p There was only one country in the world then that had any surpluses—the United States. It had escaped the ravages of war. It had flourished. We and the Americans had fought on the same side, but our contributions to the war had been different. Not a single shell had burst on U.S. soil, not a single American home had been gutted. The death toll of the U.S.S.R. was 20,000,000, that of the U.S.A. 400,000: one American for every 50 Soviet dead. I made this comparison time and again when writing of World War II. For that is something no historian in America, and most of them have views that differ from ours, can deny. Professor John Lewis Gaddis, for one, referred to a piece of mine, noting that ’a recent Soviet Account has 14 noted pointedly but accurately that for every American killed in the war against the Axis, fifty Russians died’.^^1^^

p The material losses, too, were different. The war destroyed a third of the Soviet Union’s national wealth. And only some decades earlier, in World War I and the Civil War, Soviet losses in percentage terms had been as staggering. For the Soviet Union, the cost of the war of 1941- 1945 at the then current rate of exchange, amounted to 485,000 million dollars (including destroyed property). The U.S. war cost was 330,000 million. U.S. lend-lease aid to countries fighting the Axis powers totalled 43,600 million dollars, out of which approximately 10,000 million went to the Soviet Union, amounting to about 3.5 per cent of total U.S. war cost. That is the figure—3.5 per cent—we should go by when evaluating the wartime cooperation of our two nations, because it represents the U.S. contribution to the mammoth battles in the chief and decisive theatre of the war against Germany and its allies.

p Many influential and highly placed Americans visited the Soviet Union in the early postwar years. They were warmly received as recent allies. Some were received or granted interviews by Stalin. Asked on October 29, 1946 by a United Press correspondent if Russia was still interested in a U.S. loan, Stalin answered in the affirmative. The correspondent asked how long it would take to rehabilitate the devastated regions of Western Russia. Stalin said, six or seven years, perhaps longer.^^2^^

p President Roosevelt’s son, Elliott, put the question a little differently (in an interview on December 21, 1946): ’If a system of loans or credits were arranged between the United States and the Soviet Union, would such agreements have a lasting benefit to the economy of the United States?’

p Stalin replied: ’The system of such credits is, of course, mutually advantageous both to the United States and to the Soviet Union.’^^3^^

p The logic of the late President’s son, no longer very young and consequently capable of thinking for himself, was no less than astonishing: what benefits could the United States, which had enriched itself on the war, get from the Soviet Union that had been bled, and bled white? As though the millions of Soviet lives laid down for America, among others, weren’t enough?

p At that time, indeed, it was expected that the United States would give a helping hand to its wartime ally, and assist it, if only a little, in recovering from the destruction incurred in the defence not only of our country, but of the cause of the United Nations. But the matter didn’t go any further than words, words, words. The upper echelons in the U.S.A. had other plans. Some twenty years later, George Kennan (then counsellor of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow) wrote in the first volume of his memoirs, published in 1967:

p ‘The American administrations of that day, both FDR’s and Mr. Truman’s, have often been reproached over the intervening years for the abrupt cancellation of Lend-Lease to Russia in the summer of 1945, and the failure to offer to the Soviet Union the largescale loan which, in the view of some, the Soviet leaders had been encouraged to believe they would receive... I must confess that if the United States government deserves criticism for taking a hard line in any or all of these problems, I deserve greater criticism for taking a still harder one, for taking it earlier, and for inspiring and encouraging Washington in its stiffness. It will stand as a fair example of the views I was putting before the ambassador and the State Department at that time. I know of no justification, either economic or political, for any further granting of Lend-Lease aid to Russia, for any agreement on our part that Russia, not being a contributor to UNRRA.  [15•* , should receive any substantial amount of UNRRA aid, or for any extension of U.S. government credit to Russia without equivalent political advantage to our people... I find, in retrospect, nothing to regret about this.’

p Why this ill will against an ally of the United States? Didn’t Kennan, a man who had devoted his life to studying the Soviet Union and who was considered a leading 16 expert in Soviet affairs, know enough of the country and its people? We find instructive episodes in his memoirs, lifting the veil on the mentality of those who shape American policy. ’My views on all that had to do with possible economic aid to Russia,’ he wrote, ’were influenced, I suspect, by the impressions of a journey that I had opportunity to make, within the Soviet Union, not long after the ending of hostilities in Europe.’ The U.S. Embassy counsellor visited Novosibirsk and Kuznetsk, and was hospitably received. But here is what he writes: ’I was required to endure all over again that well-meant but sometimes trying refrain of Russian hospitality: “You don’t eat anything. You don’t like it, huh?” â€™ The kind hosts could not know that Kennan’s ambition, as he notes in his memoirs, was to see Kuznetsk where ’no Westerner, so far as I could ascertain, had been... for several years. I had never seen any of the leading Soviet industrial plants.’

p For Kennan it had been a most rewarding journey. He saw everything he had wanted to see. He visited the places where Soviet military power was forged during the war, and was probably impressed. Years later, he described what he remembered of those days when, as a man who spoke fluent Russian, he was not recognised as an American by the people around him. Here is what he wrote:

p ‘The result was that I had, for once, the feeling of not being a stranger, of belonging to a company of ordinary Soviet people. My companions on the plane, in any case, did not seem to recognize me as anything out of the ordinary. At the airport in Omsk, sitting in the grass under the shade of the wing of the plane in the heat of the day, I read aloud to a group of them, at their request, from a volume of Aleksei Tolstoy’s Peter the Great which I had with me. In the evenings I shared their company in the little airport dormitories as though I were a common citizen like the rest of them. I felt immensely at home among them.’

p But the call of duty came first. Little did his companions on the plane suspect what was going on in the mind of this modestly clothed man wearing a simple worker’s cap:

p ‘Watching the great plain of the region just west of the Volga as it slowly receded beneath us, I fell to 17 thinking, in connection with these friendly fellow passengers, of the problem of American aid to Russia ... The Russian people, as the experiences of this visit had just emphasized for me, were a great and appealing people. The sufferings they had recently undergone were enormous. These sufferings had been incurred partly in our own cause. One would have liked to help, but could one? When a people found itself under the control of a strongly authoritarian regime, and especially one hostilely inclined to the United States, there was very little that Americans could do to help them, it occurred to me, without helping the regime... People and regime, in other words, were bound together in a common dialectical relationship, so that you could not help people without helping regime, and you could not harm regime without harming people. In these circumstances it was better, surely, to try neither to help nor to harm, but rather to leave people alone. It was, after all, their predicament, not ours.’

p Lofty thoughts those, verging on the philosophical. What stereotype anti-Soviet pragmatism! Kennan looked with the frigid eyes of an ‘expert’ on those whose ’ sufferings had been incurred partly in our own [American] cause’, and concluded that, after all, it was their predicament. Granted, that was a personal view. But what about the hostility to the U.S.A. that Kennan refers to? In his slowly developing narrative, he recalls how in the autumn of 1945 a group of American congressmen had (importunately, we may add) obtained Stalin’s consent to receive them.

p Kennan, who was in charge of the Embassy in the absence of the U.S. Ambassador, was to accompany them to the Kremlin. The Congressmen appeared before him from underground: they had just been on a tour of the Metro (the Moscow subway), where they had been offered refreshments (again that sinister Russian hospitality), and having lost their sense of proportion were in their cups, though, surely, the hosts had not intended that.

p ‘They were on the verge of their interview with the great Soviet leader,’ he writes. ’We tore away, in two limousines, in the direction of the Kremlin, I riding in the front seat of one of the cars. As we approached the Kremlin gate, protected by what was 18 probably the most vigilant and elaborate system of guarding of any place in the world, I was horrified to hear, from the interior of the car behind me, a raucous voice saying: “Who the hell is this guy Stalin, anyway? I don’t know that I want to go up and see him. I think I’ll get out.” Elaborate arrangements had been made, including even the submission of every passport to the Foreign Office, to assure admission of the party to the Kremlin, and I knew that if anyone were missing, things would be royally gummed up. So I said with great definiteness: “You’ll do nothing of the sort. You will sit right there where you are and remain with the party.” There ensued the formalities at the gate. Doors were opened, identities were established, seats were looked under. A car full of armed men was placed before us, and another one behind. Thus guarded, we drove off up the short incline to the heart of the Kremlin. At this point the same raucous voice became audible once more behind me: “What if I biff the old codger one in the nose?" My heart froze. I cannot recall what I said, but I am sure that never in my life did I speak with greater earnestness. I had, as I recollect it, the help of some of the more sober members of the party. In any case, our companion came meekly along. He sat in Stalin’s office at the end of the long table, facing Stalin, and did nothing more disturbing than to leer and wink once or twice at the bewildered dictator, thus making it possible for the invisible gun muzzles, with which the room was no doubt studded, to remain sullenly silent.’

p Incredible nonsense. And this from a man said to be an ‘expert’ on the Soviet Union with a reputation for sound thinking. Speaking of ‘hostility’, doesn’t it positively brim over in Kennan’s masterpiece?

p What did the elected representatives of the American people speak about with Stalin that day? ’I cannot recall the tenor of the discussion between the Congressmen and Stalin (the Washington archives, I am sure, would show it),’ Kennan writes, ’but I have a vivid memory of our approach to this occasion.’^^4^^

p Yes, we’ve heard about the ‘approach’. As for the tenor of the discussion, there’s no need to trouble the 19 Washington archives. On returning home, the talkative Congressmen lost no time to tell all comers why they had visited the Kremlin. They were members of the House Select Committee on Postwar Economic Policy and Planning no less. Gaddis collected and studied their pronouncements at the time, and described them in his book, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (which appeared in 1972):

p ‘On September 14, 1945, this delegation, led by Committee chairman William M. Colmer of Mississippi, enjoyed the distinction of a personal interview with Joseph Stalin.

p ‘Colmer told the Soviet leader that his committee knew about the Russian desire for a loan from the United States. How, he wanted to know, would the Soviets use the money, how would they pay it back, and what could Washington expect in return? . . .The delegation stopped off in London on its way home to report to Secretary of State Byrnes, and later conferred personally with President Truman. Before both men Colmer’s group stressed the necessity “of stiffening our collective backbone in dealing with the Soviet Republic".

p ‘The Colmer committee was willing to approve an American loan to the Soviet Union; but only if the Russians met certain conditions. They would have to disclose what proportion of total production they devoted to armaments. They would be required to reveal vital statistics on the operation of the Soviet economy, and to provide an opportunity to check the accuracy of these figures. The Soviet Union would have to give up the administration of relief for political purposes in Eastern Europe and disclose the terms of its trade treaties with the countries of this area. Within both the USSR and the East European countries under its control, the Kremlin would have to guarantee full protection of American property, the right to distribute American books, magazines, newspapers, and motion pictures . . . Finally, the United States should insist upon “the fulfillment of Russia’s political obligations on the same terms as those of other Governments. This includes the withdrawal of Russian occupation forces in accordance with the 20 Potsdam agreements and the Yalta conference"... In short, Colmer and his colleagues demanded that, in return for an American loan, the Soviet Union reform its internal system of government and abandon the sphere of influence ... in Eastern Europe.’^^5^^

p What the sober ones have on their mind, runs a Russian saying, the drunken ones have on their tongue: the things the gentlemen of the Select Committee said in the Kremlin can be easily imagined. But, certainly, they weren’t pumped full of vodka when they were developing their view on relations with the Soviet Union in their many public statements and articles, which Gaddis so faithfully summed up. What was said left little doubt as to who was ’hostilely inclined’. So, George Kennan, an experienced diplomat, naturally ’cannot recall’ the tenor of the discussion, suggesting that the curious turn to the archives. Below, with a trace of annoyance, it is true, he sums up the extraordinary foray of the U.S. congressmen:

p ‘The episode was a small one, hut I must say that it was one of the impressions (and there were many of them in the course of a Foreign Service career) that gradually bred in me a deep skepticism about the absolute value of people-to-people contacts for the improvement of international relations. On the other hand, I must also say that our congressional visitors varied, in their capacity to derive profit for themselves ...’^^6^^

p This closing remark, naturally vague coming from a professional diplomat, explains the behavior of the official U.S. persons who kept arriving in Moscow in those days. In the summer of 1946, for example, a group headed by oil magnate Edwin Pauley arrived in the Soviet capital to discuss reparations. It had come in order to acquaint the Soviet administration with the First Charge Principle, namely, as U.S. historian Daniel Yergin explains in his book, Shattered Peace (1977), that ’reparations from current production—that is, the output of German industry—were to be kept as low as possible. Second, all exports from this production would be used first to pay for goods imported from the West, and only after that for reparations deliveries to the East. This was the so-called First Charge Principle. Germany was to be integrated into a multilateral, but American-dominated, world economic 21 order before reparations (in effect, aid) went to the Soviet ally... Some members of the U.S. delegation could not conceal their antagonism and their belief that their directives were too soft; some could not control their entrepreneurial drives. Several of Pauley’s colleagues, recruited from the oil business, sold their suits in Moscow at a going price of $ 250 each.’ ^^7^^

Small-time profiteers who, in addition to making a quick dollar, helped to block reparations to the Soviet Union, though it was established by that time that despite the war time destruction Germany’s economic potential of 1945 was higher than in 1939.^^8^^ No, we could expect no good from theorists like Kennan, practicians like Colmer, and people like Pauley & Co. For the simple reason that Washington saw the Soviet Union as an enemy, and acted accordingly.