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p The embattled peoples of the USSR were not alone. The world’s progressives were on their side. In their own national and international interests, people all over the world unfolded an anti-fascist liberation movement. Their determination and the efforts of the governments of the belligerent countries to dispel the nazi danger and remain in the saddle, created a community of aims, leading up to the emergence of an anti-fascist coalition.

p This coalition rested on the just, liberative nature of the anti-Hitler war—a quality it acquired in full measure with the Soviet entry into the war. The Soviet war ainis were in full harmony with the nature of the war and the Soviet Union rightly became the moral and political vanguard in that great struggle for freedom.

p The liberation movement in Yugoslavia flared up with renewed force after Germany attacked the USSR. On July 7, 1941, in the village of Belaya Tserkov, the partisan group of Zikica Jovanovic clashed with gendarmes in the service of the occupation authorities. The battle grew into an armed uprising, spreading throughout Serbia, then to Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. By the autumn of 1941 a partisan war engulfed all Yugoslavia.

In Czechoslovakia, due to local conditions, the resistance assumed other forms —at first those of strikes and sabotage and of publishing underground anti-fascist literature. The underground RudePrdvo, organ-of the Communist Party, had a large circulation. In November 1941 the paper wrote: Czechoslovaks "were unbroken by centuries of Hapsburg rule, by the disgraceful Munich betrayalj or even by the bloody terror loosened by Reinhard Heydrich, the nazi hangman, and nothing will break them, whatever trials may lie ahead —

91 The people will live on, after Hitler, Goebbels, Neurath, Heydrich ... and other carrion is flung on the dustheap of history."  [91•1 

p The Rude Prdvo and other Communist Party publications were directed by Julius Fucik, a gifted journalist. Tracked down and apprehended by the nazis, he went to his death singing the Internationale. While in prison, he wrote his wellknown book, A Report with the Noose Round My Neck, an outstanding work in the humanistic tradition of truly revolutionary literature.

p In France and Belgium patriots responded to the nazi attack on the Soviet Union with increasingly powerful acts of sabotage and outright resistance. And on July 14, 1941, the French national holiday, large anti-German demonstrations took place in nazi-occupied Paris.

p The peoples in the overrun countries became loyal members of the anti-fascist coalition that began to form round the Soviet Union soon after the German attack on the USSR. Capitalist governments, including those of Britain and’the United States, joined that coalition, too, under pressure of their people’s anti-fascist struggle and by reason of imperialist contradictions between them.

p A historic change occurred in the relations between the Soviet Union and Great Britain. Nor was it a fortuitous one. Long before the war broke out, the USSR had advocated collective action against the aggressor. And in the course of the war Britain realised that her hopes of victory lay in an alliance with the USSR.

p Not knowing the Soviet people, Churchill was uneasy: perhaps, he thought, the Soviet Union would surrender? Information from Moscow dispelled his doubts. The British sensed an important change. Churchill said: "We are no longer alone."  [91•2  In a radio speech on June 22, 1941, the Prime Minister stressed that, though still an irreconcilable foe of Bolshevism, he was for an alliance with the USSR because "the Russian danger is ... our danger, and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe."  [91•3 

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p Franklin D. Roosevelt, the US President, declared his support of the USSR on June 24. That same day, however, Senator Harry Truman gave an interview that sounded like a challenge from the most sinister forces of US imperialism. "If we see that Germany is winning,” he said, "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."  [92•1 

p But neither Truman nor Moore-Brabazon, British Minister of Aviation, and their followers, could now arrest the emergence of an anti-fascist coalition, the way for which had been paved by years of Soviet efforts to establish a collective security system against aggression.

p Among capitalist statesmen, Churchill and Roosevelt probably had the clearest conception of their countries’ rockbottom interests. But their stand should not be exaggerated. Any other approach would have spelled defeat for Britain and, later, for the United States. Besides, Churchill’s radio speech contained overtones indicating his aversion of the social system in the USSR. The speech was a contradictory one. It favoured an alliance with the USSR, on the one hand, while being frankly hostile to the social system there, on the other. This contradiction explains many of the British and American wartime secrets.

p At the beginning of July 1941, the Soviet Government approached Britain, proposing an alliance. The offer was accepted. A joint action agreement was concluded by the Soviet and British governments on July 12 in Moscow, raising the curtain on what would soon become a formal anti-Hitler coalition.

p Soon after being drawn into the war, the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations with the e’migre’ governments of some of the nazi-occupied countries—Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium and Norway—and concluded formal alliances with Czechoslovakia on July 18 and with Poland on July 30. This was evidence of the Soviet wish that the conquered countries should regain their liberty and statehood.

p With the outcome of the war depending on developments on the Soviet-German Front, where Germany kept its main forces, the legitimate question arose of how Britain could help the Soviet Union, preoccupied then in repelling the enemy assault. British sentiment on this score was reflected 93 in a Tribune article: "There is only one question for us in these swift days: what can we do to help ourselves by coming to the aid of the Soviet armies?"  [93•1  The clearest possible reply was contained in the Soviet proposal that Britain should open a second front in Western Europe.

p The Churchill Government baulked. It took the risk of withholding aid in an hour when it was most desperately needed. No one could be sure then what turn the events would take. The British PM, for one, thought it possible the Soviet Union would collapse. And for Britain this would be disaster. Yet he put in jeopardy his country’s vital interests, compelling the Soviet Union to go alone, deliberately letting his ally exhaust his strength.

p In the early months of the Soviet-German war, the British Government, and then also the United States, not .yet embroiled in the hostilities, confined themselves to shipping limited quantities of raw materials, war materiel, arms and goods. Anglo-American deliveries to the Soviet Union and Soviet counter-deliveries were examined at the three-power Moscow Conference in September-October 1941, which ultimately adopted a concrete programme.

p However, Anglo-American deliveries were a trickle. General John R. Deane, head of the US Military Mission in Moscow, admitted this.  [93•2  Compared with the colossal Soviet effort, US historians admit, they made "but a slight Contribution to Soviet defence or to ultimate victory on the Eastern Front".  [93•3  What little arrived, however, was important, for at that time the Soviet Union was straining its energies to the utmost in holding off the Germans.

p The anti-fascist coalition continued to expand, joined by General de Gaulle’s French National Liberation Committee and the governments of other nazi-occupied countries.

p The Soviet attitude to co-members of the coalition was friendly. In the case of de Gaulle, the French bourgeois leader, the Soviet Union was even more considerate than the United States and Britain, which long refused to recognise his Committee. Therefore, early in June 1942 de Gaulle 94 asked whether "the Soviet Government would receive him and his troops in its territory".  [94•1  True, when the British Government promised a few days later to reconsider his status, he withdrew the question. While friendly to the Free French Movement, the Soviet people were aware that de Gaulle and his Committee represented but a segment of the French freedom fighters, who responded not so much to the General’s appeals from London, but primarily to the heroic efforts of the French Communist Party.

p After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor the United States, China, Australia and many of the Latin American countries lined up with the coalition.

p Its construction was completed in the first six months of 1942. By that time, stimulated by the Soviet victory at Moscow, the Resistance Movement spread like wildfire. On January i, 1942, a 26-nation declaration of alliance was signed in Washington, its signatories henceforth to be known as the United Nations. A treaty of alliance against Germany and her accomplices in Europe was signed by the Soviet Union and Britain in London on May 26, 1942, also stipulating cooperation and postwar mutual aid. On June 11 in Washington Soviet-American agreement was concluded on mutual deliveries of supplies. A Soviet-American communique" was published that day, stating that "full understanding was reached between the two parties with regard to the urgent task of creating a second front in Europe in ig42".  [94•2 

p The wartime coalition had an immense impact. It was the first try in world history of states with different social systems at uniting for common action—a try that justified its makers, for it provided favourable international conditions for victory over the fascist foe.

The anti-Hitler coalition frustrated imperialist Germany’s basic strategy of cutting down its adversaries one by one, preventing co-operation among them and securing for each an international political isolation. The tables were turned: Germany and her allies were increasingly isolated, with the forces of the Axis powers steadily losing strength, and those of the Allies gaining strength.