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that they might share in its postwar governance. Stalin lied flatly to Churchill, asserting that he had no intention of influencing Poland’s internal politics, and that the Poles would be free to choose their own postwar rulers. But in a stream of cables and letters, the Soviet warlord vented his own anger, as real as it was base and monstrously hypocritical, about the London Poles’ declarations of hostility to the Soviet Union.

It was plain to Churchill that the prospects of a free Poland were slender, and shrinking. Amid the exiles’ rejections of his pleas for realism, his lonely battle to restore the nation to freedom was being lost. In all probability, nothing within the power of the Western Allies would have saved Poland from Stalin’s maw. There was one dominant, intractable reality: the Soviet Union’s insistence upon exacting its price for the twenty-eight million Russians who died in the struggle to destroy Nazism. On March 3, Eden asked Churchill to cable Moscow personally about the case of two Royal Navy seamen seized in Murmansk after a drunken brawl and sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia. The prime minister wrote to the foreign secretary: “I cannot send such a telegram which would embroil me with Bruin on a small point when so many large ones are looming up.” Instead, he suggested to Eden that questions in Parliament might generate useful publicity about the case: “A little anti-Russian feeling in the House of Commons would be salutary at the present time.” When Sir John Anderson wrote to Churchill urging that the Russians should be told of the Allies’ “Tube Alloys” project—creation of the atomic bomb—Churchill scrawled in the margin of Anderson’s minute: “On no account.”857

Eden wrote in his diary about Poland: “Soviet attitude on this business858 raises most disquieting thoughts. Is Soviet regime one which will ever cooperate with the West?” A few days later he added: “I confess to growing apprehension that Russia859 has vast aims and that these may include the domination of Eastern Europe and even the Mediterranean and the ‘communising’ of much that remains.” In Italy, the Soviets refused to deal with the Allied Control Commission, and instead appointed their own ambassador with a mandate to embarrass the Anglo-Americans. It was painful for Churchill, who knew the truth about Stalin’s tyranny and the perils posed by his ambitions, to be obliged to indulge the British people’s romantic delusions, and to echo their gratitude for Russian sacrifices. Even as he was participating in an exceptionally harsh exchange of cables with Moscow on a range of issues, in a BBC broadcast on March 26 he nonetheless made a generous tribute to the Red Army. Its 1943 offensive, he said, “constitutes the greatest cause of Hitler’s undoing.” The Russian people had been extraordinarily fortunate to find, “in their supreme ordeal and agony a warrior leader, Marshal Stalin, whose authority enables him to combine and control the movements of armies numbered by many millions upon a front of nearly 2,000 miles, and to impart a unity and a concert to the war direction in the East which has been very good for Russia and for all her Allies.” All this was true, but represented only a portion of reality.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, difficulties persisted with the French. Harold Macmillan wrote from Algiers: “I would much rather get what we want860—if we can—through the French rather than by imposing it on the French. But it is a difficult hand for me to play … the trouble is that neither the President nor the PM has any confidence in de Gaulle.” Churchill had adopted a jaundiced view ever since, at Brazzaville in the Congo in July 1941, the intransigent general gave an interview to the Chicago Daily News in which he suggested that Britain was “doing a wartime deal with Hitler.” Churchill and Eden several times discussed the possibility that de Gaulle was mentally unhinged. The prime minister had become sick to death of his petulance and studied discourtesy. It seemed intolerable that Britain should struggle with Washington on behalf of Free