Office of the Historian

740.0011 European War 139/24644: Telegram

The Ambassador in the United Kingdom (Winant) to the Secretary of State

London, October 5, 1942—1 p.m.
[Received October 5—10:34 a.m.]

5537. Personal, for the President from Harriman. Without any specific information, it is my guess that Stalin’s statement last night to the Associated Press30 is part of a scheme developed by the Soviet Foreign Propaganda Bureau with which I understand Oumansky is now associated.

Stalin has evidently been told that the way to get action on the part of the United States and the British Governments is to have those in authority, to use Willkie’s31 word “prodded” by popular demand. Stalin’s statement ties in with what Maisky32 said here to the American press a fortnight ago.

The Slavic mind does not understand us any more perhaps than we understand them and they do not realize that their relations with us, both now and in the future, cannot be built on a sound basis with this type of devious method. The statement does not sound at all like the direct manner in which Stalin personally dealt with the Prime Minister and myself when we were in Moscow.33 It sounds more like a scheme of a mind like Oumansky’s.

From my personal talk with Stalin I am convinced that he wants above all to be on a basis of intimacy and frank interchange with you. On the other hand it should be borne in mind that Stalin does not pretend to understand the ways of our democracies.

I feel Stalin has been misinformed of the psychological and political situation in both the United States and Britain and the effect that this type of heavy-handed propaganda will have on our relations. I believe it is correct to say that since Dieppe34 there has been far less public clamor here and more sober thinking regaining a second front. [Harriman.]

Winant
  1. See infra.↩
  2. Concerning the visit of Wendell L. Willkie, personal representative of President Roosevelt, to the Soviet Union in September 1942, see pp. 637–650, passim. ↩
  3. Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky, Soviet Ambassador in the United Kingdom.↩
  4. In August; see pp. 618–625, passim. ↩
  5. A 9–hour raid was carried out on the German-held French channel port of Dieppe on August 19–20, 1942, by combined British, Canadian, American, and Free French contingents, which sustained heavy losses.↩