The German invasion had immense consequences for Soviet foreign policy and for the position of the USSR in the world. The day after the invasion the Soviet leadership was surprised to learn not only that Great Britain wanted an alliance but also that Winston Churchill had spoken on the radio to explain the new alliance. “No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years, and I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle that is now unfolding…I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers have tilled from time immemorial…I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine…” Churchill’s conclusion was that “Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid.” Until the rise of Hitler the Soviets had always assumed Britain to be their main enemy, and the rapprochement with France and Czechoslovakia in 1935 never extended to the British Empire. The day of the invasion many Russians, including some in the leadership, assumed that Hitler must have made a secret treaty ending the war with Britain, so Churchill’s announcement came as a great relief. In August, Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that the Lend-Lease program designed to help England and any other power fighting Hitler would be extended to the Soviet Union, and after Pearl Harbor the United States joined the USSR and Britain to fight Germany and Italy as well as Japan. The Soviet Union and Japan, however, did not declare war on each other: both were far too preoccupied elsewhere to risk another front in Eastern Siberia or Manchuria.
Lend-Lease provided significant support to the Soviet war effort, both in equipment and food supplies. The Studebaker trucks went to make up the shortfall in Soviet truck production, crucial to the support of mechanized warfare, and many of them served as launching platforms for the Katyusha rockets. The American Airocobra fighter covered gaps in Soviet aircraft supply in 1942, and Spam filled out the meager wartime diet for millions of Russians. If the scale of American efforts was not decisive, the contribution was real as was the morale effect. The Allied convoys around the North Cape of Norway through winter seas infested with U-Boats and under continuous bombardment from German aircraft were a difficult and dangerous operation, giving the Russians concrete proof that they were not alone against Hitler.
For Stalin and the generals, however, the real issue was not Lend-Lease but the possibility of a second front. After much discussion Roosevelt and Churchill decided to make their first move in the Mediterranean, in North Africa, and then in the 1943 landings in Italy. These moves led to the overthrow of Mussolini and knocked Italy out of the war, though fighting continued against the Germans. Stalin was deeply disappointed that the moves came in the south rather than in France and were limited in scale; he complained bitterly, but to no effect. He never realized the extent of the US commitment in the Pacific theater. Finally he met with Churchill and Roosevelt in Teheran at the end of 1943, where the three allies agreed that they would demand unconditional surrender from Germany, that the USSR would declare war on Japan as soon as Germany was defeated, and that the second front would consist of an allied invasion of northern France in the early summer of 1944. Stalin promised to coordinate a major offensive with the Anglo-American landing. Issues also arose at Teheran about the future of Europe, as Britain and America recognized by now that the Red Army would be the one to liberate Eastern Europe from the Nazis and reach Germany first. In October 1944, Churchill came to Moscow and proposed to Stalin a “percentage agreement” on the Balkans: Britain was to have predominant influence (ninety percent) in Greece, while the Soviet Union was to have the same in Rumania. Bulgaria was to be seventy-five percent under Soviet influence, while the two powers would have equal shares in Yugoslavia and Hungary. Stalin agreed, but Eastern Europe was a major issue again at the Yalta conference in February 1945. There the three powers generally agreed on the joint occupation of Germany (for an undefined period), the destruction of the legacy of Nazism, and reparations to the Soviet Union. Stalin agreed to Roosevelt’s proposal to set up the United Nations. Some greater agreement was achieved on the status of Eastern Europe, such as the future Polish-Soviet boundary, and an agreement that the future Polish government would represent both Stalin’s Polish allies and the conservatives. Stalin promised elections after the war. Most of the other issues involving Eastern Europe were not settled. Roosevelt and Churchill did not want simply to cede control of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union, but with the Red Army in possession of most of the territory and accounting for three quarters of the Wehrmacht’s losses, there was little that they could do.
The fate of Eastern Europe and Germany were not just issues of Soviet foreign policy. Since 1939 the Comintern had experience dizzying shifts in policy. The pact with Germany implied that fascism was no longer the main enemy: the war was a new “imperialist war” and the Communists were to oppose both Hitler and the Allies equally. The German invasion of the Soviet Union prompted yet another abrupt change in revolutionary strategy, a return to a variant of the Popular Front idea of 1935–1939. Stalin dissolved the Comintern in 1943, but most Communist parties of the world remained oriented toward Moscow. The Communists were ordered once again to make a coalition with anyone who opposed the Nazis, from conservative and aristocratic army officers like the French Gaullists to the Social Democrats. In most of occupied Europe resistance movements acquired this make-up, and even in France many aristocratic Russian émigrés joined the resistance, fighting and dying alongside working-class French Communists. As the Soviet army passed its western borders and came into the lands allied with Hitler or occupied by his troops, decisions had to be made. What sort of government should the Soviets put in place? Many local Communists believed that the time had come to seize power, to make up for the defeats of the interwar era. The Soviet tactic, however, was different. The new slogan was “people’s democracy,” meant to indicate a continuation of the wartime coalition. Land reform and limited nationalization of industry were to be central features of the new order, not “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and the Communists were to rule together with Socialists and even anti-fascist liberals and conservatives.
At the moment of the German surrender at Stalingrad, all these issues were barely on the horizon. The task was to begin to drive the Nazis out of the country, and the Red Army moved to the west, pushing the Germans back to their starting points from the previous summer. In the spring of 1943, as the snow melted and the mud dried, Hitler tried for the last time to reverse the tide of defeat. The Wehrmacht planned a massive counter attack into the Soviet salient around Kursk, in the middle of the steppe, ideal ground for armored warfare. It was the German armor, the giant Ferdinand assault guns and the new Tiger tanks that were to carry the weight of the attack. The Red Army, however, fully reequipped and with new skill and confidence, planned its countermeasures without flaw. Though Stalin at first wanted a swift counter-offensive, Zhukov and the generals persuaded him to stay in defense until the Nazis were worn down. The German armor confronted massive fire from artillery, rockets and anti-tank guns as well as the Soviet air force. In a matter of days the offensive stalled and then the Soviet armor pushed the Germans back. The Red Army went on through the rest of the year to take back the eastern parts of the Ukraine, Kiev itself in November, as well as most of Russia proper. Soviet troops lifted the siege of Leningrad in January 1944. In the next months the Red Army surrounded and destroyed some fifty thousand German troops in one battle at Korsun, southwest of Kiev, pounding them to pieces in the snow with artillery and air strikes.