of living, by educating them, by bringing them sanitation—by making sure that they get a return for the raw wealth of their community.”

Around the room, all of us were leaning forward attentively. Hopkins was grinning. Commander Thompson, Churchill’s aide, was looking glum and alarmed. The P.M. himself was beginning to look apoplectic.

“You mentioned India,” he growled.

“Yes. I can’t believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.”

“What about the Philippines?”

“I’m glad you mentioned them. They get their independence, you know, in 1946. And they’ve gotten modern sanitation, modern education; their rate of illiteracy has gone steadily down…”

“There can be no tampering with the Empire’s economic agreements.”

“They’re artificial…”

“They’re the foundation of our greatness.”

“The peace,” said Father firmly, “cannot include any continued despotism. The structure of the peace demands and will get equality of peoples. Equality of peoples involves the utmost freedom of competitive trade. Will anyone suggest that Germany’s attempt to dominate trade in central Europe was not a major contributing factor to war?”

Elliot described the following day’s conversation where Churchill began by saying:

“Mr. President,” he cried, “I believe you are trying to do away with the British Empire. Every idea you entertain about the structure of the postwar world demonstrates it. But in spite of that”—and his forefinger waved—”in spite of that, we know that you constitute our only hope. And”—his voice sank dramatically—”you know that we know it. You know that we know that without America, the Empire won’t stand.”

Churchill admitted, in that moment, that he knew the peace could only be won according to precepts which the United States of America would lay down. And in saying what he did, he was acknowledging that British colonial policy would be a dead duck, and British attempts to dominate world trade would be a dead duck, and British ambitions to play off the U.S.S.R. against the U.S.A. would be a dead duck. Or would have been, if Father had lived.”

It was but two months after this meeting, that an angry Churchill acquiesced to FDR’s drafting of the August 12, 1941 Atlantic Charter that pulled the British for the first time in history into a new paradigm of cooperation, and multipolarism. When read alongside FDR’s 1941 Four Freedoms speech to congress earlier that year, one can see not only the germ seeds of the later UN Charter drafted on August 14, 1941 and signed into law on June 26, 1945, but also the rise of the Multipolar Alliance and BRI Framework today.

Tragically, FDR died under questionable circumstances on April 12, 1945 resulting in a swift takeover of the US government by supranational forces which have today come to be called “the deep state”. It was within a short interval of time of FDR’s death that every major ally who shared the great president’s vision for a post-war age of cooperation was either dead or labelled a red-commie traitor, never to regain influence again.

Stalin’s Warning to Elliot

Explaining to Elliot why his mother’s request for entry to Russia was rejected, Stalin stated passionately that it was due to Eleanor’s denial of all requests by Soviet representatives to examine the body or even allow for an autopsy. When Elliot pressed for answers to those whom Stalin believed to be his father’s murders, the Russian leader responded: “The Churchill gang! They poisoned your father, and they continue to try to poison me…the Churchill gang!”

It is also telling that Churchill could not bring himself to accept the Order of the Garter at the end of WW2 since he failed to achieve his primary mission as Britain’s wartime leader. Unbeknownst to many historians even today, Churchill’s primary mission was not the winning of the war, or the crushing of fascism, but rather the salvation of the British Empire which had created a Frankenstein monster that refused to play the second string in the New World Order realizing that Germany’s military power gave Hitler the edge he needed to lead in this dystopian dance.

However only a week after Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, Churchill’s conscience allowed him to accept the honor. Perhaps the rabid imperialist looked upon the new Cold War age that he had earlier set into motion alongside the Anglo-American Alliance that he put into place that the rabid imperialist could sleep satisfied knowing that he did his job.

In the next installment we will review the origins of the UN Charter in greater detail followed by a third part on the Westphalian Treaty of 1648 that ended the 30 years war and the strategic importance of this world-changing policy for today.

– William Shakespeare (Twelfth Night)

There is a very real attempt to rewrite history as we speak. A history that is at the root of what organises our world today, for it is understood that who controls the past, will have control over our present and our future.

This attempt to rewrite history is of the most paramount significance because it is what is used today to shape who we regard as a “friend” and who we regard as a “foe.” Thus who controls the “narrative” of history, will also control who we see ourselves “aligned” with.

There is a consequence to this which can only lead to further disunity, to further conflict, to further war. It can only be remedied when the past is finally acknowledged.

There is still time to change this dreadful course.

A Meeting of Minds

The Tehran conference (Nov 28 – Dec 1, 1943) was the first time that Roosevelt and Stalin met in person. It was a historic meeting of the two most important leaders of the Allies that would shape the outcome of WWII.

Roosevelt had been trying to set up a meeting for more than a year, the meeting was of utmost importance because it would allow the two leaders to begin a basis for a solid “trust” to be formed, essential to not only winning the war but for maintaining a stable peace afterwards.

Over four years into WII had passed, and the level of distrust, fear and hatred for the Soviets was still prevalent in the political and military circles within the United States.

This was especially the case within the State Department career officers who were against FDR’s recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933, and thus antagonism to him and his policies were pervasive (1). When Harry Hopkins, FDR’s closest advisor on foreign policy during WWII, was sent to Europe to check in on the foreign service, he had found many U.S. embassies and legations still displaying the portrait of Herbert Hoover on their walls instead of FDR.

George Keenan, best known as the author of the Cold War strategy of “containment,” was among many of similar fibre, who opposed FDR’s recognition of the Soviet Union, stating: “We should have no relationship at all with them…Never- neither then nor at any later date- did I consider the Soviet Union a fit ally or associate, actual or potential, for this country.”

The Foreign Services’ anti-Soviet attitude ran so deep that most were against aid to Russia even after Hitler had invaded, despite the Soviets losing more lives against the Nazis in the first few months than all of Europe combined.

Churchill himself made it no secret that he wanted to make sure Germany would emerge from the war strong enough to counterbalance Russia in Europe (strong… but as he sought to soothingly explain not dangerous).

However, Roosevelt would be the first to recognize that the ever growing barbarism of Hitler was much more dangerous than these foreign intelligence circles were estimating, and that Russia was an imperative ally, in fact the only ally, that could ensure its defeat.

The Tehran conference was a great success in collaborative strategy to win the war, but more importantly, it was a great diplomatic success that would begin one of the most important alliances to have ever occurred in modern history.

The Truth Behind the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

In 1936, Stalin had predicted how German aggression would break out upon the world:

“History shows that when any state intends to make war against another state…it begins to seek frontiers across which it can reach the frontiers of the state it wants to attack…I do not know precisely what frontiers Germany may adapt to her aims, but I think she will find people willing to ‘lend’ her a frontier.”

These statements were made before the Munich Agreement which was just that, a “lending of a frontier.”

On March 18^th 1939 at Stalin’s direction Litvinov, Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, proposed that France, Britain, Poland, Russia, Romania and Turkey join together at a conference to draw up a treaty to stop Hitler. Chamberlain was strongly against the idea, writing to a friend: “I must confess to the most profound distrust of Russia. I have no belief whatever in her ability to maintain an effective offensive, even if she wanted to. And I distrust her motives.” (2)

On April 14^th 1939, Lord Halifax, British Foreign Minister said that Britain would not extend an alliance to Russia in case Germany were to attack. Russia was clearly being told to go at it alone.

On April 16^th 1939, Stalin had Litvinov propose to Sir William Seeds the British ambassador, that Russia, France and Britain make a pact that would bind their three countries to declare war on Germany if they or any nation between the Baltic and the Mediterranean were attacked.

Great Britain and France refused.

The Munich Betrayal had already been signed Sept 30^th 1938, where Britain had “allowed” Hitler’s annexation of the German speaking territory of Czechoslovakia, as if it were a British colony that it could do with as it wished.

In addition, the Bank of England and the Bank of International Settlements, through BoE Governor Montague Norman, allowed for the direct transfer of 5.6 million pounds worth of gold to Hitler that was owned by the Bank of Czechoslovakia.

And lastly, that Prescott Bush on behalf of Union Banking was caught funding Hitler before and during WWII and on Oct 20th, 1942 had its bank assets seized under the “U.S. Trading with the Enemy Act.”

Despite all of this, it is the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that has been selected by “historians” to go down in history as a deep stain on the moral character and true “face” of the Soviet Union. Confirmation that the Russians should never be trusted, for they would side with whoever wielded the greatest power, no matter the ideologies held.

This could not be further from the truth, and is in fact a gross disregard of the responsibility that Great Britain and France held in creating such a desperate situation for the Soviet Union. They had left her destitute because they wanted to see her destroyed.

Stalin was under no illusion. He knew that it was an impossibility for the USSR to coexist with a Nazi Germany, specifically because the existence of the Slavic people was considered unacceptable to the latter. Hitler, who described this belief in detail in his Mein Kampf, made no secret that he thought the Slavic people an inferior race and that after his conquest he planned to turn Russia and Poland into slave nations. Hitler would boast “The conflict [in the east] will be different from the conflict in the west.” The people of the west were to be subdued, the people of the east were to be annihilated.

Poland’s foreign minister Josef Beck who controlled foreign policy was strongly pro-German, and was adamant that Germany would never invade Poland. Some say Beck was a Nazi agent. It is curious that his son Anthony would in fact find after his father’s death, among his possessions an entire album filled with photos of Beck posing with Nazi generals and various officials of the Nazi government elite. (3)

Poland’s refusal to strategise a defense put the Soviet Union in an understandably difficult situation, since Poland shared a border with them. If Poland were to be invaded it would be used as a launching pad to attack the USSR, which had happened numerous times in the recent past, including during WWI.

Despite the fact that Poland would have absolutely no ability to defend itself in the case of a German invasion, Lord Halifax used as his excuse for putting off serious negotiations with the USSR that it was due to Josef Beck’s refusal to allow Russian soldiers to enter Poland, even if it were to drive back a Nazi army…who wanted to exterminate the Polish race as Hitler explicitly stated repeatedly.

Lord Halifax is on record after a meeting with Hitler having said of the führer “By destroying communism in his [Hitler’s] country, he had barred its road to Western Europe…Germany therefore could rightly be regarded as a bulwark of the West against communism.” (4)

Nine days after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed on Sept 1, 1939 the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. After 18 days of fighting not a single Polish division was left. On Sept 17th, the Red Army entered eastern Poland and Poland ceased to exist.

This situation could have been avoided. Poland did not have to suffer the fate it did during WWII, which had the only concentration camp outside of Germany, near their shared border with the Soviet Union, meant to extinguish their race (and everyone knew that the Russians were next on the list).

Poland suffered this fate because Great Britain and France had decided that they were “expendable” for the destruction of the Russian people. Hitler would have to consume Poland before consuming the Soviet Union. By failing to organise an alliance as Stalin requested months beforehand, Germany was allowed to wreak havoc on numerous countries, each country left to attempt meekly to defend itself, and one by one they fell.

What was it all for?

Stalin was aware that Hitler would never leave Russia alone, and the pact was a desperate manoeuvre to attempt to buy time, it was his hope that Hitler would attack France and Great Britain and only then turn his attention towards Russia. We cannot judge this harshly, since it had already been decided by Britain and France to play those very cards. Since alliance was off the table, it was left to a matter of avoiding being first on the chopping block.

Churchill was convinced throughout the war and afterwards, that Stalin was no different from Hitler, and that no alliance could be trusted. Churchill feared that Stalin’s greatest wish was to conquer and subdue western Europe. This fear and delay in forming a second front, by rejecting Eisenhower’s Operation Sledgehammer and delaying Operation OVERLORD for months would cost many millions of innocent lives.

The United States chose to see the situation differently, as Cordell Hull, U.S. Secretary of State from 1933-1944, wrote in his Memoirs that the signing of the pact was Stalin’s way “to keep Hitler’s legions from approaching too close to Russia…We [FDR and Hull] did not wish to place her on the same belligerent footing as Germany…Hitler had not abandoned his ambition with regard to Russia.” And thus, it was regarded as a defensive manoeuvre.

It is interesting to note that Stalin received messages that summer of 1939 from both Hitler and Roosevelt but he received no messages from either Chamberlain or Daladier.

On Oct 31, 1939 Hans Frank, the German governor-general of occupied Poland announced:

“The Poles do not need universities or secondary schools; the Polish lands are to be turned into an intellectual desert…The only educational opportunities that are to be made available are those that demonstrate to them their hopelessness or their ethnic fate.”

And indeed, that is exactly what happened.

When the Red Army liberated Poland, it found no buildings usable as schools, no school equipment, no scientific material, no laboratories. What the Germans did not destroy they shipped back to the fatherland.

The Fight for a U.S.-Russia Alliance

On June 22, 1941 Operation Barbarossa was launched. Within a week the Germans had captured 400,000 soldiers, damaged more than 4,000 planes beyond repair and penetrated 300 miles into Russia, capturing Minsk. Another 200,000 soldiers were captured the second week.

Stalin, recollecting himself from the shock of such levels of destruction, gave a speech July 3, 1941 stirring the spirit of Russia and reassuring its people that victory was possible against such a formidable foe, that the Russian struggle “will merge with the struggle of the peoples of Europe and America for their independence, for democratic liberties. It will be a united front of the peoples who stand for freedom and against enslavement.”

However, the Soviet Union was still going to need support if they were to win against Hitler’s armies. There was strong opposition in America to aiding Russia for various reasons, but the most disruptive one was the thought that the Russians did not deserve American support, that they were no different from the Nazis.

Senate opposition to the very idea of aid to Russia was especially forceful. The Missouri senators were the worst. “It’s a case of dog eat dog,” barked Senator Bennett Clark from Missouri. Senator Harry Truman, yapped in accord: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible.”

Bone chilling words to come from a future American President, words that no Russian would ever forget.

It was thought by many that the Soviets would not last long in a war with Hitler. British intelligence estimated that the Wehrmacht would reach Moscow “in three weeks or less.”

Roosevelt felt differently. He would set up a Lend-Lease in March 1941 which allowed the U.S. to supply anti-Hitler collation allies with material. Despite this aid being delayed for months in the case of the Soviet Union, it nevertheless did come, and not a minute too soon.

On Sept 8, 1941 the siege of Leningrad began and would only end in Jan 1944. Hitler intended to starve the 2.2 million Russian inhabitants declaring “Requests to be allowed to surrender will be rejected…We have no interest in preserving any part of the population of that large city.”

General Zhukov was sent to the city’s defense and saved Leningrad from such a fate. Later Eisenhower would say of Zhukov “In Europe the war has been won and to no man do the United Nations owe a greater debt than to Marshal Zhukov.”

Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program was a major factor in Russia’s salvation. The list of goods that Roosevelt committed to send to the Soviet Union was astounding. It included shipments every month of 400 planes, 500 tanks, 5,000 cars, 10,000 trucks and huge quantities of anti-tank guns, anti-aircraft guns, diesel generators, field telephones, radios, motorcycles, wheat, flour, sugar, 200,000 pairs of boots, 500,000 pairs of surgical gloves and 15,000 amputation saws. By the end of October 1941, ships were carrying 100 bombers, 100 fighter planes, 166 tanks all with spare parts and ammunition, plus 5,500 trucks. (5)

The siege of Moscow lasted from Oct 1941 to Jan 1942, it would claim 926,000 Soviet lives before it ended.

The Soviet Union was receiving supplies from the U.S., but it was taking the full brunt of the Wehrmacht army on their own.

According to WWII historian and authority on Nazi Germany Gerhard Weinberg, the German military’s own figures show that ten thousand Russian prisoners of war were shot or killed by hunger and disease EVERY SINGLE DAY for the first seven months of the war. This amounts to two million, adding one million Soviet citizens who died during this period, 3 million Russians died in the first seven months of the war.

Eisenhower had drafted a plan code name Sledgehammer to organise a second front to support Russia, but it would rely on the complete backing of Great Britain from where the operation would be launched, for housing and aircraft support.

Major General Ismay head of the British Office of the Minister of Defense was among those who thought it a great mistake to have misled General George Marshall and Hopkins on British support for the operation, stating:

“Our American friends went happily under the mistaken impression that we had committed ourselves to both Roundup and Sledgehammer…When he had to tell them, after the most thorough study of Sledgehammer, that we were absolutely opposed to it, they felt that we had broken faith with them…I think we should have come clean, much cleaner than we did, and said, “We are frankly horrified because of what we have been through in our lifetime.’ “(6)

The second front was postponed yet again, the invasion of French North Africa by a joint U.S.-British operation occurred instead.

It is interesting to note that Churchill is on record for his frustration at the Soviets destroying German weapons upon capturing German soldiers, he was furious because he wanted these weapons kept in case they would be needed against the Russians in a future war…

FDR’s Vision for a Postwar World

The Atlantic Charter was to be the death knell for colonial empires. Western Europe and America thought of it in terms of safety within borders, but the Third World heard the true spirit; national sovereignty. It would take years to make its way around the globe but the fiery spirit had been lit among colonial peoples. Churchill only went along with it because he had to. The continued existence of the British Empire was at stake and only America could save it.

As recounted in, Elliot Roosevelt’s As He Saw It, FDR made his thoughts clear on the matter: “I think I speak as America’s president when I say that America won’t help England in the war simply so that she will be able to continue to ride roughshod over colonial peoples.”

Churchill never understood FDR’s idea that independence, not dependence, was the best economic solution to the world’s problems, nor did he understand that FDR believed the pursuit and maintenance of colonial empires was a root cause of WWII (as did Stalin), and that before independence of these countries could be accomplished it would need in the meantime a strong and balanced leadership of the four powers; U.S., Russia, China and Great Britain to defend nations’ right to sovereignty.

On February 23 1944, FDR stated at a press conference his thoughts on the United Nations:

Q: Do you conscientiously believe that the Conference can be the foundation of world peace for more than the generation of the men who are building that peace?

FDR: I can answer that question if you can tell me who your descendants will be in the year 2057.

Q: Can we look forward?

FDR: We can look as far ahead as humanity believes in this sort of thing. The United Nations will evolve into the best method ever devised for stopping war, and it will also be the beginning of something else to go with it.

On March 1^st, 1944 FDR spoke to a packed joint session of Congress stating:

“The Crimea [Yalta] Conference was a successful effort by the three [U.S., USSR and Britain] leading Nations to find a common ground for peace. It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balance of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries – and have always failed. We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organization in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join.”

Let U.S. not U.S. not allow so many millions to have died for this vision, be for naught.

An upcoming paper will focus on the relations between Truman and Stalin, the dropping of the Atomic Bomb and Churchill’s announcement of the Iron Curtain.

The author can be reached at cynthiachung@tutanota.com

(1) On November 16, 1933, President Roosevelt had ended almost 16 years of American non-recognition of the Soviet Union following a series of negotiations in Washington, D.C. with the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov.
(2) P 162, Susan Butler’s “Roosevelt and Stalin: Portrait of a Partnership”
(3) P 160, Ibid
(4) P 165, Ibid
(5) Ibid
(6) P 247, Ibid

“Russia will be remembered as an empire of cynical lies.”

“The Kremlin praises Stalin.”

“Putin veers into radical revisionism.”

“Of course it’s a piece of crude propaganda.”

These are the comments of know-nothings and haters who want to ride on the bandwagon of Russophobia and anti-Putinism prevalent in the West. It takes years, even decades to explore the various national archives on the origins and conduct of World War II. I have been working in those archives for more than thirty years. I do not say this to boast, but merely to emphasise that my life’s work has been devoted to the study of Soviet foreign policy and to the origins and conduct of the Second World War. I am now working on a new book-length manuscript, covering the period from 1930 to 1942, which at present amounts to 21 chapters and more than 1,200 pages of typescript. I still have a way to go before I am finished. Some critics will no doubt dismiss my work, using the timeless strategy of shooting the messenger in order to kill the message. You take your chances when you go up against orthodoxy and received ideas. That’s life.

Although I have written and continue to write a great deal on the subject of President Putin’s article, I will just stick to a few salient points in this column. They are based on material from Soviet, French, British, and US archives. I would add that the Soviet diplomatic papers are rich and not only explain Soviet foreign policy, but report on the politics, economics, and foreign policies of other states. There are extraordinary, detailed reports of conversations between Soviet diplomats and politicians, officials, diplomats, journalists, businessmen, and even Free Masons of the countries in which they were stationed. These foreign interlocutors spoke with remarkable candor about what was going on in their countries. A few prominent examples are Winston S. Churchill, Sir Robert Vansittart, Max Aitken (or Lord Beaverbrook), David Lloyd George, Léon Blum, Édouard Herriot, Georges Mandel, Joseph Paul-Boncour, and the less well-known Romanian foreign minister, Nicolae Titulescu.

I propose to offer a few fragments from my book manuscript. So let’s begin in December 1933, eleven months after Hitler came to power in Germany, the Soviet Politburo established the principles of a new policy of collective security and mutual assistance against Nazi Germany. The Soviet idea was to re-establish the World War I anti-German entente, composed, inter alia, of France, Britain, the United States, and even fascist Italy. Although not stated publicly, it was a policy of containment and preparation for war, should containment fail. The League of Nations became an important element of Soviet strategy to be strengthened and readied for use against Nazi Germany.

An improvement of Soviet relations with France began in 1932; with the United States, in 1933; and with Britain, in 1934. The circumstances were different of course in each country, but Soviet attempts to pursue collective security and mutual assistance against Hitlerite Germany were basically rejected in the United States in 1934, in France, initially also in 1934 (a more complex case), and in Britain, in early 1936.

The Soviet government also attempted to improve relations with Romania where the most important advocate of mutual assistance, was the foreign minister, Titulescu. He had a remarkable relationship with his Soviet counterpart, Maksim M. Litvinov, the able executor of Soviet foreign policy, and with the Soviet ambassador in Bucharest, Mikhail S. Ostrovsky. Titulescu trusted Ostrovsky more than he did his own colleagues. He (Titulescu) was squeezed out of office in August 1936; his cabinet colleagues thought he was “too pro-Soviet”. His departure marked the end of serious attempts at Soviet-Romanian mutual assistance.

In Romania, the most important advocate of mutual assistance was the foreign minister, Titulescu

In Czechoslovakia, Soviet diplomats also made progress. Their task was easier in Prague because Nazi Germany was an obvious threat to Czechoslovak independence. A pact of mutual assistance was concluded in May 1935, but was limited in scope and conditional on French intervention, first, in the event of Nazi aggression.

It may come as a surprise, but the Soviet government also attempted to improve relations with Poland, especially in 1932-1933. The Poles affected to be somewhat interested in Soviet overtures, but only as a ruse to enhance their value in negotiations with Hitlerite Germany for the conclusion in January 1934 of a non-aggression pact. Thereafter, the Poles rejected Soviet overtures for better relations. Poland became a determined opponent and spoiler of Soviet collective security and mutual assistance right up until August 1939. The Polish government served as an accomplice of Hitlerite Germany in 1938 during the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and was widely criticised for it. Churchill referred to the Poles as “vultures”. Then Colonel Charles de Gaulle considered Poland to be a “nothing… playing a double game” (1936). A French diplomat, Roland de Margerie, compared the Poles during the Munich crisis to “ghouls who in former centuries crawled the battlefields to kill and rob the wounded….” Putin’s account of Polish policy during the 1930s is historically accurate and supported by archival evidence, and is not in the least “radical revisionism”… unless one considers Churchill a “revisionist”. I imagine President Putin a little like Sgt. Joe Friday, the fictional LA police detective, saying, “Just the facts… I just want to get the facts….”

Talks with the Soviet Union were opposed by the French general staff and the defence minister, Édouard Daladier.

In 1937 the Polish high command explained their position to French counterparts. The Poles saw themselves between potential enemies, Nazi Germany in the west and the Soviet Union in the east. According to a report from the French 2^e Bureau, contacts with the Polish general staff indicated “a very clear accentuation of the Polish anti-Russian position.”

“From the Polish point of view,” the report noted, “the German danger vis-à-vis Poland is limited to some known territorial claims. The Russian danger on the other hand aims at the total destruction of the Polish state.” Readers should understand that there was at that time no such Soviet aim. On the contrary, Soviet policy, as Commissar Litvinov often said, was to improve relations with Poland and to draw it into an anti-Nazi entente. The Polish elite saw matters differently. Faced with the two dangers, the Polish general staff not only did not contemplate military cooperation with the USSR, but stated to the French that in the event of a Soviet “invasion” for whatever reason [meaning Red Army intervention to aid Czechoslovakia in the event of Nazi aggression], it “could be led to accept German military aid even if such collaboration should lead to Polish territorial losses.” From 1934 onward the crucial issue for effective Soviet military support for France and for Czechoslovakia was Red Army passage across parts of Poland and Romania to engage the enemy (since the USSR did not have a common frontier with Germany). Poland would never agree to it, although Romania, under Titulescu, was more receptive on condition of French and British guarantees. The Poles were essentially blackmailing the French: if you ally with the USSR, we’ll go with Nazi Germany. What will you do then? The French general staff got the message.

The Soviet side desired a consolidation of Franco-Soviet relations to face the Nazi danger and that the French general staff did not. The reasons were complicated based on domestic hostility toward the French communist party and the USSR, defeatism, fear of war and the spread of communism, admiration for fascism, and so on.

One of the more egregious examples of western bad faith toward the USSR was French. In May 1935 France and the USSR signed a mutual assistance pact which the French side had gutted of substance. This is a complicated story. In spite of the obstacles, Soviet diplomats and soldiers pursued a consolidation of the mutual assistance pact through the conduct of military staff conversations, that is, between the French and Soviet general staffs. There were some French politicians and ministers who wanted these discussions to proceed, but the French general staff and the defence minister, Édouard Daladier, opposed them. It was difficult to do so openly (because some cabinet members supported the staff talks), and so the generals and Daladier pursued a policy of stringing along their Soviet counterparts. Delay, delay, delay became the French strategy. Daladier was a defeatist. In 1936 he told colleagues that Germany would flatten Czechoslovakia’s defences in six hours, and therefore it was not worth a fight. Shocking, impossible, you might think, but the Soviet and French archival papers fit together like bricks in a mason’s well-built wall. There can be no question that the Soviet side desired a consolidation of Franco-Soviet relations to face the Nazi danger and that the French general staff did not. The reasons were complicated based on domestic hostility toward the French communist party and the USSR, defeatism, fear of war and the spread of communism, admiration for fascism, and so on.

Titulescu’s exclusion from office in August 1936 marked the failure of Soviet policy although the Soviet side continued to pursue mutual assistance against Nazi Germany until August 1939. One after the other, the United States, France, Italy, Britain declined better relations with the USSR. The smaller powers regarded these developments with dismay. Czechoslovakia and Romania looked to a strong France and would not go beyond French commitments to the USSR. France looked to Britain. The British were the key, if they were ready to march, ready to ally themselves with the USSR, everyone else would fall into line. Without the British – who would not march – everything fell apart.

Putin’s account of the Polish role in the Munich crisis is accurate and cannot be denied, at least based on the historical evidence.

In the autumn of 1936, all Soviet efforts for mutual assistance had failed, and the USSR found itself isolated. No one wanted to ally with Moscow against Nazi Germany; all the above mentioned European powers conducted negotiations with Berlin to lure the wolf away from their doors. Even the Czechoslovaks. The idea, both stated and unstated, was to turn Hitler’s ambitions eastward against the USSR. “A spirit of capitulation,” Litvinov warned Stalin in September 1936, “has arisen not only in France, but also in Czechoslovakia….” This is why the Soviet government continued its pursuit of mutual assistance. It did not on any account wish to find itself isolated in Europe, a real danger if France and Britain could conclude, as they sought to do, a deal with Hitler for security in Western Europe.

Putin’s account of the Polish role in the Munich crisis is accurate and cannot be denied, at least based on the historical evidence. The irony is of course that Poland was Hitlerite Germany’s accomplice in 1938, only to become its victim in 1939.

Putin’s brief account of the last chance alliance negotiations in 1939 between France, Britain and the USSR is also accurate. In some ways Soviet persistence in pursuit of an alliance against the Nazi menace is remarkable in spite of years of Anglo-French disinterest or opposition. Even during the summer of 1939 the British continued secret negotiations with the Germans for a last chance rapprochement when they were also negotiating at the same time with the Soviet Union. The news leaked out in the British papers in late July causing a scandal in London. Imagine the Soviet reaction as agreement was being reached for Anglo-Franco-Soviet alliance negotiations in Moscow.

In early August British and French military missions set out for Moscow on a slow chartered merchantman, the City of Exeter, making a top speed of thirteen knots. One Foreign Office official had proposed sending the missions in a fleet of fast British cruisers to make a point. The Foreign Secretary, Edward Lord Halifax, thought that idea was too provocative. So the French and British delegations set out on a lumbering merchantman and took five days to get to the USSR. They played shuffleboard to kill time. All the while, tick tock, the countdown to war was underway. Everyone knew it was approaching.

Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, Soviet commissar for war

Were the British and French governments serious about these last chance negotiations? The British chief negotiator, Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, had no written powers to conduct negotiations or sign an agreement with the Soviet side. The Foreign Office eventually sent out credentials by air mail. It is unknown whether Drax ever received them. His French counterpart, General Joseph Doumenc, had a vague letter of authority from the then président du Conseil, Daladier. He could negotiate, but not sign an agreement. Doumenc and Drax were relative nobodies. On the other hand, the Soviet delegation was headed by Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, commissar for war, and other senior Soviet officers. He had full plenipotentiary powers in so far as that was possible with Stalin. “All indications so far go to show,” advised the British ambassador in Moscow, “that Soviet military negotiators are really out for business.” In contrast, formal British instructions were to “go very slowly”, as President Putin correctly points out. When Drax met Foreign Secretary Halifax before leaving for Moscow, he asked about the “possibility of failure” in the negotiations. “There was a short but impressive silence,” according to Drax, “and the Foreign Secretary then remarked that on the whole it would be preferable to draw out the negotiations as long as possible.” Doumenc commented that he had been sent to Moscow with “empty hands”, les mains vides. They had nothing to offer their Soviet interlocutors. They could not deliver Polish cooperation, for Poland’s opposition to an agreement continued until the very end. Nor could they offer dynamic war plans to defeat Hitler: Britain could send two divisions to France at the outset of a European war. You can’t do much with two divisions. In contrast, the Red Army could immediately mobilize one hundred divisions, and Soviet forces were just then thrashing the Japanese in heavy fighting on the Manchurian frontier. “They are not serious,” Stalin concluded. The French and British governments appeared to think they could play Stalin for a dope. Oh, how wrong they were.

It is easy to criticise the Soviet side for agreeing to the non-aggression pact. It was the least attractive policy option, but what would you have done in Stalin’s boots? The Soviet side had pursued a policy of collective security and mutual assistance against Nazi Germany officially since December 1933. Démarche after démarche, attempt after attempt to achieve an anti-Nazi entente with the west had failed. The British and the French did not want it, preferring time after time to find some way forward with Herr Hitler. The deal at Munich, the betrayal of Czechoslovakia, made them unfit to criticise the non-aggression pact. As British historian, the late A.J.P. Taylor, put it sixty years ago, violent western reproaches against the USSR “came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich…. The Russians, in fact, did only what the Western statesmen had hoped to do; and Western bitterness was the bitterness of disappointment, mixed with anger that professions of Communism were no more sincere than their own professions of democracy [in dealing with Hitler].” In August 1939, the French ambassador in Moscow called it tit for tat.

The French and British governments appeared to think they could play Stalin for a dope. Oh, how wrong they were.

Even in August 1939, with war imminent, the French and British were not serious. You can only play someone for a fool for so long. Moreover, great powers will not opt for war with weak, dissembling allies. Given the circumstances, given the danger, Soviet long-suffering patience with their Anglo-French interlocutors finally ran out.

A Soviet-western alliance in the 1930s was not a pig in a poke, by the way, there were people in France and Britain who favoured an alliance with the USSR against the Axis and fought hard to obtain it. One Soviet diplomat called them “white crows” or rare birds. They reckoned that without the USSR and without the Red Army, they could not hope to defeat the Nazi Wehrmacht. They were right, as the actual unfolding of World War II would demonstrate. There were more than a few in France and Britain who favoured an alliance with the USSR, but they could not swing their governments. They were not numerous enough or influential enough for that.

Until the very end the Poles were incorrigible, played the fool’s game, blinded by their hatred of Russia, Soviet or otherwise. When it came to a choice between Germany and Russia, the Polish elite did not hesitate. The Russian was an “Asiatic”, a “barbarian”; the German at least was a civilised European. When Drax and Doumenc met Voroshilov for the last time in Moscow to plead for a continuation of negotiations, Voroshilov had this to say, according to the secret Soviet record of conversation: “At the time when we were discussing the organisation of a united front against aggression in Europe, the Polish press and individual political officials were declaring with particular vigour and without stop that they do not need any help at all from the side of the USSR. Romania remained quiet, but Poland conducted itself very strangely: it cried out to the entire world that Soviet troops would not pass across its territory [to face the common Nazi enemy], that it did not consider necessary any business with the Soviet Union, and so on. In these circumstances to calculate on the success of our negotiations, of course, was impossible.” Admiral Drax replied that he hoped in the future the circumstances would become more favourable. “We also hope so,” Voroshilov replied. In the end the circumstances did improve in 1941 when the grand alliance was organised under the fire of Nazi guns.

There is a last irony which I would like to underline. During the interwar years Stalin pursued a foreign policy intended to avoid Soviet isolation so that the West would/could not gang up on the USSR. In August 1939 he was faced with unattractive options: war with doubtful allies, and thus war alone against the Wehrmacht, or a deal, however ugly, or temporary it might be, with Hitlerite Germany to stay out of the war. Stalin’s choice proved ill-fated. In June 1941 he was to find himself isolated, facing a massive Nazi invasion. France was gone, beaten and humiliated in 1940. Britain was saved only by the English Channel and the Royal Air Force. It could offer little support to the Red Army and no troops to fight on the Soviet front. The Red Army had to fight against the Wehrmacht nearly alone for three years, exactly the situation which Stalin had always wanted to avoid. He got it anyway. Sometimes people forget that the past was once in the future. Life and death decisions are not as easy to make in the present as they are in hindsight.

The facts are the facts: nowhere in Europe did any government want to ally wholeheartedly with the USSR against the common foe. The small powers counted on Britain and France to stand firm, but they never did. The USSR was the ugly Cassandra, the truth-teller about the Nazi danger: almost everyone despised her and few would embrace her. Like it or not, the direct result was the non-aggression pact.

The facts will not stop western mainstream media, and the “experts” on Twitter from making various sorts of accusations against President Putin and the Russian Federation. It will not stop the Poles from denying their own sombre history during the 1930s. This is part of a dangerous US/NATO campaign of denigration and isolation against the Russian Federation and its president. The propaganda war over World War II will thus continue, archival evidence or not. As politicians go President Putin is not a bad historian. I share, more or less, his views on World War II, and hopefully will have a book manuscript to publish before too long, which demonstrates beyond a doubt where the responsibilities lay for the outbreak war in 1939.

So I tip my hat to President Putin for daring to challenge the west’s fake history and for braving the loud, potted indignation of western critics. His idea for better relations with the United States, Britain, and France is splendid although he must surely know that nothing is likely to come of it. When you have the great responsibility of trying to keep the peace, however, one does what one can even if it is only for the record.

It is always forgotten that Franklin Roosevelt was a personal eyewitness to the catastrophic Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. FDR was no child. He was by then almost 40 years old and had been as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the civilian chief operating official of the entire United States Navy for more than six years including through a world war.

Roosevelt recognized at the time very clearly that megalomaniac President Woodrow Wilson had completely destroyed the future peace and happiness of the entire world on the rocks of his blasphemous arrogance and sheer incompetence. Decades of observation and reflection combined to show how Wilson’s airy visions of a world remade on the principles of national self determination was only a recipe for endless bloodbaths and more chaos.

Wilson’s monumental mess up at Versailles also led the United States to withdraw from the world stage for more than 20 years.

Roosevelt had a very different vision of the world to come after 1945. Central to it was his understanding that the United States and the Soviet Union did not have to love each other or ignore their very different national interests but that they had to remain partners in the great task of maintaining world peace. But tragically, this vision did not survive the president’s death from a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945.

Roosevelt’s successor Harry Truman suddenly, immediately and without even giving a courtesy warning shut down all Lend Lease aid to the Soviet Union: it was the decision that truly started the Cold War.

Then Truman abandoned Roosevelt’s wise and visionary determination to force the old European powers of Britain, France and the Netherlands to immediately grant independence, or at least initiate a phased process towards that goal in most of their old colonies across Africa and Asia.

Instead, Truman threw U.S. financial and military support behind frantic British and French attempts to keep most of their empires. This decision led directly to two of the most terrible post-colonial wars waged by the French to hold on to Algeria and Indo-China – modern Vietnam, along with Cambodia and Laos.

Thirty more years of wars and oceans of innocent blood would flow before the inevitable outcomes that Franklin Roosevelt reached in 1945 came about anyway.

It has been an almost unanimous consensus among Western historians that Roosevelt was a naive and childish appeaser of Josef Stalin and international communism. Instead, FDR’s successor Truman has been elevated as a far greater figure and the great hero in supposedly saving the West from Soviet conquest.

However, two outstanding recent histories by Susan Butler (“Roosevelt and Stalin”) and Nigel Hamilton “War and Peace: FDR’s Final Odyssey”) document and present a far different picture.

For all their myriad differences, Roosevelt had succeeded in forging an effective partnership with Stalin to create as table, long-lasting new world system in which the two dominant superpowers could work together to maintain world peace.

Indeed, far from manipulating Roosevelt as so many neoconservative and neoliberal Western writers have mindlessly claimed for so many decades, Stalin was emotionally shocked and deeply depressed by FDR’s s passing, Being Stalin, his first reaction was to task the formidable Soviet espionage apparatus to investigate whether FDR had actually been assassinated by hardliners in his own government.

That was not the case. On the contrary, as Hamilton documents, FDR suffered a catastrophic health collapse following his return from the October 1943 Tehran conference with Stalin and Winston Churchill. It was almost certainly brought on by the rigors suffered by an already seriously ill man flying in unpressurized aircraft higher than 10,000 feet for extended periods of time.

Indeed, as Hamilton step by step shows, Roosevelt’s chief cardiologist Dr. Howard Bruenn performed prodigies to keep a dying man alive and as leader of the United States for another 18 months almost to the victorious conclusion of the war against Nazi Germany.

Franklin Roosevelt died at the age of 63 after years of remorselessly developing heart problems. His father James had died from the same fundamental causes. His cousin, President Theodore Roosevelt had died at the age of 61 after years of comparable health problems. The extraordinary fact of FDR’s final years was not that he died so soon but that he lived so long.

It was tragic that FDR did not live to celebrate the Victory Day over the Nazi evil he had done so much achieve. He missed it by only four weeks.

It was vastly more tragic that FDR died before he could take the crucial steps to institutionalize the crucial partnership of the U.S. and the USSR on a lasting basis and force the Europeans to allow their emerging colonies a clear, honest path to freedom.

If the leaders of today’s Democratic Party truly wished to revive the great achievements and heritage of their greatest leader, they would immediately end all the unnecessary wars they have cheered, demanded and plunged into around the world: And they would immediately restore the vital partnership with Russia that was the key to his war success.

Were FDR permitted to return today, he would be horrified, raging and contemptuous of those who claimed to be his successors needlessly demonizing a non-communist and non-aggressive Russia, free and open to a degree no-one in the West in his own day could have possibly imagined.

Most of all, he would have been disgusted beyond reason to see the United States committed so deeply to fighting needless, meaningless unending wars across the Middle East, Asia and Eastern Europe – wars with no conceivable goal and therefore with no possible end, eternal wars – exercises only in exhaustion and futility.

Franklin Roosevelt would not have celebrated Victory Day 75 years after his death with his customary loud and generous laughter. He could only have wept.

Much has been written over the years about the wartime Yalta conference, and more ink will no doubt be spilled this year, on its 75^th anniversary. Yalta was supposed to mark the beginnings of post-war Anglo-American-Soviet cooperation. Plans were discussed for the United Nations. Germany was to be sorted out so it would not again threaten European security. Reparations in kind were to be paid to the USSR to help rebuild the country. Poland was to be moved westward with a new government acceptable to the Big Three allies. The USSR would come into the war against Japan, and so on. The atmosphere at the meetings was cordial, but the cordiality did not last long. All the high hopes were soon dashed, and then followed by a welter of recriminations. Naïve, sick Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) caved in to Joseph Stalin. Or FDR betrayed Winston Churchill. Or Churchill and FDR abandoned Poland to communism. Or… and this is perhaps the more common view in the West, Stalin betrayed the Grand Alliance and duped his partners. Yalta, whichever way you look at it, did not lead to those “broad, sunlit uplands”, as Churchill put it, on which many pinned their hopes.

The Russian government likes to remind people in the West of the Grand Alliance against Nazi Germany with a view to improving relations in the present for some new common cause, or simply because there is no other alternative. One can understand that need and the reasoning, and more power to the Russians for trying, but as a historian I follow the trails of evidence wherever they lead.

In November 1933 FDR and Maksim M. Litvinov, then commissar (narkom) for foreign affairs, negotiated US recognition of the USSR.

If only things had been different. For example, if only FDR had not suddenly died on 12 April 1945, and if only Harry Truman had not become US president. I am not sure FDR’s continued presence in the White House would have mattered one way or the other. In November 1933 FDR and Maksim M. Litvinov, then commissar (narkom) for foreign affairs, negotiated US recognition of the USSR. Both Roosevelt and Stalin wanted to close a deal, especially on outstanding debts from the revolutionary period. This would have allowed wider cooperation on “political” issues, mainly security against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. If these two powerful leaders wanted to get on better terms in 1933, a Soviet-American rapprochement should have started in that year, and not in 1941. What happened? The State Department, full of Sovietophobes, intervened to scuttle the start made by FDR and Litvinov. Would it have been any different in 1945, had Roosevelt lived?

It was not just the anti-communists in the United States, who opposed postwar cooperation with the USSR; there were also Sovietophobes in London. Anglo-Soviet relations were almost always bad from 1917 to 1941. After the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917 the British government sent troops to the far distant corners of Russia and paid out more than a £100 million pounds to support the White Guard resistance against Soviet Russia. This was not beer money. If it had been up to Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for war (from January 1919), a lot more would have been done to overthrow the Bolsheviks. After the failure of the Allied intervention in 1920-1921, there were occasional attempts to improve Anglo-Soviet relations which never went very far.

The best chance came in 1934 when Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Undersecretary of the Foreign Office, and Ivan M. Maisky, the Soviet polpred, or ambassador in London, started talking about a rapprochement in the summer of 1934. The motivation for both was the rising menace of Nazi Germany, as it was for FDR and Litvinov. In March 1935 Anthony Eden, then Lord Privy Seal, went to Moscow, to meet Stalin, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, Litvinov and others. Litvinov wanted to talk about the Nazi danger, but Eden preferred generalities. Litvinov and Maisky thought Eden was on their side, but they were wrong. When he became Foreign Secretary at the end of the 1935, he almost immediately put the brakes on the Anglo-Soviet rapprochement.

Maisky, the Soviet polpred, or ambassador in London

Why would Eden do that? It was the usual anticommunism amongst the British governing elite, the usual Sovietophobia. Anglo-Soviet relations never got beyond this false start even as the Nazi threat to peace increased through the various crises of the late 1930s. At the Munich conference in September 1938 the British and French governments sold out Czechoslovakia for five months of false security. They had ambitions for much more with Herr Hitler, but he bitterly disappointed them.

And finally there were the last chance negotiations in 1939 to organise an Anglo-Franco-Soviet front against Nazi Germany. In April the Soviet government made new alliance offers, and put them in writing to make a point. Even then however, as astonishing as it might seem now, Britain and France failed to seize the opportunity to close a deal with Moscow. British and French leaders were just not serious about an anti-Nazi entente with the USSR in spite of Churchill’s warning in the House of Commons that without the Red Army, France and Britain had no chance in a war against Hitler.

Litvinov wanted to talk about the Nazi danger, but Eden preferred generalities

In May Stalin sacked his stalwart narkom Litvinov. It should have been a wake-up call in London and Paris, but wasn’t. You could not blame Stalin for dismissing Litvinov. He was mocked in the west. He had tried since 1933 to organise an anti-Nazi bloc. It was the Grand Alliance That Never Was. This was not a personal policy, by the way, but Soviet policy approved by Stalin. All the USSR’s prospective allies had abandoned Moscow one after the other: the United States, France, Italy (yes even fascist Italy), Britain, and Romania. Even the dodgy Czechoslovaks were unreliable. Poland of course always stood against cooperation with the USSR. In July 1939 British officials were caught still talking with German counterparts about a last minute détente.

In August 1939 British and French delegations finally went to Moscow to negotiate terms of an alliance. They travelled on a slow chartered merchantman, without authority to conclude an agreement, but with instructions to “go very slowly”. “With empty hands,” said the French chief negotiator. The clock was ticking down to war, and still the British and French were not serious with their assumed Soviet allies.

You know what happened next. Stalin bailed himself out by concluding the non-aggression pact with Hitler. Nothing to be proud of, mind you, but what options did he have? Trust the French? Trust the British? They were not serious, and you don’t go to with war with allies who are not serious. What would you have done? Of course, the British and French blamed Stalin for the failure of negotiations. And so have generations of western historians and more recently politicians. It was an audacious Pot calling Kettle black.

In September 1939 the Wehrmacht invaded Poland and defeated it in a matter of days. In May 1940 France was knocked out of the war, lasting only a little longer than Poland had done. Couldn’t the French have fought a little? Stalin asked his colleagues at the time. And the British, how could they let this happen? Now Hitler is going to beat our brains out, Stalin rightly feared.

On 22 June 1941 Hitler invaded the USSR. Every intelligence agency in Europe knew that Hitler was going to attack. The various Soviet agencies knew too and kept Stalin well informed. He must have been about the only leader in Europe who did not believe that Hitler would invade. The British and Americans reckoned that the Red Army would hold out for 4 to 6 weeks. Not much optimism there. The British of course were projecting from their own experience. They had yet to beat the Wehrmacht in battle.

David Low, the celebrated British cartoonist, drew an image, asking when Britain would offer real help instead of rhetorical flowers of praise.

Churchill broke out cigars and cognac when Germany attacked the USSR. You can always count on Winston for a good quote: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil.” On other matters he was not so eager in spite of a grand speech on BBC the evening of 22 June. There was a big debate inside the government about whether the Soviet national anthem, the Internationale, should be played on BBC radio on Sunday evenings along with the anthems of other British allies. The government at first refused to approve, not wanting to appear to be endorsing socialist revolution. A touchy subject, Winston was adamant until after the Soviet victory before Moscow in December 1941. Eden, again Foreign Secretary, asked the PM to relent. “All right,” Churchill wrote on Eden’s note. Churchill had a hard time deciding whether the Russians were “barbarians” or allies, even when he needed them most.

That summer of 1941 Britain began to ship war matériel to the USSR. Not much mind you, but better than nothing. Britain was still not in a position to offer important assistance. When Stalin suggested that Britain send troops to fight on the Soviet front, Churchill would have nothing to do with it, though others in London felt guilty because the Red Army was doing all the fighting. The Foreign Office suggested an evasive reply. David Low, the celebrated British cartoonist, drew an image, asking when Britain would offer real help instead of rhetorical flowers of praise. In early July 1941 Maisky, the Soviet polpred, raised the question of a second front in France. That too was out of the question.

Did the British want to fight to the last Red Army soldier? David Low wondered in a cartoon where ‘Colonel Blimp’, the proverbial rotten British Tory, and his cronies sat watching from afar the war in the east. You could hardly blame Stalin for accusing the British of shirking the fight during the late summer and autumn of 1942 with the battle of Stalingrad raging. Churchill and Roosevelt made careless promises about a second front which they could not or would not keep.

During the summer of 1941 Roosevelt got involved after sitting on the sidelines, worried about the “isolationist”, anti-communist opposition. The Soviet polpred in Washington reported obstacles in obtaining US assistance, but then he noted an improvement in the atmosphere. In November 1941 FDR announced that “Lend-Lease” supplies would go to the USSR. The Grand Alliance began to form up.  Roosevelt became Godfather of the Big Three.

David Low wondered in a cartoon where ‘Colonel Blimp’, the proverbial rotten British Tory, and his cronies sat watching from afar the war in the east.

After the Soviet victory before Moscow in December 1941 the Foreign Office debated what impact it would have on the course of the war. Stalin could opt out of the war leaving Britain and the US in the lurch. Sir Orme G. Sargent and Sir Alexander Cadogan, senior Foreign Office officials, were great Sovietophobes. Historians can always count on them for something nasty to say about the USSR. In early February 1942 they were worried about the outcome of the war. They feared that the Red Army might win without any help from the west. According to Cadogan and Sargent, that would be a catastrophe. Britain would have nothing to say about the post-war order.

Here is what Cadogan had to say on 8 February 1942: “… we ought to hope for continued pressure by the Soviet, with erosion of German manpower & material and not too [emphasis in original] great a geographical advance.”

Eden responded on the same day: “… it remains broadly true that a German collapse this year will be an exclusively Soviet victory with all that implies. Therefore clearly we must do all in our power to resolve grievances & come to terms with [Stalin] for the future. This may also prevent him from double crossing us, but it will at least remove pretexts. He has these now…” Britain had no armies in Europe, fighting the Germans.

The Foreign Office had two big worries in February 1942: the Red Army winning too quickly and Stalin double-crossing them. Can you imagine? The Red Army had already suffered more than 3 million casualties, not to speak of civilian losses, and the Foreign Office was worried about the Red Army winning too quickly.

Pragmatist that he was, Churchill knew what he had to do. He threw some flowers to Stalin: “Words fail me to express the admiration which all of us feel at the continued brilliant successes of your Armies against the German invader, but I cannot resist sending you a further word of gratitude and congratulation on all that Russia is doing for the common cause.”

Philip Faymonville, the Brigadier in charge of Lend-Lease, got on well with his Soviet counterparts which did not sit well with the US military attaché, Joseph Michela

In July 1941 the British and Soviet governments exchanged military missions. The first three British heads of mission were a failure. They were Generals Frank Noel Mason-Macfarlane, Giffard Martel and Brocas Burrows. The latter two officers were true blue Sovietophobes. General Burrows had been in Murmansk during the British intervention in 1918-1919. Burrows could not hide his hatred of the USSR. He wanted to wear medals he had got from the White Guard armies. The Foreign Office reluctantly let him do it. Burrows only lasted a few months in Moscow before Stalin himself asked for his recall.

There was also trouble in the US embassy in Moscow. The Brigadier in charge of Lend-Lease was Philip Faymonville. He got on well with his Soviet counterparts which did not sit well with the US military attaché, Joseph Michela. Brigadier Michela hated the USSR and disdained the Red Army. He was wrong about Soviet capabilities and intentions in just about every report he sent to Washington. What on earth was he doing in Moscow? In 1942 he accused Faymonville of being a homosexual, blackmailed, he implied by Soviet intelligence. The FBI investigated and found nothing but praise for Faymonville. Michela was a good hater and hated “the pinks” in the US government who supported the Soviet war effort. That also included FDR since it was his policy to support the USSR.  The US embassy in Moscow was infested with Sovietophobes; and it was civil war between Michela and Faymonville. In 1943 they were recalled to Washington.

In the summer of 1944 Sovietophobia in the British War Office was so intense that it worried the Foreign Office. Stalin was certain to hear of it. In August 1944 the Chiefs of Staff were talking about the USSR as “enemy no. 1”. This was a reversion back to the 1930s when western elites could not decide if the USSR or Nazi Germany was “enemy no. 1.” The Foreign Office was greatly alarmed by the inability of British senior officers to conduct themselves “diplomatically” with their Soviet counterparts. To quote the head of the Northern Department, Christopher F. A. Warner, “Anglo-Russian post-war relations will be irretrievably prejudiced with the most appalling results for perhaps 100 years. This is altogether too high a price to pay for the prejudices of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff [Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke]”. Even Churchill had trouble restraining his old anti-Bolshevik urges, shocking his colleagues at times with outlandish comments about communist crocodiles and Russian barbarians.

Russophobia and Sovietophobia were alive and well in the higher ranks of the British and US armed forces even as the Red Army was crushing the Wehrmacht. And that was not all. In June 1944 Stalin proposed the formation of a Tripartite Military Commission to coordinate military planning with the western allies, they having finally landed in Normandy. After months of delays, the proposal was abandoned because of foot dragging by the British Chiefs of Staff.

British army hostility also manifested itself in planning for the post-war period. In several major planning documents prior to the end of the war you can follow the revisions to these papers where the authors slipped in preoccupations about a potential Soviet threat to British interests in the post-war period.

All of this occurred in the lead-up to the Yalta conference. The relatively smooth waters of cooperation between FDR, Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta concealed roiling cross currents beneath the glistening surface which some historians like to emphasise. These rip tides were quick to erupt in the last weeks of the war.

In March 1945 there was a row over secret Anglo-American negotiations in Berne, Switzerland with German military representatives for the surrender of German forces in northern Italy. In late March Molotov, narkom for Foreign Affairs, accused the Anglo-Americans of going behind the back of the Soviet Union. In early April German resistance in the west collapsed, though not in the east. It looked like the Red Army was going to have to bear most of the casualties again in reducing the last German forces. The Soviet side must have wondered if there was a connection between the March negotiations in Switzerland and the end of German resistance in the west.

In the Foreign Office, Sargent, Deputy Permanent Undersecretary, took offence at Soviet irritation. It’s time for “a showdown” with Moscow, he wrote in early April 1945. A “showdown,” he said. We’ve put up with the Soviet for a long time because they were carrying the brunt of the fighting, but since the German collapse in the west, things have changed. We can start setting conditions for the Soviet side, Sargent wrote. What is interesting about his memorandum is that he already anticipated the division of Europe between east and west. We’re going “to rehabilitate” Germany, Sargent wrote, as we did Italy “so as to save her from Communism.”

“They [the USSR] may well decide that there is not a moment to be lost in consolidating their cordon sanitaire, not merely against a future German danger, but against the impending penetration by the Western Allies.” Godfather Roosevelt quieted down the row over the Berne negotiations just before his death on 12 April. US Ambassador Averill Harriman and the US head of the military mission in Moscow, General John R. Deane, then rushed to Washington, to obtain, in effect, the abandonment of FDR’s policy toward the Soviet Union.Roosevelt’s ghost could not do much against the zeal of subordinates who were determined to set matters straight with the USSR.

Not to be outdone, Churchill ordered the Joint Planning Staff to draw up contingency plans for war against the USSR. Yes, that is correct, for war against the USSR. This astonishing, scandalous document was entitled Operation “Unthinkable” and dated 22 May 1945, three months after Yalta. It was classified “top secret”, and you can understand why. The document foresaw the contingency of military action against the Red Army only a fortnight after VE Day, making use of reconstituted German divisions to be allied with British and US forces. “The overall or political object is to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and British Empire.” Of course, we’ll offer the Russians a choice, said the document, but “if they want total war, they are in a position to have it.” The War Office weeders really slipped up when they did not destroy this particular document. I have never seen in British archives so much stupidity, so many wild ideas, packed into one 29pp. document. General Hastings Ismay, the PM’s military advisor, wrote to Churchill in early June that the document was “bare facts”. The Chiefs of Staff felt that “the less that was put on paper… the better.” Churchill replied that the paper was a “precautionary study of what, I hope, is still a purely hypothetical contingency.” That sounded like backpedaling.

You will find this extraordinary document in the British National Archives at Kew in a Cabinet file entitled “The Russian Threat to Western Civilisation”. My guess is you can also find fresh files like this one, dated 2014 or after, in top secret US and British government vaults. Foreign Office official Warner was more right than he knew when he wrote about the danger of 100 years of Anglo-Russian hostility. If one starts the clock ticking in 1917, we are at 103 years and counting.

This is why I propose that the Yalta conference was a mirage, brilliant to be sure, but still a mirage. As soon as the German danger subsided, it was back to business as usual in the West. The Grand Alliance was over—it was a “truce”, some of my students have said. The cold war, which began after 1917, then gradually resumed in the spring of 1945. Count the years since 1917 when the USSR and Russia have had good relations with the west and with the United States in particular. Four years out of 103 leaves not quite a century of hostility, and this does not bode well for change in the foreseeable future. It is best to see things as they are, and not as you might wish them to be.

The Soviet Union contributed more than did any other nation to the defeats of Germany and Japan in World War II, but America and Britain together defeated Italy. Many prominent Western ‘historians’ white-out the Soviet roles in defeating Hitler and especially Hirohito, and they overstate the importance of America’s victories to the ultimate outcome, and ignore or underplay Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s strong rejection and repudiation of Winston Churchill’s imperialistic agenda, not only for a continuation of empires, but for a continued postwar exploitation of colonies, as being acceptable goals for the future. Those ‘historians’ are actually propagandists — no real historians, at all — because they fundamentally misrepresent; yet they dominate in the ‘historical’ profession, and they have produced in the US and in its allies a widespread and profoundly warped ‘history’ of the war and of its aftermath, and of Twentieth-Century history, and of our own time. This ‘historical’ distortion has continued even after 1991 (it even accelerated) when the Cold War between the US and Russia ended only on the Russian side, but not actually on the US side. These ‘historical’ lies accelerated because ‘historians’ continue, even today, to hide this crucial fact, that the US side of the Cold War secretly continued — and still does continue — to try to conquer Russia. Ever since the time of America’s vile, bloody and illegal actual coup against Ukraine in February 2014 onward, Russia has been responding increasingly. This is especially so because of yet another American-and-allied aggression against a nation that has cooperative arrangements with Russia, Syria, 2012-. The purveyors of fake ‘news’ and fake ‘history’ display the gall to cry foul and to lie and allege that Russia’s necessary defensive actions against America’s aggressions are, instead, themselves, aggressions, to which America and its vassal-nations have the right to respond, and should respond, by what then would actually be yet more aggressions (violations of international law) — instead of to quit its string of aggressions, and to apologize, not only for the aggressions, but also for the lies, that the US regime and its propagandists have been perpetrating, against Russia, and against nations that cooperate with Russia. The reality has been that US foreign policy is, and has been, driven by one overriding and obsessive goal for a hundred years: first, to conquer any nation that’s friendly with Russia, and thereby to isolate Russia internationally; and, then, finally, to grab Russia itself. This entire US geostrategy is based upon lies.

THE ‘HISTORICAL’ LIES, v. THE HISTORICAL TRUTHS

According to the standard accounts, the Cold War ended on both sides in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved, and its communism ended, and its Warsaw Pact (the military alliance that the USSR had created in response to America’s having created the NATO military alliance against the Soviet Union) all ended. But, secretly, the Cold War continued on the US side, and with the same (and now blatantly) imperialist goal of ultimately conquering Russia and China, so as to establish the first-ever all-encompassing global empire. Whereas Franklin Delano Roosevelt had set up the U.N. so as to evolve into a global democracy of nations — a democratic federal republic encompassing all nations — his successor, Harry S. Truman quickly became deceived by Winston S. Churchill and Dwight David Eisenhower to believe that the Soviet Union was trying to take over the entire world, and so Truman promptly abandoned FDR’s vision and initiated instead the permanent-warfare US, the military-industrial-complex-ruled US, which relegated the U.N. to a secondary role, as a mere mediator for global diplomacy, not as the international lawmaker that FDR had hoped it would ultimately evolve into. FDR’s dream and intention, of establishing a system of international laws functioning as the all-encompassing global democratic federal democracy in which all nations are represented, became thwarted, almost as soon as he died, when the Deep-State US military-industrial complex that’s run behind the scenes by the controlling owners of America’s top weapons-manufacturing firms took hold.

After WWII, the US Government secretly aspired — and still does aspire — to rule over the entire world, including especially over Russia and China. George Herbert Walker Bush told Robert Sheer in the 24 January 1980 Los Angeles Times and in Scheer’s 1982 book With Enough Shovels, page 29, that in a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the US, the “winner in a nuclear exchange” would be whichever side is stronger than the other at the war’s end; and, so, for Bush, nuclear weapons didn’t exist in order to avoid a nuclear conflict, but instead in order to “win” it. This also is the reason why, on the night of 24 February 1990, Bush secretly told West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to ignore the promises that Bush’s team were making to Gorbachev, that NATO would not be expanded “one inch to the east” (i.e., not extended right up to Russia’s border) if Gorbachev ends the Cold War. Bush, in confidence, told Kohl “To hell with that! We prevailed, they didn’t.” And he also secretly told French President Francois Mitterrand to pursue no “kind of pan-European alliance” (i.e., alliance that includes Russia) because, actually, total conquest of Russia remains the US-and-allied goal. This view — that the goal is control over Russia — became firmly established in US Government policy by no later than 2006 when Bush’s son was the President and the phrase “Nuclear Primacy” (the ability to “win” a nuclear war against Russia) became used in order to refer to America’s geostrategic goal.

Part of that scam by ’The West’ (the emergent American empire) has been the ongoing ‘historical’ lie that the Allied victory in WWII was mainly an American and British affair, and not mainly a Soviet one. Another part of it is that the Soviet Union had started the Cold War; and yet a third part is that the Cold War was about ideology (communism versus capitalism) instead of about the US regime’s goal of ultimately conquering Russia and Chinaso as to achieve the world’s first and only full global and unchallengeable empire.

The excuse for all of this was always the allegation that global empire is Russia’s goal and that the US therefore needs to win the nuclear war when it ultimately happens. But Russia, and its prior USSR, always did maintain, and still does maintain, as actual Government policy (not just mere verbiage, such as in America after 1980) the belief in “MAD” or Mutually Assured Destruction — the idea that any nuclear war between the two superpowers will destroy the entire planet and therefore produce no winners whatsoever — no winner but only nuclear winter — regardless of which side might temporarily emerge the stronger while nuclear winter and resulting global famine soon destroy all life on Earth after that nuclear exchange. Russia is not (like America is) aiming to take over the planet. The fact that the US regime is trying to take over the planet has shocked even America’s top geostrategic scientists. The ‘historians’ hide all of this, so as to continue the myth that in the US-Russia relationship, Russia is and has been the aggressor, and America the defender — instead of vice-versa, which is, and has been, the historical reality.

A rare, early, excellent, and honest, Western history of the immediate post-WW-II world, was the libertarian William Henry Chamberlin’s 1950 book America’s Second Crusade. Its earnest author — a disenchanted former socialist who once had trusted Stalin’s goodwill but was dismayed now to find Stalin to be America’s enemy as well as an unforgivable tyrant to the nation he led — opened by saying “My book is an attempt to examine without prejudice or favor the question why the peace was lost while the war was being won.” He was struggling to understand how and why and when the Cold War started, but unfortunately, some key documents, in order to become enabled to understand that, had not yet become public. A crucial passage in his book that reflected state-of-the-art historical writing in 1950 but certainly not today, asserted:

Stalin’s diplomatic masterpiece was his promotion, through his pact with Hitler, of a war from which he hoped to remain aloof. [FALSE: Stalin knew that the Soviet Union was Hitler’s main target to attack, and he was terrified of that]

This attractive dream of watching the capitalist world tear itself to pieces and then stepping in to collect the fragments was shattered by Hitler’s attack in June 1941. [FALSE: that war between USSR and Germany was already baked-in in 1939; and it was Stalin’s nightmare — not his “dream.”]

Chamberlin thought that Stalin had made with Hitler the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact because Stalin had wanted to join with Hitler in taking over the entire world — i.e., for aggression, instead of for defense; i.e., instead of so as to protect the USSR from becoming invaded by Hitler (which defensive motivation actually is what obsessed Stalin). Chamberlin thus wrote approvingly of “Churchill’s scheme which would have limited the extent of Soviet conquest.” Chamberlin thought that the ideological conflict (to the extent that there actually was one in the Cold War) was between communism versus capitalism, not  between fascism versus non-fascism (which it was, and still is).

Here are the facts, which have been revealed by the making-public of archives as of 2008 and subsequently:

On 18 October 2008, Britain’s Telegraph bannered “Stalin ‘planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact’” and buried the core revelation, that Stalin prior to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact recognized Hitler’s determination to conquer the Soviet Union and he had, on 15 August 1939, urged Chamberlin to accept the USSR as an ally in their mutual war to defeat Hitler; but Chamberlin refused, and so Stalin reached out to Hitler for an agreement with him to a dividing-line between those two countries’ (Germany’s and USSR’s) essential areas of control for each one’s national security. Poland especially was a worry to both of them, because Poland had had territorial conflicts with both Germany and the Soviet Union. Thus was signed on 23 August 1939 the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, which split Poland between both countries.

The Versailles Treaty at the end of WW I had handed to Poland what had been German territory that through most of prior history had been Polish territory. Hitler was elected into power in 1933 vowing to abandon that Treaty and to restore, to German rule, that part of Poland.

As regards Poland’s conflicts with Russia: Poland had invaded Moscow during 1605-18, before Russia responded by both military and diplomatic means to virtually conquer Poland into becoming a colony of Russia, which it remained almost uninterruptedly until 1939, when the Hitler-Stalin agreement — the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact — restored part of Poland to the Soviet Union, but handed the other part of Poland to Germany.

Stalin, having been spurned by Chamberlin (who held his own imperialistic intentions — he was as imperialistic as were the fascists: Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini), had actually no other option in 1939 than to reach a peace-agreement with Hitler, so as to avoid having the Soviet Union become swallowed up by the capitalist countries — first by Germany, and then by whatever countries would finally win the coming World War (presumably, likewise Germany).

This is why Chamberlin’s claim that Stalin’s “dream” of imperialist expansion “was shattered by Hitler’s attack in June 1941” is false: Stalin’s necessity for the USSR to be granted enough time, to prepare for Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa invasion against it (which ended up starting on 22 June 1941), caused the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact to become signed on 23 August 1939, which signing sparked both of its signatories to promptly invade Poland and start the active phase of WWII on 1 September 1939, both countries invading Poland. FDR didn’t hold that agreement against Stalin, but instead against Chamberlin, who really hated Russia and virtually forced Stalin into that Pact. Chamberlin’s goal wasn’t to get the Soviet Union onto Britain’s side but instead for a war between the Soviet Union and Germany to weaken both of them enough for a UK-US alliance to take over both of them, and, ultimately, the world. FDR got Churchill to agree to a “United Nations” in which there would be an international democracy of nations and all military weapons and enforcement of General Assembly laws would be possessed and enforced only by “the Big Four” of US, UK, USSR, and China, but Churchill balked at including China because he wanted to retain control of his eastern vassal-nations. FDR agreed instead to each of the Big Four enforcing U.N. laws only  within its own neighborhood, so as to prohibit friction between the Big Four — and China would enforce in East Asia and Western Pacific, which meant Britain’s freeing India, Burma, Malaya, and some other of its vassal-nations. US was to enforce U.N. laws throughout the Western Hemisphere. USSR was to do the same in eastern Europe and central Asia. UK was to do it in Western Europe. Initially, Roosevelt’s plan had been only for a U.N. consisting of this Big Four as “trustees” over other nations that are within their neighborhood, but he soon recognized the need for, as the Dumbarton Oaks founding document for the U.N. put it, on 7 October 1944, “Membership of the Organization should be open to all peace-loving states.” Also: “There should be an international court of justice which should constitute the principal judicial organ of the Organization.” And: “Each member of the Organization should have one vote in the General Assembly.” No international bill of rights was included, because the U.N. wasn’t to get involved in any nation’s internal affairs. But, then, FDR died and along came President Truman, and the U.N.’s Constitution became established on 26 June 1945, as the “Charter of the United Nations”, and it dispensed altogether with that crucial distinction, and, furthermore, the Big Four became the Five permanent Members of the Security Council, France (yet another imperialist regime) being added to the Big Four. Already, FDR’s vision was starting to become replaced by that of agents of owners of America’s ‘defense’ contractors. They needed the distinction to be abandoned so that the U.N. would become distracted away from its peace-keeping function and toward “human rights” issues that could ‘justify’ international invasions. And thus we have today a toothless U.N., far from what FDR had intended. This is very profitable for the military-industrial complex and enables the US regime to aspire to being, as Barack Obama claimed it already to be, “the one indispensable nation”, and every other nation therefore to be ‘dispensable’ (and consequently usable for “target-practice”).

After the 18 October 2008 article in Britain’s Telegraph, another article that is a breakthrough for historians is Randy Dotinga’s superb review (and the best summary), appearing in the 5 March 2015 Christian Science Monitor, of Susan Butler’s 2015 masterpiece, Roosevelt and Stalin: Portrait of a Partnership. (Butler’s book is based on her own prior publication, by Yale, of My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin.) Dotinga’s review is titled “‘Roosevelt and Stalin’ details the surprisingly warm relationship of an unlikely duo: How FDR and Stalin forged a bond that helped to shape history.” Basically, what Butler has documented (in those two books) and Dotinga accurately summarizes, is that FDR and Stalin were in agreement and FDR and Churchill were not, and that FDR was consistently a supporter of the position that no nation has a right to interfere in the internal affairs of any other nation, except when those internal affairs present a realistic threat against the national security of one’s own nation. FDR was consistently an opponent of empires, which exist not for national security but for the further enrichment of one’s own nation’s aristocracy, the owners of its international corporations. The negative reviews of Butler’s Roosevelt and Stalin at Amazon object to Stalin’s domestic policies but ignore what FDR was concerned with, regarding Stalin, which was international policies. It would have been foolish for FDR to have gotten into disputes with his most important ally over internal Soviet matters (but American imperialists wish that he had done so). Similarly, FDR did not think that he possessed a right to interfere in Hitler’s domestic policies (including even the extermination programs), but recognized that he had an obligation to protect the United States from Hitler’s intended conquest of the entire world. For example, FDR’s chosen mastermind for, and Truman’s designated prosecutor at, the Nuremberg Tribunals, Robert Jackson, focused mainly against the German regime’s imperialist policies, its international aggressions that really were not motivated by Germany’s national security but instead by international conquest — aggression. The Holocaust was also an important, but secondary, concern, at those tribunals. In international affairs, FDR recognized that the primary focus must be on international policies, not on intranational policies — that it must be on policies betweennations, not policies within nations. He stuck to that; America’s imperialists didn’t like that. (For them, Churchill was the hero.)

As Dotinga’s review also pointedly notes:

But FDR has a huge blind spot. Up until the very end, “Roosevelt and Stalin” virtually never mentions a man who forever annoyed the Russians by declaring in 1941 that “if we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.”

This man’s name is Harry Truman. When Roosevelt dies in 1945, just weeks after the Yalta conference, the vice president knows virtually nothing about the wartime talks and has never even spent a second inside the White House’s Map Room brain center.

Truman would learn about the nuclear bomb, which spawned an intense debate in the Roosevelt Administration about whether to mention it to the Soviets, America’s supposed allies. In fact, they’d already figured out something was up.

Despite this fault line over trust with FDR, the Soviets would later mourn a safer world they believed Roosevelt would have created if he’d lived. To them, he was a dear friend who passed away too soon.

FDR knew and respected that Stalin led the main component of the anti-Nazi team. FDR had no illusions about what immense and unnecessary suffering Stalin’s domestic policies produced, but this wasn’t FDR’s business. US national security was. And FDR knew that if Hitler were to win, then America would ultimately be ruled from Berlin, and Hitler’s domestic policies, which were even worse than Stalin’s, would become also America’s domestic policies. That’s what FDR was protecting America against, and his chief international ally was Stalin — not actually Churchill (such as the fake ‘history’ — from pro-imperialists — claims).

The Democratic Party’s biggest donors chose Harry S. Truman to become FDR’s successor because they figured that he’d be able to be controlled by them, and this belief turned out to have been correct. Truman wasn’t corrupt but he was able to be fooled (self-righteously to believe what his billionaire-approved advisors told him), and this is how the Cold War began. Truman thought he had no choice — that Stalin’s regime would take over the world if America did not. He was fooled. And that’s why the OSS and its successor, the US CIA and other agencies, protected and even imported or hired many ‘former’ committed Nazis, as soon as FDR died. America is now basically ruled posthumously by Hitler’s ideological heirs. Whereas some of America’s leaders, such as Barack Obama, probably do it intelligently, understanding where the supremacist and imperialist agenda comes from (the “military-industrial complex” or the nation’s most politically active billionaires), others of them, such as perhaps Donald Trump, might, like Truman was, be true-believers who have been simply fooled by them. Certainly Trump has loads of prejudices, which make him vulnerable to being manipulated without his even being aware of that. He believes what he wants to believe, and such a person is especially vulnerable to being manipulated. Obama, on the other hand, might be more of a realist than a fool. In either case, it’s the billionaires who now control the US Government (and see this, with more on that).

Furthermore, there were two powerful reasons why Stalin would have been getting himself into ideological trouble amongst his own communists if he had aspired to expanding Soviet control beyond the local neighborhood of adjoining (“buffer”) nations all of which were collectively surrounded by the broader capitalist world: (1) Marx himself strongly condemned imperialism; and, (2) Stalin’s main ideological competitor within the Soviet Union was Leon Trotsky, who advocated for a rapid worldwide spread of communism, versus Stalin’s position against that, which was called “communism in one nation,” and which advocated to postpone pushing for such a spread until after communism has first become an economic success within the USSR so that workers throughout the world would rise up to overthrow their oppressors. America’s Deep State knew all about the idiocy of casting Stalin as being an imperialist, but simply lied, in order to increase America’s own empire. They were, and are, brazen.

A masterpiece of historical writing, and of historical documentaries based on it, showing in a broader perspective the history of US international relations during the 20th Century, is Oliver Stone’s and Peter Kuznick’s Untold History of the United States, especially Chapter One here, and Chapter Two here. Massive though it is, it’s only truths, no lies. That’s extraordinarily rare. A masterpiece of behind-the-scenes history regarding US international relations, containing stunning first-person details of the period 1943-1990 (that’s up to but not including the end of the Cold War on Russia’s side), is L. Fletcher Prouty’s JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy. Another related historical masterpiece is David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. All of this is history that was being hidden and lied-about at the time when it was being mentioned, at all, in the ‘news’ — and which still remains being lied-about in the ‘news’ and ‘history’ that dominates today, within the US and its empire. The only professional historian amongst those writers was Peter Kuznick. All of the others were journalists, except for Prouty, who was a participant. One can’t reasonably trust the historical profession (nor most of the journalistic profession) in the US and its empire. That’s a fact — a proven-true empirical observation — no mere speculation.

Most of these pieces take it for granted Putin has some sort of approval of Stalin. But is it “approval” to call communism a road to a dead end – said earlier but most recently last December? What about his statement at the Butovo execution ground?

Those who were executed, sent to camps, shot and tortured number in the thousands and millions of people. Along with this, as a rule these were people with their own opinions. These were people who were not afraid to speak their mind. They were the most capable people. They are the pride of the nation.

Or about what he said when he unveiled the memorial in the centre of Moscow?

This horrific past must not be stricken from the national memory – let alone justified in any way – by any so-called higher good of the people.

One of Putin’s advisory councils speaks against statues to Stalin quoting a government resolution that it’s “unacceptable” to “justify the repressions” or deny that they happened. Paul Robinson has demonstrated the falsity of the “Stalin is back” here. It’s nonsense.

Another theme is that Moscow is distorting or whitewashing history. But the truth is that the articles are the ones distorting history. History is not supposed to be a box from which convenient accusations are selected, ignoring the rest: historians are supposed to try to figure out what happened and explain how it came to be. Most Western accounts of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact are selective briefs for the prosecution. Although I very much suspect that the authors don’t know any better and their outrage is founded on their ignorance.

23 August was the 80^th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement and its secret protocol for carving up Poland and other countries. An occasion to hammer Russia which was too good to pass up. But their argument – assertions really – collapse because none of them knows that what Stalin really wanted was an alliance with the Western powers to stop Hitler: the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement was Plan B, not Plan A.

When I was in university in the 1960s a text in one of my courses was AJP Taylor’s Origins of the World War II. It mentioned the British-French mission sent to Moscow upon Stalin’s invitation to form a USSR-UK-France alliance to stop Hitler. This event has mostly slipped down the memory hole but periodically makes a reappearance as, for example, in 2008 “Stalin ‘planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact’“. Stalin’s anti-Hitler pact failed and, knowing that the USSR was on Hitler’s target list, he bought time with the pact and started grabbing territory so as to gain a buffer.

In other words, all these pieces, in their prosecutorial enthusiasm, leave out the context (or in the case of the Guardian, present the Russian view as mere – and, you’re supposed to understand, unwarranted – assertion). As I said, I was generally aware that Stalin had made an overture to Paris and London and therefore understood that the pact with Germany was his Plan B, but it wasn’t until I read this piece by Michael Jabara Carley that I understood just how comprehensive and long-lasting Stalin’s attempts to form an effective anti-Hitler coalition had been. I strongly recommend reading Carley’s essay in full but in summary Moscow understood the threat immediately and spent five or six years trying to get the Europeans to join with it in an anti-Hitler agreement. A weak mutual assistance pact with Paris appeared in 1935, approaches to London that year collapsed when it made a deal with Berlin, approaches to Bucharest and Prague failed, Warsaw was hopeless because of its early pact with Berlin and baked-in animosity. The Munich agreement of 1938 and (memory hole again) Warsaw’s collaboration with Berlin in eating Czechoslovakia just about ended Moscow’s hope but it tried one last time in late 1939. (The discussion here has some more details, particularly Chamberlain’s view and the British military’s warning that the Poles, alone, would last two weeks).

There were plenty of reasons why Stalin’s approaches were rejected by Western politicians: they didn’t see the threat, Chamberlain’s “most profound distrust of Russia”, no one liked communism, few trusted Stalin, many questioned the effectiveness of the Red Army, some hoped that the nazis and the communists would fight each other to the death, some preferred the nazis. Poland, whose territory was essential for an effective Soviet threat to Germany, was the decisive obstacle: Warsaw doubted that the Soviets, once in, would ever leave and believed, with its pact and collaboration with Berlin, that it was safe. So, Stalin’s Plan A never happened. Carley: “The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was the result of the failure of nearly six years of Soviet effort to form an anti-Nazi alliance with the western powers”. Yes, the pact included a carve-up of several countries but Stalin was looking to the security of the USSR. (And, à la Fawlty Towers, don’t mention the Czechoslovakia carve up, it will spoil the morally superior position the West likes to take.) In the end Stalin miscalculated the timing: Hitler invaded before he’d knocked out Britain and its empire/commonwealth and before the Soviets had properly fortified their new borders.

The failure of Moscow’s long effort to put together an alliance to stop Hitler is the reason for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, not Stalin’s all-round nastiness and sense of fellowship with Hitler. Nasty the pact was, in a nasty period, but it was Stalin’s second choice. Those are the historical realities. Another historical reality (almost down the memory hole) is the fact that, if we’re talking about agreements with Hitler, Moscow was late to the party. Lots of leaders were fooled by Hitler but Stalin probably least of all.

Now, I suspect that the average Western newspaper consumer doesn’t know this background and – speaking for myself – I only found out about the Warsaw-Berlin pact a year or two ago. In fact, had it not been for remembering Taylor’s book, I would probably have been ignorant of Stalin’s Plan A too. The memory hole has swallowed much and most of the authors of these pieces seem quite unaware of that fact and are very offended when, for example, the Russians point out that Warsaw – officially the victim par excellence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact – took its pound of flesh from Czechoslovakia.

Many of these pieces, after falsely establishing what they imagine to be a Stalin-Hitler common purpose, can’t resist trying to make a connection between what they imagine to have been Stalin’s motives then and Putin’s today. But it’s hard to see it. Yes, the effects of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact endure but, surely, the biggest “deadly result” of Stalin’s failed Plan A is the war itself. There are at least two ways to look at the Soviet occupation/control of most of the territories it liberated from the nazis: 1) the behaviour of an aggressive expansionist power, 2) that of a power determined that its neighbours would never again be assembly areas for another attack and had learned that it would be on its own if it happened again. We all know which conclusion the Western Allies came to. Elsewhere I have speculated on the cause of that choice but that’s another bit of past living on in the present.

In short, the basic premise of these pieces is quite simply wrong: Stalin didn’t feel an affinity to Hitler and cheerfully join him to rip things apart. And when the Russian talk about the Western European share of responsibility for Hitler’s war, it’s not “odious sophistry” or “rewriting history” or “propaganda”, it’s because they know about Stalin’s failed anti-Hitler coalition and most Western commentators don’t. It is very plausible that a coalition of the USSR, France and Britain and the smaller threatened countries would have prevented the war altogether. We do know that one conspiracy to overthrow Hitler was aborted by Chamberlain’s appeasement. Perhaps when one truly understands that Stalin’s Plan A might have prevented the war altogether, one can understand how irritated the Russians are when they’re blamed for starting it.

While the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was the starter’s gun for Hitler’s attack on Poland it is historical nonsense to present the pact as Stalin’s preferred option. And more nonsense to somehow tie it all to Putin.

And what of Poland? Alone, it did last only a few weeks, the nazis killed about 20% of the population and in the end the USSR occupied it anyway. (A bit reminiscent, come to think of it, of Poland, Napoleon and Russia.)

(There is, however, an unforced parallel which doesn’t occur to anybody: both Putin and Stalin looked first to the West for partners; both were disappointed. Stalin probably realised with Munich that his alliance idea was impossible and I believe that for Putin the moment came with Libya. They decided that the West was недоговороспособны (Russian for “unable to negotiate” – editor’s note). That complicated Russian word contains within it the meaning that you cannot make an agreement with them and, even if you do, they will not keep it. So, there is some connection, after all, but it’s not what these people think.)

Sunday, the 80th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland, Vice President Mike Pence spoke in Warsaw’s Pilsudski Square of “five decades of untold suffering and death that followed” the invasion. Five decades!

What Pence was saying was that, for Poland, World War II did not end in victory but defeat and occupation by an evil empire ruled by one of the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century, Josef Stalin.

The “Liberation of Europe,” the 75th anniversary that we celebrated at Omaha Beach on June 6, was a liberation that extended only to the Elbe River in the heart of Germany.

Beyond the Elbe, the Nazis were annihilated, but victory belonged to an equally evil ideology, for the “liberators” of Auschwitz had for decades run an archipelago of concentration camps as large as Himmler’s.

So who really won, and who lost, the war?

Winston Churchill wanted to fight for Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938, and Britain went to war for Poland in 1939. Yet if both nations ended up under Bolshevik rule for half a century, did Britain win their freedom? And if this was the predictable result of a war in a part of Europe where Nazis confronted Bolsheviks, why did Britain even go to war?

Why did Britain declare war for a cause and country it could not defend? Why did Britain turn a German-Polish war into a world war that would surely bankrupt her and bring down her empire, while she could not achieve her declared goal—a liberated and independent Poland?

What vital British interest was imperiled by Hitler’s retrieval of a port city, Danzig, that had been severed from Germany against the will of its 300,000 people and handed to Poland at Versailles in 1919?

Why, then, did Britain declare war?

Because Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had insanely given the Poles a blank check, a war guarantee on March 31, 1939: if Germany uses force to retrieve Danzig, and you resist, we will fight at your side.

That guarantee guaranteed the war.

Given the cause for which their country went to fight, British actions during the war seem inexplicable.

When Stalin’s army invaded Poland on September 17, 1939, two weeks after Hitler, Britain did not declare war on the Soviet Union.

The Polish officer corps were executed on Moscow’s orders in 1940. When the bodies were unearthed in Katyn in 1943, Churchill, now an ally of Stalin, responded to the Free Poles’ request to investigate the atrocity: “There is no use prowling round the three year old graves of Smolensk.”

Rather than attack Hitler after he invaded Poland, Britain and France remained behind the Maginot Line and waited until Hitler’s armies stormed west on May 10, 1940, the day Churchill took power.

In three weeks, the British army had been defeated and thrown off the continent. In six weeks, France had surrendered.

After Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain in 1940, Britain refused all of Hitler’s offers to end the war, holding on till June 1941, when Hitler turned on his partner Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union.

Churchill is the “man of the century” for persuading Britain to stand alone against Nazi Germany in 1940, Britain’s “finest hour.”

But at war’s end, what was Churchill’s balance sheet?

The Poland for which Britain had gone to war was lost to Stalinism and would remain so for the entire Cold War. Churchill would be forced to accede to Stalin’s annexation of half of Poland and its incorporation into the Soviet bloc. To appease Stalin, Churchill declared war on Finland.

Britain would end the war bombed, bled, and bankrupt, with her empire in Asia, India, the Mideast, and Africa disintegrating. In two decades, it would all be gone.

France would end the war after living under Nazi occupation and Vichy rule for five years, lose her African and Asian empire, and then sustain defeats and humiliation in Indochina in 1954 and Algeria in 1962.

Who really won the war?

Certainly the Soviets, who, after losses in the millions from the Nazi invasion, ended up occupying Berlin, having annexed the Baltic states and turned Eastern Europe into a Soviet base camp, though Stalin is said to have remarked of a 19th-century czar, “Yes, but Alexander I made it to Paris!”

The Americans, who stayed out longest, ended the war with the least losses of any great power. Yet America is a part of the West, and the West was the loser of the world wars of the last century.

Indeed, the two wars between 1914 and 1945 may be seen as the Great Civil War of the West, the Thirty Years War of Western Civilization that culminated in the loss of all the Western empires and the ultimate conquest of the West by the liberated peoples of their former colonies.

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s statement follows along similar lines. Here is an excerpt: “Black Ribbon Day marks the sombre anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Signed between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in 1939 to divide Central and Eastern Europe, the infamous pact set the stage for the appalling atrocities these regimes would commit. In its wake, they stripped countries of their autonomy, forced families to flee their homes, and tore communities apart, including Jewish and Romani communities, and others. The Soviet and Nazi regimes brought untold suffering upon people across Europe, as millions were senselessly murdered and denied their rights, freedoms, and dignity [italics added].”

As a statement purporting to summarise the origins and unfolding of the Second World War, it is a parody of the actual events of the 1930s and war years. It is politically motivated “fake history”; it is in fact a whole cloth of lies.

Let’s start at the beginning. In late January 1933 President Paul von Hindenburg, appointed Adolf Hitler as German chancellor. Within months Hitler’s government declared illegal the German Communist and Socialist parties and commenced to establish a one party Nazi state. The Soviet government had heretofore maintained tolerable or correct relations with Weimar Germany, established through the treaty of Rapallo in 1922. The new Nazi government however abandoned that policy and launched a propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union and against its diplomatic, trade, and business representatives working in Germany. Soviet business offices were sometimes trashed and their personnel roughed up by Nazi hooligans.

Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maksim M. Litvinov

Alarm bells went off in Moscow. Soviet diplomats and notably the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maksim M. Litvinov, had read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, his blueprint for the German domination of Europe, published in the mid-1920s. The book became a bestseller in Germany and was a necessary addition to the mantel piece or the living room table in any German home. For those of you who may not know, Mein Kampf identified Jews and Slavs as Untermenschen, sub humans, good only for slavery or death. The Jews were not to be the only targets of Nazi genocide. Soviet territories eastward to the Ural Mountains were to become German. France was also named as a habitual enemy which had to be eliminated.

“What about Hitler’s book?” Litvinov often asked German diplomats in Moscow. Oh that, they said, don’t pay it any mind. Hitler doesn’t really mean what he wrote. Litvinov smiled politely in reaction to such statements, but did not believe a word of what he heard from his German interlocutors.

In December 1933 the Soviet government established officially a new policy of collective security and mutual assistance against Nazi Germany. What did this new policy mean exactly? The Soviet idea was to re-establish the World War I anti-German entente, to be composed of France, Britain, the United States, and yes, even fascist Italy. Although not stated publically, it was a policy of containment and preparation for war against Nazi Germany should containment fail.

In October 1933 Litvinov went to Washington to settle the terms of US diplomatic recognition of the USSR. He had discussions with the new US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, about collective security against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Iosif Stalin, Litvinov’s boss in Moscow, gave his approval to these discussions. Soviet-US relations were off to a good start, but in 1934 the State Department—almost to a man, anti-communists—sabotaged the rapprochement launched by Roosevelt and Litvinov.

At the same time Soviet diplomats in Paris were discussing collective security with the French foreign minister, Joseph Paul-Boncour. In 1933 and 1934 Paul-Boncour and his successor Louis Barthou strengthened ties with the USSR. The reason was simple: both governments felt threatened by Hitlerite Germany. Here too promising Franco-Soviet relations were sabotaged by Pierre Laval, who succeeded Barthou after the latter was killed in Marseilles during the assassination of the Yugoslav King Alexander I in October 1934. Laval was an anti-communist who preferred a rapprochement with Nazi Germany to collective security with the USSR. He gutted a Franco-Soviet mutual assistance pact which was finally signed in May 1935 only to delay its ratification in the French National Assembly. I call the pact the coquille vide, or empty shell. Laval lost power in January 1936 but the damage had been done. After the fall of France in 1940, Laval became a Nazi collaborator and was shot for treason in the autumn of 1945.

In Britain too Soviet diplomats were active and sought to launch an Anglo-Soviet rapprochement. Its aim was to establish the base for collective security against Nazi Germany. Here too the policy was sabotaged, first by the conclusion of the Anglo-German naval agreement in June 1935. This was a bilateral pact on German naval rearmament. The Soviet and French governments were stunned and considered the British deal with Germany to be a betrayal. In early 1936 a new British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, put a stop to the rapprochement because of communist “propaganda”. Soviet diplomats thought Eden was a “friend”. He was nothing of the sort.

Fascism represented force, power, and masculinity for European elites who often doubted themselves and feared communism

In each case, the United States, France, and Britain halted promising discussions with the Soviet Union. Why would these governments do something so seemingly incomprehensive in hindsight? Because anti-communism and Sovietophobia were stronger motives amongst the US, French, and British governing elites than the perception of danger from Nazi Germany. On the contrary, these elites in large measure were sympathetic to Hitler. Fascism was a bulwark mounted in defence of capitalism, against the spread of communism and against the extension of Soviet influence into Europe. The great question of the 1930s was “who is enemy no. 1”, Nazi Germany or the USSR? All too often these elites, not all, but the majority, got the answer to that question wrong. They preferred a rapprochement with Nazi Germany to collective security and mutual assistance with the USSR. Fascism represented force, power, and masculinity for European elites who often doubted themselves and feared communism. Leather uniforms, the odor of sweat from tens of thousands of marching fascists with their drums, banners, and torches were like aphrodisiacs for elites unsure of their own virility and of their security against the growth of Soviet influence. The Spanish civil war, which erupted in July 1936, polarised European politics between right and left and rendered impossible mutual assistance against Germany.

Italy was a peculiar case. The Soviet government maintained tolerable relations with Rome even though Italy was fascist and Russia, a communist state. Italy had fought on the side of the Entente during World War I and Litvinov wanted to keep it on side in the new coalition he was trying to build. Benito Mussolini had colonial ambitions in East Africa, however, launching a war of aggression against Abyssinia, the last parcel of African territory which had not been colonised by the European powers. To make a long story short, the Abyssinian crisis was the beginning of the end of Litvinov’s hopes to keep Italy on side.

In Romania too Soviet diplomats had some early successes. The Romanian foreign minister, Nicolae Titulescu, favoured collective security and worked closely with Litvinov to improve Soviet-Romanian relations. It was Titulescu who backed Litvinov in trying to obtain agreement with France in 1935 for a pact of mutual assistance in spite of Laval’s conniving and bad faith. Between Titulescu and Litvinov there were discussions about mutual assistance. These too came to nothing. Romania was dominated by a far right elite which disapproved of better Soviet relations. In August 1936 Titulescu found himself politically isolated and was compelled to resign. He spent much of his time abroad because he feared for his life in Bucharest.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain

In Czechoslovakia, Eduard Beneš, like Titulescu, favoured collective security against the Nazi menace. In May 1935 Beneš, the Czechoslovak president, signed a mutual assistance pact with the USSR, but he weakened it to avoid going beyond the scope of the Soviet pact with France, sabotaged by Laval. The Czechoslovaks feared Nazi Germany, and rightly so, but they would not ally closely with the USSR without the full backing of Britain and France, and this they would never obtain.

Czechoslovakia and Romania looked to a strong France and would not go beyond French commitments to the USSR. France looked to Britain. The British were the key, if they were ready to march, ready to ally themselves with the USSR, everyone else would fall into line. Without the British—who would not march—everything fell apart.

The Soviet Union also tried to improve relations with Poland. Here too Soviet diplomats failed when the Polish government signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in January 1934. The Polish elite never hid its preference for a rapprochement with Germany rather than for better relations with the USSR. The Poles became spoilers of collective security sabotaging Soviet attempts to organise an anti-German entente. They were at their worst in 1938 as Nazi accomplices in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia before they became victims of Nazi aggression in 1939. Soviet diplomats repeatedly warned their Polish counterparts that Poland was headed to its doom if it did not change policy. Germany would turn on them and crush them when the time was right. The Poles laughed at such warnings, dismissed them out of hand. Russians are “barbarians”, they said, the Germans, a “civilised” people. The choice between the two was easy to make.

Let me be clear here. The archival evidence leaves no doubts, the Soviet government offered collective security and mutual assistance to France, Britain, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, even fascist Italy, and in every case their offers were rejected, indeed spurned contemptuously in the case of Poland, the great spoiler of collective security in the lead-up to war in 1939. In the United States, the State Department sabotaged improving relations with Moscow. In the autumn of 1936, all Soviet efforts for mutual assistance had failed, and the USSR found itself isolated. No one wanted to ally with Moscow against Nazi Germany; all the above mentioned European powers conducted negotiations with Berlin to lure the wolf away from their doors. Yes, even the Czechoslovaks. The idea, both stated and unstated, was to turn Hitler’s ambitions eastward against the USSR.

Munich: selling out your friends to buy off your enemies

Then came the Munich betrayal in September 1938. Britain and France sold out the Czechoslovaks to Germany. “Peace in our time,” Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, declared. Czechoslovakia was dismembered to buy “peace” for France and Britain. Poland got a modest share of the booty as part of the dirty deal. “Jackals,” Winston Churchill called the Poles. In February 1939 the Manchester Guardian called Munich, selling out your friends to buy off your enemies. That description is apt.

In 1939 there was one last chance to conclude an Anglo-Franco-Soviet pact of mutual assistance against Nazi Germany. I call it the “alliance that never was”. In April 1939 the Soviet government offered France and Britain a political and military alliance against Nazi Germany. The terms of the alliance proposal were submitted on paper to Paris and London. In the spring of 1939 war looked inevitable. Rump Czechoslovakia had disappeared in March, gobbled up by the Wehrmacht without a shot fired. Later that month Hitler claimed the German populated Lithuanian city of Memel. In April a Gallup poll in Britain showed massive popular support for a Soviet alliance. In France too public opinion backed an alliance with Moscow. Churchill, then a Conservative backbencher, declared in the House of Commons that without the USSR there could be no successful resistance against Nazi aggression.

Logically, you would think that the French and British governments would have seized Soviet offers with both hands. It did not happen. The Foreign Office rejected the Soviet alliance proposal with the French grudgingly trailing behind. Litvinov was sacked as commissar and replaced by Viacheslav M. Molotov, Stalin’s right arm. For a time Soviet policy continued unchanged. In May Molotov sent a message to Warsaw that the Soviet government would support Poland against German aggression if so desired. Incredible as it may seem, on the very next day, the Poles declined Molotov’s proffered hand.

The Foreign Office rejected the Soviet alliance proposal with the French grudgingly trailing behind

In spite of the initial British rejection of Soviet proposals, Anglo-Franco-Soviet negotiations continued through the summer months of 1939. At the same time however British officials got caught negotiating with the Germans in search of a détente of the last hour with Hitler. It became public news in the British papers at the end of July as the British and French were preparing to send military missions to Moscow to conclude an alliance. The news caused a scandal in London and raised understandable Soviet doubts about Anglo-French good faith. It was then that Molotov began to show an interest in German overtures for an agreement.

There was more scandal to come. The Anglo-French military missions traveled to Moscow on a slow chartered merchantman making a top speed of thirteen knots. One Foreign Office official had proposed sending the missions in a fleet of fast British cruisers to make a point. The Foreign Secretary, Edward Lord Halifax, thought that idea was too provocative. So the French and British delegations went on a chartered merchantman and took five days to get to the USSR. Five days mattered when war could break out at any moment.

Could the situation become any more tragic, any more a farce?  Indeed it could. The British chief negotiator, Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, had no written powers to sign an agreement with the Soviet side. His French counterpart, General Joseph Doumenc, had a vague letter of authority from the French président du Conseil. He could negotiate but not sign an agreement. Doumenc and Drax were supernumeraries. On the other hand, the Soviet side was represented by its commissar for war with full plenipotentiary powers. “All indications so far go to show,” advised the British ambassador in Moscow, “that Soviet military negotiators are really out for business.” In contrast, formal British instructions were to “go very slowly”. When Drax met the Foreign Secretary Halifax before leaving for Moscow, he asked about the “possibility of failure” in the negotiations. “There was a short but impressive silence,” according to Drax, “and the Foreign Secretary then remarked that on the whole it would be preferable to draw out the negotiations as long as possible.” Doumenc remarked that he had been sent to Moscow with “empty hands.” They had nothing to offer their Soviet interlocutors. The British could send two divisions to France at the outset of a European war. The Red Army could immediately mobilise one hundred divisions, and Soviet forces had just thrashed the Japanese in heavy fighting on the Manchurian frontier. What the hell? “They are not serious,” Stalin concluded. And he was right. The French and British governments thought they could play Stalin for a fool. That was a mistake.

After the bad faith, after all the conniving, what would you have done in Stalin’s boots, or any Russian leader’s boots? Take the Poles, for example, they worked against Soviet diplomacy in London, Paris, Bucharest, Berlin, even Tokyo… anywhere they could put a spoke in the Soviet wheel. They shared with Hitler in the spoils of Czechoslovak dismemberment. In 1939 they attempted until the last moment to sidetrack an anti-Nazi alliance in which the USSR was a signatory. I know, it is all too incredible to believe, like an implausible story line in a bad novel, but it was true. And then the Poles had the temerity to accuse the Soviet side of stabbing them in the back. It was Satan rebuking sin. The Polish governing elite brought ruin upon itself and its people. Even today it is the same old Poland. The Polish government is marking the beginning of the Second World War by inviting to Warsaw the former Axis powers, but not the Russian Federation, even though it was the Red Army which liberated Poland at high cost in dead and wounded. This is a fact of history which Polish nationalists simply cannot bear to hear and which they seek to erase from our memories.

The French and British governments thought they could play Stalin for a fool. That was a mistake

After nearly six years of trying to create a broad anti-German entente in Europe, notably with Britain and France, the Soviet government had nothing to show for its efforts. Nothing. By late 1936 the USSR was effectively isolated, and still Soviet diplomats tried to obtain agreement with France and Britain. The British and French, and the Romanians, and even the Czechoslovaks, and especially the Poles sabotaged, spurned or dodged Soviet offers, weakened agreements with Moscow and tried themselves to negotiate terms with Berlin to save their own skins. It was like they were doing Moscow a favour by humoring, with polite, knowing smiles, Soviet diplomats who talked about Mein Kampf and warned of the Nazi danger. The Soviet government feared being left in the lurch to fight the Wehrmacht alone while the French and the British sat on their hands in the west. After all, this is exactly what the French and British did while Poland collapsed at the beginning of September in a matter of days at the hands of the invading Wehrmacht. If France and Britain would not help Poland, would they have done more for the USSR? It is a question which Stalin and his colleagues most certainly asked themselves.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was the result of the failure of nearly six years of Soviet effort to form an anti-Nazi alliance with the western powers. The pact was ugly. It was Soviet sauve qui peut, and it contained a secret codicil which foresaw the creation of “spheres of influence” in Eastern Europe “in the event of… territorial and political rearrangement[s]”. But it was not worse than what the French and British had done at Munich. “C’est la réponse du berger à la bergère, the French ambassador in Moscow remarked, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The dismemberment of Czechoslovakia was the precedent for what then followed. As the late British historian A.J.P. Taylor so aptly put it long ago: violent western reproaches against the USSR “came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich…. The Russians, in fact, did only what the Western statesmen had hoped to do; and Western bitterness was the bitterness of disappointment, mixed with anger that professions of Communism were no more sincere than their own professions of democracy [in dealing with Hitler].”

There then occurred a period of Soviet appeasement of Hitlerite Germany no more attractive than the Anglo-French appeasement which preceded it. And Stalin made a huge miscalculation. He disregarded his own military intelligence warning of a Nazi invasion of the USSR. He thought Hitler would not be such a fool as to invade the Soviet Union while Britain was still a belligerent power. How wrong he was. On 22 June 1941 the Axis powers invaded the Soviet Union with a huge military force along a front from the Baltic to the Black Seas.

It was the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, 1418 days of the most horrendous, intense violence. The USSR allied, finally, with Britain and the United States against Hitlerite Germany. It was the so-called Grand Alliance. France of course had disappeared, crushed by the German army in a military debacle in May 1940. During the first three years of fighting from June 1941 until June 1944, the Red Army fought nearly alone against the Nazi Wehrmacht. How ironic. Stalin had done all he could to avoid facing Hitlerite Germany alone, and yet there he was, the Red Army fighting nearly alone against the Wehrmacht and Axis Powers. The tide of battle turned at Stalingrad, sixteen months before the western allies landed in Normandy. Here is what President Roosevelt wrote to Stalin on 4 February 1943, the day after the last German forces surrendered in Stalingrad. “As Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States of America, I congratulate you on the brilliant victory at Stalingrad of the armies under your Supreme Command. The 162 days of epic battle for the city which has for ever honored your name and the decisive result which all Americans are celebrating today will remain one of the proudest chapters in this war of the peoples united against Nazism and its emulators. The commanders and fighters of your armies at the front and the men and women, who have supported them, in factory and field, have combined not only to cover with glory their country’s arms, but to inspire by their example fresh determination among all the United Nations to bend every energy to bring about the final defeat and unconditional surrender of the common enemy.” As Churchill put it to Roosevelt at about the same time: “Listen, who is really fighting today? Stalin alone! And look how he is fighting…” Yes, indeed, we should not, even now, forget how the Red Army fought.

From June 1941 until September 1943 there was not a single US, British, or Canadian division fighting on the ground of continental Europe, not one. The fighting in North Africa was a sideshow where Anglo-American forces faced two German divisions when more than two hundred German divisions were arrayed on the Soviet Front. The Italian campaign which began in September 1943 was a fiasco tying down more Allied divisions than German. When the western allies finally arrived in France, the Wehrmacht was a beaten-up shadow of what it had been when German soldiers stepped across Soviet frontiers in June 1941. Normandy was an anti-climax, enabled by the Red Army, and by no means the “decisive” battle of World War II which the western Mainstream Media have made it out to be.

Whatever sins, whatever turpitudes, whatever mistakes the Soviet government committed between September 1939 and June 1941, they were paid for in full by the colossal sacrifices and victory of Soviet arms against Hitlerite Germany

In the Soviet Union the Germans pillaged, burned, murdered relentlessly in an attempted genocide of the Soviet people, Slavs and Jews alike. An estimated 17 million civilians died at the hands of Nazi armies and their Ukrainian and Baltic collaborators. Ten million Red Army soldiers died in the war to liberate the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and to run down the Nazi beast in its Berlin lair. Large areas of the Soviet Union from Stalingrad in the east to the Caucasus and Sevastopol in the south to the Romanian, Polish and Baltic frontiers in the west and the north were laid waste. While there were Nazi massacres of civilians at Ouradour-sur-Glâne in France and in Lidice in Czechoslovakia, there were hundreds of such massacres in the Soviet Union in Byelorussia and the Ukraine in places of which we do not know the names or which are known only in still unexplored or unpublished Soviet archives. Whatever sins, whatever turpitudes, whatever mistakes the Soviet government committed between September 1939 and June 1941, they were paid for in full by the colossal sacrifices and victory of Soviet arms against Hitlerite Germany.

In the light of these facts, the Trudeau August 23^rd statement is politically motivated anti-Russian propaganda which serves no Canadian national interest. Trudeau gratuitously insulted not only the government of the Russian Federation, but also all Russians whose parents and grandparents fought in the Great Patriotic War. He attempts to delegitimise the emancipatory character of the war of the USSR against the Hitlerite invader and thereby to discredit the Soviet war effort. Trudeau’s statement panders to the interests of his Ukrainian minister for foreign affairs in Ottawa, Chrystia Freeland, a known Russophobe, who celebrates the life of her late grandfather, a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator in occupied Poland. She supports a regime in Kiev which emerged from the violent, so-called Maidan coup d’état against the elected Ukrainian president, backed by fascist militias and from abroad by the European Union and the United States. As preposterous as it may sound, this regime celebrates the deeds of World War II Nazi collaborators, now treated as national heroes. The Canadian prime minister desperately needs a history lesson before he again insults the Russian people, and indeed denigrates the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers and sailors allied with the USSR against the common foe.

Instead, as is often the case in the age of George Orwell’s “big lie” in modern America and Britain, the opposite was the case. The Yalta conference was a triumph of realpolitik that kept the global peace between the superpowers almost three quarter s of a century so far.

It is, therefore enormously ironic that the peace of the world should now be threatened over US and UK outrage in particular over Russia asserting its legal and sovereign rights after a blatant breach of agreements and sovereignty by the Ukrainian vessels in Kerch Strait separating Crimea from mainland Russia.

The kneejerk US and UK reactions, based on mindlessly swallowing generations of dangerous mythmaking by both Republicans and Democrats in the United States and by the revered demigod Winston Churchill in Britain is that at Yalta Roosevelt cynically – and possibly in full senility – “sold out” all the countries of Eastern Europe to Stalin and thereby threatened the survival of the West.

This myth was created by Churchill in Volume 6 of his enormous war memoirs, “The Second World War”. (Most of it was in fact written for him by an enormous team of British historians and bureaucratic researchers. This did not stop Churchill from happily accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature on the entirely false grounds that he had written all of it.)

Churchill blamed Roosevelt for selling out Eastern Europe at Yalta in his discussions with Stalin. By then FDR was long since dead and so were Harry Hopkins, his de facto national security adviser at Yalta and Major General Edwin “Pa” Watson, his closest personal aide.

The next US president, Harry Truman made no secret in later years of his deep, abiding jealousy for President Roosevelt and was happy to scapegoat his dead predecessor for the outcome of Yalta..

Truman’s successor, President Dwight Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander actually worked sympathetically and closely with the Soviet Union to prevent any clash between the Western and Soviet armies knowing that only the Nazis could benefit from such a disaster.

But by 1952, running for president himself, Eisenhower did not dare to acknowledge his own key role in accepting Soviet control of half of Europe, so it made perfect sense for him to slander the late FDR as well.

In fact, Yalta was a triumph for FDR in everything that really mattered: The division of Europe agreed to there by the “Big Three” was based on realities of power and could therefore be upheld and maintained for many decades and it was. By contrast, the hyped, gargantuan Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 led to the rise of Adolf Hitler within 14 years and another, even worse world war only 20 years later. Versailles was a catastrophe. Yalta, where it really mattered, was a lasting triumph.

Because of the great Soviet victory in June 1944 in the Battle of Belorussia, it was inevitable that all of Central Europe from Stettin in the Baltic to the borders of Greece would fall under Soviet control before the Anglo-American armies driving in on the Third Reich from the West could get there. That was why the American Republican criticisms of the dying Franklin Roosevelt for "selling out" Central Europe at the 1945 Yalta conference were so unfair. There was nothing in practical terms FDR could have done otherwise.

And in any case, FDR did not make the key concessions to Stalin on Central Europe at all. It was Churchill, the British statesman who has become the icon-hero of American internationalist conservatives, who made them.

Churchill, at his meeting in Moscow with Stalin in October 1944 initialed the famous agreement on the back of a napkin that acknowledged the Soviet dominant role in all of the Balkans, except for Greece. Roosevelt was outraged when he learned about it. By then, Churchill knew that Poland, Hungary and most of the rest of Central Europe would fall to the Soviet armies too. The Battle of Belorussia had ensured that.

As US senators and pundits vie with each other now to push US President Donald Trump towards a potentially enormously dangerous confrontation with Russia over the Kerch Straits clash, it is more important than ever to recover and teach the true lessons of Yalta.

In February 1945 a dying but clear-headed Franklin Roosevelt opted for continued respect and dialogue with the Soviet Union to prevent world wars and preserve the peace of the world. His wisdom lasted almost 70 years.

Yalta was never a naïve sellout and Roosevelt gave away nothing. After he died Winston Churchill and the US Republicans successfully slandered his good name for their own glory and lying gain.

To restore US-Russian trust, dialogue and respect, it is vital Americans are educated at last to the true story.