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It is an outstanding curiosity of the Second World War that two such brilliant men as Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt allowed themselves to suppose that the mere fact of discovering a common enemy in Hitler could suffice to make possible a real relationship, as distinct from an arrangement of convenience on specifics, between Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. Stalin and his acolytes never for a moment forgot that their social and political objectives were inimical to those of their capitalist Western Allies. British politicians, generals and diplomats were, however, foolish enough to hope that they might achieve some comradeship with the Soviets, without forswearing their visceral loathing for them. Few senior Americans were as hostile to the Russians as were the British, partly because they were so confident of U.S. power, and correspondingly less fearful of Soviet ambitions. But the Americans, too—with such notable exceptions as Harriman—harboured delusions about their ability to make friends with the Russians, or at least to exploit U.S. might to bend the Soviet government to their will, which rational assessment of rival national purposes should have dispelled.

It is striking that Churchill’s visit to Moscow failed to inspire any quickening of aid to Russia. Following the disaster to PQ17 in July, the British dispatched no further supplies to Archangel for two months, declining to risk another convoy in the relentless daylight of Arctic high summer. On and after September 20, twenty-seven of PQ18’s forty ships arrived safely. Thereafter, for four months the Royal Navy was too preoccupied with supporting the Torch landings to dispatch any Arctic convoys at all. At horrific risk, thirteen merchant ships sailed independently and unescorted to the Kola Inlet. Just five arrived. By January 1943, only two further convoys, thirty merchantmen in all, had reached Russia safely. Thereafter, as Allied resources grew and German strength in northern Norway was weakened by diversions of Luftwaffe aircraft to other theatres, the picture changed dramatically. Massive consignments of vehicles, stores and equipment, most of American manufacture, were successfully shipped, half of them through Vladivostok. Such assistance made a critical contribution to the Red Army’s advance to victory in 1944–45. But Stalin and his people were entitled to consider that they saved themselves until 1943 with only marginal foreign aid.

Soviet historians in comparatively modern times have continued to heap scorn upon the shortfalls of Western assistance. In 1978 Victor Trukhanovsky wrote: “The deliveries were curtailed652 not so much by the difficulties of escorting convoys … as Churchill and British historians like to claim, as by the fact that in Britain there were influential circles which did not like the alliance with the USSR and hindered the normal development of relations between the two alliances. Their influences affected the stance adopted by Churchill.” Although in reality shortages of weapons and shipping, together with Soviet intransigence, were the principal inhibiting factors, it was true that few senior figures in Britain wanted the Soviets to emerge strengthened from the war. Extravagant early assurances given to Moscow by both Washington and London were broken. Churchill’s promise to dispatch twenty, even forty British air squadrons to support the Red Army went unfulfilled. There were readily identifiable reasons for this. But Stalin saw only one reality: that while his own nation was engulfed in battle, blood and destruction, Britain remained relatively unscathed and America absolutely so.

Churchill was too wise to waste much consideration upon the moral superiority of Britain’s position over that of the Soviet Union. All that now mattered to the British and Americans was that the three nations shared a common commitment to the defeat of Nazism. Nonetheless, it was hard to achieve even basic working relationships. Whatever courtesies Stalin accorded to such grandees