A book on Soviet wartime diplomacy has to begin somewhere, and where it begins is the first thing it tells you. The Road to Great Victory announces its subject on the title page — "Soviet Diplomacy 1941–1945" — and its opening chapter is headed "Soviet Diplomacy at the Outbreak of the Great Patriotic War." The outbreak, for Vilnis Sipols, is 22 June 1941: "At daybreak on June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union." Everything the book covers — the forging of the Grand Alliance, the second-front question, Lend-Lease, Tehran, Yalta, Potsdam, the shape of the post-war world — flows from that morning. The choice of terminus is legitimate; the Great Patriotic War did begin then. But it means that the two years of Soviet diplomacy immediately before June 1941 fall outside the frame by design, and those two years are the ones on which the whole moral standing of the story depends.
Watch how the Introduction crosses them. It sets the scene at length: the Soviet campaign for collective security from 1933, the convention defining aggression, the mutual-assistance treaties of 1935, Chamberlain's "appeasement," the American Neutrality Acts. Then, in two sentences, it clears the ground between the failure of collective security and the German invasion: "The policy of acquiescence in the predatory ambitions of Germany, Japan, and Italy, pursued by Britain, France and the United States, gave the bloc of fascist aggressors an opportunity to trigger off the Second World War. Having started the war on September 1, 1939, the German Reich brought Poland, France and most of other countries of Europe under its sway." The next paragraph jumps clean to 1941: "Only after Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union, in June 1941, did a coalition of the U.S.S.R., Britain, and the United States and a number of other countries begin to take shape." Between 1 September 1939 and 22 June 1941 nothing happens that the diplomatic historian of Soviet foreign policy needs to record. The Treaty of Non-Aggression signed in Moscow on 23 August 1939, its Secret Additional Protocol, the entry into eastern Poland on 17 September, the partition treaty of 28 September, the war with Finland, the annexation of the Baltic states and Bessarabia in the summer of 1940 — all of it lies in the gap the Introduction steps over.
This is the same author who, two years earlier, wrote Diplomatic Battles Before World War II (Progress, 1982), the companion volume in this series and the direct prequel to this one. That book ran up to 1 September 1939 and had to reach the Pact, because negotiation was its declared subject; it described the treaty article by article and left the Secret Protocol out — an omission the introduction to that volume treats at length. The Road to Great Victory is the sequel, and its period spares its author even the awkwardness of arriving at the document. In a study explicitly devoted to Soviet diplomacy across the war years, the phrase "non-aggression pact" does not occur once. The most consequential treaty Soviet diplomacy signed in the decade has been placed just outside the book's opening date, and the book opens exactly where the placing is invisible.
The date needs no detective work. The spine reads 1984, the copyright line reads "© Progress Publishers 1984," and the text cites Soviet sources published in Moscow in 1984. This is not one of the lagged Progress reprints — it is a genuinely contemporary book, written for the fortieth anniversary of the victory of 1945. The Introduction says as much in its first line: the war "came as so much of a shock to so many peoples as not to have been forgotten to this day, four decades since it was over." The Conclusion closes the circuit: "After the Second World War, Europe has been living in peace for forty years now. That is the best indication of how far this major problem was then solved."
Forty years of peace is the book's argument, not merely its arithmetic. It was written into the Second Cold War — Reagan's first term, the Euromissile crisis, the Pershing II and cruise deployments of 1983, the sharpest East–West freeze since the early 1960s — and it deploys the wartime alliance as a double reproach: to a West that once needed Soviet arms and now rearmed against Moscow, and as a title-deed to Soviet legitimacy as the peace-keeping power. The book was made for export in the language of international circulation, and its back matter advertises its neighbours in the Progress catalogue — L. Teplinsky's Danger: NATO! among them. "The book is intended for the general reader," the colophon states: the Western peace movement, the sympathetic lecturer, the diplomatic historian who could be trusted to weigh a footnote. Its final sentence turns 1945 directly on 1984 — the victory, it says, is a lesson for the aggressors of the present day.
Sipols himself is worth placing, because he is not a hack drafted in for the anniversary. He was a Latvian, a professional historian of Soviet diplomacy, and this book carries his own trade in its footnotes — among them his 1959 monograph Behind the Scenes of the Foreign Intervention in Latvia, 1918–1920. He works from Soviet published document series, from Churchill's and Eden's and Woodward's memoirs and histories, from the Public Record Office by Cabinet file number, from the German and American diplomatic collections. This is a real apparatus, and the citation habit runs the right way for most of the book: the claims about Anglo-American conduct are documented from Anglo-American sources. It is the more striking, then, where the citations stop.
A reader who takes this book for a tissue of propaganda will be disarmed the first time they check it against a serious Western history, because a great deal of it is right, and the central grievance it presses is a real one.
The core claim is true and should be stated without hedging. The Soviet–German front was the decisive theatre of the war; the Red Army broke the bulk of the Wehrmacht; and the Soviet people paid a price no other combatant approached. The book gives the toll as "over twenty million lives" against British losses of 370,000 and American of some 300,000 — the official figure of its day, since revised upward toward 27 million, but of the right and terrible order. Against the durable Western habit of remembering the war as an Anglo-American story with a Russian sideshow, this is a necessary corrective, and Sipols documents it partly from the enemy's own mouth: he quotes the British and American command's private assessment of 1943 that "the Russian Army was the only land force that could yield decisive results," any force they could land being "merely a drop in the bucket."
The second-front grievance is the strongest thing in the book, and it is not manufactured. The Western powers did promise a landing in France in 1942, did postpone it to 1943 and then to 1944, and did leave the Soviet Union to bear the main weight of the German army for three years. Sipols tracks the diplomacy of that delay closely and fairly, and he catches the Western leaders being candid in private. He records that Roosevelt "did not even conceal from his close associates that the purpose behind his assurances regarding the Second Front" was "to reassure the Soviet Government" — assurance as a substitute for action. He shows the 1942 second-front communiqué being drained of content into the "urgent tasks" of creating a front rather than a pledge to open one. And he is entitled to Churchill's own coldest line, cabled to Sir Stafford Cripps in the desperate autumn of 1941, when the ambassador reported Soviet anger at the taunt that Britain was "prepared to fight to the last drop of Russian blood": the Russians, Churchill wrote, "have no right to reproach us"; they "brought their own fate upon themselves." Litvinov's suspicion — that the Western calculation was for Soviet forces "to be exhausted and worn out to the utmost so as to reduce its role in resolving the post-war problems" — was not simple paranoia, and the historiography has largely borne out that the delay had political as well as logistical motives.
Even the book's minimising of Lend-Lease is defensible on its own terms. Sipols argues that the tide turned at Moscow in 1941 "before any Lend-Lease supplies first reached the Soviet Union," that the bulk of deliveries came in 1943–45 when Soviet industry was already outproducing Germany, and that the supplies amounted to "2 per cent of the artillery, 10 per cent of the tanks and 12 per cent of the aircraft" the USSR fielded. The proportions are broadly sound; the one-sidedness is in the omission of what those deliveries disproportionately were — trucks, locomotives, radios, aviation fuel and food, the sinews of mobility rather than the count of tanks — but the corrective against the Western myth that American aid won the war on the Eastern Front is a fair one.
All of this must be credited, and credited precisely, because the criticism that follows is not the reactionary one. There is a long tradition in Cold War writing that sets Stalin's crimes beside Hitler's, files the two states under a single "totalitarianism," and quietly deflates the anti-fascist war into a quarrel between equivalent tyrannies. That equivalence is false, and the revolutionary socialist tradition from which this introduction is written has always rejected it. The Soviet Union was not Nazi Germany's moral twin; the war against it was a war of liberation for the peoples of Europe; and the victory was the achievement of a society the October Revolution had built. Ernest Mandel, whose The Meaning of the Second World War (Verso, 1986) is the Fourth International's own full-length reckoning with the war and the counterweight to this volume, is emphatic that "there cannot be the slightest doubt that German imperialism deliberately and brazenly unleashed the war" (ch. 2), and equally emphatic that it was the planned economy created by the Revolution that let the USSR survive and win (ch. 5). Nothing that follows chips at that. The quarrel is not with the victory. It is with what the diplomacy of the victory was made to conceal.
Return to the gap the Introduction steps over. The Pact is not the only casualty of the book's opening date; so is everything the Pact set in motion — and the events could not be omitted entirely, because the wartime diplomacy the book does narrate consists, in large part, of the Soviet effort to get those events ratified.
The single most persistent Soviet diplomatic objective of 1941–42, in Sipols's own telling, was to make Britain and the United States "recognise the Soviet Western frontiers as of June 22, 1941." He states plainly what that meant: at the Moscow talks of December 1941 the Soviet government "stressed the fundamental importance of having the British Government recognise the Soviet Western frontiers as of June 22, 1941, notably, the incorporation of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in the U.S.S.R." Here is a Latvian historian, writing in Riga's imperial capital, describing the diplomatic campaign to secure Western recognition of the annexation of his own nation — and describing the annexation only as an accomplished "incorporation," a frontier that simply exists as of a certain date, never as an act with a cause. The one place the Baltic states enter as living societies, the book has them extinguished by someone else: the "reactionary bourgeois States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia," it says, were established after 1918 by German and Entente bayonets and were "alien to their peoples' aspirations." How they ceased to exist in 1940 is not a question the book asks. The eastern Polish territories get the same grammar: seized by Poland "during the armed intervention of 1920," they "were reincorporated in the U.S.S.R. in 1939" — reincorporated by whom, under what treaty, in what month of 1939, the reader is not told.
The frontier "as of June 22, 1941" is the frontier the Secret Additional Protocol drew. Mandel names it exactly. In his chapter on the aftermath he lists what Stalin spent the first eighteen months of the war pressing Churchill to accept: "the Soviet frontiers of 1941, i.e. recognition of what had been obtained through the Hitler-Stalin pact: the Baltic States, the Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia as well as Bessarabia and the Northern Bukovina" (ch. 17). (Mandel's own text elsewhere misdates the Protocol's signature to 27 August; it was signed on the night of 23 August 1939.) Sipols narrates the entire diplomacy of getting that frontier recognised and never once describes how the frontier was made. The prequel volume performed the suppression the hard way, reaching the treaty and cutting the annex; this volume performs it by geography, beginning its clock the day after the annexations were complete and treating their result as the natural state of the world. The reader who wants the missing two years should turn to the introduction to Diplomatic Battles Before World War II, where the same author is caught in the act of drawing the veil; here he does not have to draw it, because the frame already hides the room.
The book's period does contain one great Soviet–Polish crisis, and it is a diplomatic crisis, squarely inside Sipols's remit: the rupture of relations with the Polish government-in-exile. He narrates it to the day. The London Poles under General Sikorski had pressed territorial claims and grown hostile, he writes, and its "anti-Soviet declarations became so virulent before long that the Soviet Government found it necessary to sever diplomatic relations with it" — the rupture of 25 April 1943.
The date is exact. The cause is a blank. What made April 1943 the moment of rupture was Katyn: on 13 April the Germans announced the mass graves in the Katyn forest, and the London government asked the International Red Cross to investigate the bodies of some 22,000 Polish officers, policemen and members of the intelligentsia — men shot in the spring of 1940 by the NKVD, on the direct authorisation of the Soviet Politburo. It was the request for an independent investigation that Moscow treated as the "anti-Soviet declaration" justifying the break. The word Katyn does not appear anywhere in this book; neither does NKVD; neither does deportation. A diplomatic history that can fix the rupture to 25 April 1943 but cannot say what the two governments had fallen out about is missing the load-bearing fact of its own chapter. The massacre itself, and the Soviet lie maintained until 1990, are set out in the introductions to the companion volumes in this series — Grechko's Liberation Mission and Minasyan's Great Patriotic War — and need not be re-argued here. The point that belongs to Sipols is narrower and, in its way, sharper: this is the one book of the three whose declared subject is the diplomacy of 1943, and it dates the diplomatic wound precisely while amputating its cause.
Having removed the cause, the book must supply a replacement, and the replacement is an escalation. The London Poles' agents in Poland, Sipols writes, "were not fighting against the German invaders, and were even cooperating with them in the extermination of the Polish guerilla fighters." This is worth pausing on by the standard this series applies to Progress books generally. It is an accusation with no described act a reader could check — no place, no date, no unit, no document — laid against the government whose army, the Home Army, was at that moment the largest armed resistance in occupied Europe. It is essence, not evidence: the London Poles are "reactionaries," and reactionaries collaborate, and so the charge writes itself. Set beside it the treatment of the Warsaw Rising of 1944, which the book blames on its victims in the identical vocabulary — a "reckless and fearful gamble" by "power-seeking criminals" — exactly as Grechko and Minasyan do, because all three are executing one institutional line. That episode is treated in full in the companion introductions; here it is enough to note that the diplomatic rupture of 1943 and the military catastrophe of 1944 are narrated by the same device, the victim reclassified as the aggressor so that the thing done to him need never be named.
The book's largest single theme after the second front is the post-war settlement — the Polish question at Tehran and Yalta, the Curzon Line, the fate of Eastern Europe — and here the critique has to be made with care, because the book is not simply lying and the reactionary reading of Yalta is not the socialist one.
Sipols presents the Sovietisation of Poland as the diplomatic defeat of a "reactionary" émigré government by the "new popular democratic Government" that "gained more esteem and support of the mass of the people with each passing day." The Curzon Line as Poland's eastern frontier, the "reorganisation" of the Warsaw provisional government with a few London Poles admitted, the promised elections — all of it is rendered as legitimate security and liberation, never as the drawing of a sphere. The tell is the vocabulary of the Conclusion, where the book states its thesis without ornament: "The Soviet Government pursued the fair objective of liberation," while Britain "fought to keep her empire" and the United States "sought to establish its world-wide supremacy." Two of the three powers have spheres and interests; one has only a fair objective. The Red Army's westward advance installs governments that are, by definition, the free choice of their peoples, because the book's grammar has no word for a Soviet imposition.
But the correction here is not the émigré legend of a Poland "betrayed" at Yalta, and it is important to say so, because that legend is false too and the book is at its most honest in refuting it. Sipols records, accurately, that Roosevelt and Eden had privately agreed as early as 1942 to concede the Baltic states and Bessarabia to the USSR, treating the concession as "a bargaining counter"; that by Yalta even Churchill accepted the Curzon Line; and that Poland had in fact been liberated "by Soviet, not British or American, forces." Mandel makes the same refusal from the other side. The shape of post-war Europe, he argues, was determined "to a large extent" on the battlefield rather than at the conference tables (ch. 16); the Western powers were in no position in 1945 to alter where the Red Army stood. What Mandel adds, and what Sipols cannot, is that this was not liberation in the sense the word carries in the book. The buffer states of Eastern Europe were assimilated to the Soviet model from around 1947–48 by "military-bureaucratic compulsion" — "revolution from above" — over the independent organisations of the working class rather than through them (ch. 17). Capitalism was indeed abolished there; landlords and industrialists did lose their property; but it was done by an occupying army and a political police, precisely so that it should not be done from below. Mandel sets 1944–48 alongside 1939–41 as two instances of one method — the same method whose first instance the book's opening date conceals. The standing measure of the whole argument remains Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936): the Soviet bureaucracy as a privileged, nationally-minded caste whose foreign policy served its own security and the status quo, conducted, in Mandel's phrase, in the traditional mould of European power politics, spheres and all. "The fair objective of liberation" is the phrase that caste used for the results of its own frontier-making.
The two questions this series has learned to put to any such volume separate the scholarship from the operation cleanly. First: is each accusation attached to a described act that could be shown not to have happened? For the second-front delay, yes — Sipols names the meetings, quotes the cables, cites the files, and a reader can check him and will mostly find him right. For the London Poles "cooperating with them in the extermination" of the resistance, no — there is no act, only an essence. Second: could the book's own category ever be turned on the author's side? "The fair objective of liberation," as the book defines it against imperialist "spheres," can never describe a Soviet action; the annexation of the Baltic states is not an annexation but an "incorporation," the rupture with Poland is caused by Polish virulence and never by a Soviet grave, the tanks that install the Warsaw government are liberation by definition. A charge that cannot rebound on the speaker is the finding, and it is not about any single word.
So read the middle of this book as diplomatic history and read its seams as instruction. The chapters on the forging of the alliance, on the long diplomacy of the second front, on the conference-table manoeuvring at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam are the work of a real archival historian, and they contain material — the private Anglo-American assessments of Soviet weight, the cynicism of the second-front assurances, the documented reality of the delay — that a serious reader will want and can trust. The seams are three, and each falls where the answer had been decided before the file was opened: the opening date of June 1941, which places the Pact and the annexations just off the page; the rupture of April 1943, dated to the day and severed from Katyn; and the frontier "as of June 22, 1941," whose recognition the book pursues through two hundred pages of honest diplomacy without once describing how the frontier came to be.
It is worth holding both facts at once, because a Latvian wrote this book. Sipols was not lying about the second front, and the reader who dismisses him there will simply be wrong. He was a historian permitted to publish everything he found in the Soviet and Latvian archives except the documents that bore on how his own nation lost its independence — and he wrote the book that permission allowed, opening it on the one date that made the permitted silence look like the natural order of things. What that cost is not recorded in the text. It is only visible in the shape of it, in the two years the road to great victory is made to begin after.