World War II Behind Closed Doors by Laurence Rees Read Free Book Online Page B

Roosevelt and Churchill must have felt constrained by their respective governments' own previous half-truths about Stalin. During 1943 Allied propaganda had continued to churn out wildly positive material about the Soviet Union and Stalin, of which Mission to Moscow was the most glaring example. Robert Buckner, the producer of the film, later described it as an ‘expedient lie for political purposes’. 35 The trouble was that the general public formed their own upbeat view of Stalin and the Soviet Union based on ‘expedient lies’ such as this. Consequently Roosevelt – with an election coming up in less than a year – would have felt it unhelpful to his own political chances to contradict the positive gloss.
    In any event, Roosevelt seemed happy enough to stick to the previous propaganda line on his return from Tehran. When asked by a journalist what ‘type of person Marshal Stalin’ was, he replied: ‘I would call him something like me…a realist’. 36 And in his 1943 Christmas Eve broadcast to the American people, Roosevelt remarked: ‘I must say I got along fine with Marshal Stalin. He is man who combines a tremendous relentless determination with stalwart good humour. I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people – very well indeed’. 37
    But Stalin was, as Roosevelt knew full well, a ‘realist’ who had shown in the past that he rejected the values that the American President held most dear – freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom from fear, to name but three. Roosevelt had openly condemned Stalin's regime just three years before, and although there were now straws in the wind to suggest that the Soviet system might possibly become less draconian in the future, theAmerican President ought to have known full well that Stalin was not a man ‘like’ him at all.
    But the signs are that Roosevelt's gushing words about Stalin were not just politically expedient. As he had told his son, Elliot, in private at Tehran, he had genuinely found something to ‘like’ in Stalin and thought him ‘impressive’. Perhaps it was because the Soviet leader was a great listener – an attribute that suited the garrulous President – and, as we have seen, in manner and style Stalin did not seem to be a bloodthirsty tyrant at all. It was only if you discarded the surface appearances and listened carefully to what Stalin said that a darker picture appeared. At Tehran, the two Western leaders either didn't choose to see this, or else simply couldn't see it.
    THE RETURN OF KATYN
    While Stalin dined with Roosevelt and Churchill at Tehran, his security forces were hard at work trying to cover up the mass murder they had committed three years before at Katyn. The Red Army liberated Smolensk and the surrounding area in late August 1943, in the aftermath of their victory at Kursk. Within days the Soviets fenced off the murder site at Katyn once again, and the NKVD began excavating the bodies that had been reburied by the Germans after their own investigation into the crime earlier in the year had been completed.
    The Soviet authorities knew they faced two practical problems in trying to pretend that the Germans had committed the murders. First, the Germans had gathered eye-witness testimony that blamed the Soviets for the shootings; and second, no documentation had been found on any of the Polish corpses that dated from after April 1940 – something that was at odds with the Soviet claim that the Poles had been murdered in the summer of 1941.
    But neither of these difficulties was insurmountable for the Soviet secret police. First they added false documents to the genuine ones the Germans had already found. These included areceipt for 25 roubles from Starobielsk camp in the name of Vladimir Arashkevich, dated 25 March 1941, and an icon on the reverse of which were an illegible signature and the date