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been introduced into the dock unloading crews,” the local NKVD chief reported to Lavrenti Beria, overlord of Stalin’s security apparatus, when an American freighter docked at Sebastopol. “The main purpose is to prevent possible attempts to plant U.S. agents in the port, and to prevent possible provocation by hostile elements among the crew, and to prevent any contact between port staff and the crew. Female agents who have received most detailed briefings will be kept in close touch with officers who come ashore.” Yet Roosevelt continued to believe that he could do business with Stalin in a way that Churchill could not. The U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, who had become converted to a deeply sombre view of the Soviet Union, visited Roosevelt in November 1944 to urge the need for much greater American toughness towards Stalin. He emerged despondent: “I do not believe that I have convinced the President of the importance of a vigilant, firm policy,” he wrote. Many Americans were more troubled by the residual imperial ambitions of their British ally than by the designs of their Russian one upon eastern Europe. “The British would take land anywhere in the world, even if it were a rock or a sandbar,” Roosevelt observed caustically to his secretary of state. A letter-writer to the San Francisco Chronicle complained that “American boys spilled their blood in Europe to protect the mighty Empire . . . Yesterday in her dark hour England whimpered for aid against the arrogant. Today, the winning of her battle made certain by the blood and wealth of America, England is arrogant.” Washington strove manfully to sustain a working relationship with Moscow, despite relentless Soviet slights.

Russians nursed a contempt, not discouraged by Stalin, for the belated achievement of Overlord. “We spoke very little about the Second Front,” said artillery officer Major Yury Ryakhovsky. “We never felt any weakening of German pressure because of what the Western allies were doing—indeed, we didn’t feel they were doing much. Their campaign was merely a splinter in Germany’s side.” “It was a pity the Americans and British did not start fighting sooner,” said Lieutenant Pavel Nikiforov sardonically, observing that he himself had been wounded in action three times before the first Allied soldier stepped ashore on D-Day.

Soviet behaviour towards the West throughout the Second World War conformed to an historic pattern identified by the historian Orlando Figes: “Complex feelings of insecurity, of envy and resentment towards Europe . . . define the Russian national consciousness.” A Rumanian who visited Russia in September 1944 was awed by the hardships being endured by the population, and noted a mixture of arrogance and inferiority complex in Russian attitudes towards the world: “They are aware of their great victories but at the same time fear they are not being shown sufficient respect. This upsets them.” The Russians scorned the political hypocrisy which they perceived in their Western allies. The Anglo-Americans exercised their consciences about the future governance of Bulgaria and Rumania while appearing wholly indifferent to Soviet expressions of concern about continuing fascist dictatorship in Spain. Here were characteristic bourgeois double standards. The Yugoslav partisan leader Milovan Djilas wrote after a meeting with Stalin in June 1944: “I was filled with admiration for the ruthless, inexhaustible will of the Soviet leaders. And with horror for the endlessness of the cunning and evil that surrounded Russia.” John Erickson, British chronicler of the Red Army, speaks of a mood of “embattled isolation” among both Soviet soldiers and civilians.

The Russians revealed to the Western allies next to nothing about their operational plans. American pleas to deploy liaison officers at Soviet Army headquarters were summarily rejected. For all the public courtesies exchanged between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, a spiritual divide separated Russia from its Western partners, which would become an abyss as the season approached to garner