711.61/798
Memorandum by the Acting Chief of the Division of European Affairs (Atherton) to the Under Secretary of State (Welles)
Mr. Welles: I am sure that you will be interested in the extracts set forth below taken from a confidential letter which Mr. Steinhardt has written to Mr. Henderson under date of October 20, 1940 relating to various problems facing the Embassy in Moscow. Since the portions of the letter devoted to Soviet-American relations might be of interest to you and might be even of help in connection with your conversations with Mr. Oumansky, we are submitting them to you despite the personal character of the letter.
“Disposing briefly of the political side, we have been uncertain of the Department’s policy and purposes arising out of the series of conferences with Oumansky, which of course have been given extraordinary [Page 407] publicity in the European press. Taken at its face value, the telegram15 advising us of the matters of secondary importance discussed between Oumansky and Mr. Welles would indicate that the conferences had no purpose other than to iron out routine difficulties. However, I have not been so certain but that there was a deeper purpose, and as long as I have not been certain that there was a deeper purpose, it has been difficult to orient our course here. Whether or not there was a deeper purpose, it has been made abundantly clear to me that the British have read a very profound objective into this series of conferences. You have my report16 that Cripps17 seized upon the opportunity to threaten Molotov with the United States; that may not be very diplomatic language, but in effect that was his object and I am certain that Molotov received his remarks as being more than those of ‘a third party’. Of course, it may well have been that this is exactly what the Department wanted, but we here have been uncertain. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind but that the publicity going the rounds that an Anglo-American-Soviet alliance was ‘in the making’ has had a very bad effect in the Kremlin. I do not need to labor the point with you that this is the wrong approach to these people. They are realists, if ever there are any realists in this world. Their fear of the German army—no longer held by the French army—is, of course, even greater than before France collapsed. The idea that they would change their policy and run the risk of a German invasion because the British wish them to do so, is childish beyond belief. In my opinion, there will be no change of basic or fundamental Soviet policy in respect of a shift of weight away from the Axis Powers unless and until the German army is no longer regarded in the Kremlin as the principal threat to the Soviet Union. If I am correct in this interpretation, approaches by Britain or the United States must be interpreted here as signs of weakness and the best policy to pursue is one of aloofness, indicating strength, rather than an approach which can have no prospect of success as long as the German military force remains intact and there is no sign of a weakening of German moral. In the Far East, it seems to me that the Soviet objective must be war between the United States and Japan. Nothing would be more to their liking and they have apparently decided that this purpose would be best accomplished by a Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact which, in their opinion, would bring about such a conflict. Once the conflict has begun, and barring extraordinary pressure from Germany, I should expect the Soviet position to shift so as to withhold any assistance to Japan, particularly insofar as concerns oil, in the hope that Japanese naval power will be destroyed and that the fruits of any such war would fall into the Soviet lap without any effort. It is difficult to envisage a Japanese-American naval war, the ultimate outcome of which will not be of material value to the Soviet Union, for should Japanese naval power be destroyed, it would inevitably result in a Japanese collapse which would allow the Soviet Union to re-occupy sufficient territory to assure the safety of Vladivostok.
[Page 408]“The British attempts to use the United States as a trial balloon for a continuance of their appeasement policy. This point needs no elaboration, as you are familiar from the telegrams with the publicity given by the British to their unsuccessful attempts to wean the Soviet Union away from Germany—with the United States cast in the role of ‘wet nurse’.”
“To make matters worse, the Soviet authorities have been more recalcitrant, uncooperative, and stubborn than usual during the past three or four weeks. This is easy to explain. As long as the attitude in Washington was unfriendly, we were getting results here. As soon as the Oumansky–Welles conferences began to take shape in Washington, Oumansky undoubtedly reported the same as a great personal victory and I have little doubt reported the United States as seeking the good graces of the Soviet Union in anticipation of war with Japan. As you Know, from your own experience, the moment these people here get it into their heads that we are ‘appeasing them, making up to them, or need them’, they immediately stop being cooperative. With Oumansky’s vindictive nature, I can just imagine what some of his reports to Molotov must look like. I am sure that he has been gloating and the impression has been created here that the Embassy can be ignored because of the ‘jitters’ in Washington. It would, of course, have been far better to have specifically conditioned the concessions to be made by our Government on the complete removal of our grievances here and to have layed down as a condition precedent to any concessions that the Vladivostok Consulate be granted and some two hundred Americans released from the Lwow area, not to speak of our own difficulties in connection with living conditions, space, etc., but I assume that the ‘higher ups’—regarded international ‘policies’ as more important than profitable results and are still fooling themselves into believing that the Soviet Government responds to kindness or evidences of good will. My experience has been that they respond only to force and if force cannot be applied, then to straight oriental bartering or trading methods and that they would have valued the concessions made in Washington much more had they been on a bargaining basis, such as the charter of a tanker in exchange for a Consulate in Vladivostok or five hundred tons of marine tankers for each American now over a year in the clutches of the local authorities at Lwow. That, in my opinion, is the only language they understand and the only language productive of results. It also has the advantage of gaining their respect. In my opinion, our prestige here has not been at all enhanced by the concessions made to Oumansky, without asking for a semblance of a quid fro quo. I can imagine just what you are up against in trying to get this point of view across. It must be all the more difficult with the British and American press endeavoring to formulate our foreign policy.”
- Telegram No. 614, October 3, 2 p.m., p. 388.↩
- See telegram No. 1293, October 5, 6 p.m., from the Ambassador in the Soviet Union, vol. i, p. 617.↩
- Sir Stafford Cripps, British Ambassador in the Soviet Union.↩