The Anglo-Soviet Agreement

On the evening of 12 July 1941, in the Kremlin and in the presence of Joseph Stalin, the British ambassador Stafford Cripps and the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, signed a short document: the “Agreement between His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom and the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”. It had two articles. In the first, the two governments undertook to render each other “assistance and support of all kinds” in the present war against Hitlerite Germany. In the second, they promised that during this war they would neither negotiate nor conclude an armistice or treaty of peace except by mutual agreement. Three weeks after Germany’s attack on the USSR, a state that had been fighting the Reich since June 1940 without a great ally and a state that until 22 June had been bound to the Reich by a pact became allies.

Popular chronologies spread this story over three dates. Under 5 July they record that the British government ruled out a negotiated peace with Nazi Germany; under 8 July, that Britain and the USSR signed a mutual defence agreement and undertook not to conclude a separate peace; and under 12 July, that they concluded a pact of assistance. The first two entries need correcting. Britain’s refusal of any negotiations with Hitler was not a decision of 5 July but the constant line of Winston Churchill’s government, emphatically restated on 22 June. Sources record no separate government declaration on that day. And nothing was signed on 8 July: that day Stalin received Churchill’s first personal message and, in conversation with Cripps, proposed the agreement concluded four days later. Nor was it a mutual defence agreement; it was a commitment to assistance in a war already under way.

“We will never parley”

On the evening of 22 June, a dozen or so hours after the first shots in the east, Churchill announced in a radio broadcast that Britain would give Russia and the Russian people whatever help it could. In the same speech he answered those who hoped that the war in the east would push London towards a compromise with Berlin. Britain, he said, had a single, irrevocable aim – to destroy Hitler and every trace of the Nazi regime – and nothing would turn it from that purpose: “We will never parley, we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang.”

This confirmed the position Churchill had held since May 1940, when in the War Cabinet he had rejected the idea of sounding out peace terms through Mussolini, and when, in July of that year, his government had rejected the “appeal to reason” Hitler made in the Reichstag. In 1941, however, the reminder had a particular addressee. Moscow vividly remembered Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland in May and London’s silence on the matter, and Stalin was inclined to suspect that the British might come to terms with Germany at the USSR’s expense. Every assurance that Britain would not make peace with the Reich was therefore also a response to Soviet mistrust.

On 24 June the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, developed this line in the House of Commons. He said that the political systems of the two states were opposed to each other and that the British had always detested the communist creed, “but that is not the point”: Russia had been attacked treacherously and without warning, and the sole aim of both countries was to defeat Germany. He revealed that even before the attack he had personally warned the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, of Germany’s intentions, and announced that the Soviet government had accepted a British offer to send a military and economic mission to Russia. The assistance, as Moscow stipulated, was to be mutual, and London accepted that condition.

Of the days that chronologies associate with 5 July, one more event of importance for this story is certain. That day, at the Foreign Office and with Eden taking part, Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski and Ambassador Maisky began talks on restoring Polish–Soviet relations, broken off in September 1939. The British, who wanted to reach an agreement with Moscow as soon as possible, were at the same time pressing the Poles to bring their negotiations to a conclusion.

The ambassador returns to Moscow

Cripps, a left-wing politician sent to Moscow in 1940 precisely in order to improve relations with Stalin, had achieved little in a year. At the beginning of June 1941 Eden called him to London for consultations, as the Foreign Office was by then convinced that Germany was preparing to attack the USSR. Moscow viewed the ambassador’s departure with suspicion, and the TASS communiqué of 14 June, which called rumours of imminent war hostile propaganda, also mentioned his journey. That is why Cripps was in London on 22 June. He returned to Moscow on 27 June together with the British military mission, headed by Lieutenant General Noel Mason-MacFarlane, a former military attaché in Berlin, and with an economic mission. He arrived in the role he had longed for throughout the year: the representative of a country whose help the Soviet Union needed.

At the same time a Soviet military mission went to London under General Filipp Golikov, the head of military intelligence. On 9 July Eden, asked in the House of Commons whether the government intended to conclude a formal treaty or alliance with the USSR regarding the conduct of the war and the making of peace, replied evasively that he had nothing to add to the Prime Minister’s speech of 22 June and his own statement of 24 June, but assured the House that relations were proceeding satisfactorily, as he had just received the Soviet mission. In reality, talks on just such an agreement had been going on since the previous day.

Both sides entered them with reserve. Most British military men did not believe that the Red Army, which in the first weeks was losing hundreds of thousands of men in the Białystok and Minsk pockets, could hold out for long, and they did not want to send east equipment that might fall into German hands. In the Kremlin, for their part, they remembered the plans to bomb Baku in 1940 and Hess, and above all the fact that until 22 June the British had been adversaries. Even so, when on 3 July Stalin spoke on the radio for the first time since the outbreak of war, he called Churchill’s speech on aid to the Soviet Union “historic” and declared that in this war the USSR would have loyal allies in the peoples of Europe and America.

Stalin’s two points

On 7 July Churchill sent Stalin his first personal message. Cripps delivered it on 8 July. The Prime Minister wrote that everyone in Britain was glad that the Russian armies were putting up such strong and spirited resistance to the “utterly unprovoked and merciless invasion of the Nazis”, and promised to do everything that time, geography and growing resources allowed. He described the RAF’s day and night raids on Germany and occupied Europe, which were meant to force Hitler to bring part of his air force back to the west, announced a “serious operation” by the Royal Navy in the Arctic, after which the fleets of the two countries would establish contact, and welcomed the arrival of the Soviet military mission.

That same day Cripps talked with Stalin. The master of the Kremlin proposed that the two governments make a joint declaration in two points: on mutual assistance, without specifying its scale or nature, and that neither state would conclude a separate peace. The proposal was modest, and convenient for London, since it required no agreement on issues where agreement would have been difficult, above all borders. Churchill at once summoned the War Cabinet, whose meeting was attended by the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Peter Fraser, who was then in London. In a message delivered to Stalin on 10 July he gave assurances that the British government “entirely approved” of the proposed declaration and wished to sign it as soon as Canada, Australia and the Union of South Africa had given their views, and then to announce it to the world at once.

The signature in the Kremlin

The dominions raised no objections, and on 12 July the document was signed. Instead of unilateral or parallel declarations, it took the form of an agreement signed by plenipotentiaries of both governments: Cripps as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, and Molotov as Deputy Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Stalin and members of the British military mission watched the ceremony.

The text was short. After a preamble in which the two governments stated that they had concluded the agreement came two undertakings: to render each other “assistance and support of all kinds in the present war against Hitlerite Germany”, and, during this war, neither to negotiate nor to conclude an armistice or peace except by mutual agreement. The parties agreed that the agreement would enter into force on signature and required no ratification. It was drawn up in two copies, in English and Russian, both versions being equally authentic. Its text was published immediately.

The agreement did not name the other Axis states, although Finland, Romania, Hungary, Italy and Slovakia were already fighting the USSR alongside Germany. It did not specify the nature or scale of the assistance, and said nothing about war aims, borders or the post-war order. It was essentially what Britain and France had announced in March 1940 in their pledge against a separate peace, with the addition of a promise of mutual assistance. A similar clause against concluding a separate armistice or peace had also been part of the Anglo-Polish alliance agreement of 25 August 1939. A month earlier, on 12 June 1941, representatives of Britain, the dominions and the governments-in-exile of the occupied countries, Poland among them, had also undertaken at St James’s Palace in London to fight together until victory and to assist one another.

“It is, of course, an alliance”

On 15 July Churchill, asked in the House of Commons about the agreement with Russia, replied that at the end of the previous week a “solemn agreement” had been concluded between the British and Russian governments, supported by the peoples of both countries and by all the great dominions of the Crown. He thanked Eden and Cripps, who had “indefatigably” brought the matter to a swift conclusion, and added: “It is, of course, an alliance, and the Russian people are now our allies.” He also quoted the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, Jan Smuts: let nobody say that the British had allied themselves with the communists and were fighting for communism. Since Hitler, in his insane megalomania, had forced Russia to defend herself, “we bless her arms and wish her all success”, without for a moment identifying ourselves with her communist creed.

This distinction between wartime cooperation and ideology matched the mood in Britain, where sympathy for fighting Russia was growing fast and was causing unease in part of the Conservative Party. In Moscow the agreement was presented as proof that the USSR was not alone in the war.

In the same statement Churchill mentioned that Eden had brought about a “very far-reaching agreement” between the Soviet state and the Republic of Poland. The negotiations were not yet finished, but the Prime Minister expressed the hope that, thanks to General Sikorski’s statesmanship, a further step would soon be taken. For the Poles the agreement of 12 July was both good and disquieting news. It brought closer an understanding with Moscow and the release of hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens imprisoned and deported in the USSR, but it also showed that Britain would from now on be courting a new, more powerful ally, and that the question of Poland’s eastern border, on which Moscow would promise nothing, might be relegated to the background in London.

Its place in the war

The agreement of 12 July was the first act of the grand coalition that was to defeat Germany, but only a few days later it became clear how differently the two sides understood the word “assistance”. On 18 July Stalin thanked Churchill for both messages, which had “marked the beginning of agreement between our governments”, and immediately demanded a second front: a landing in northern France that would draw part of the German forces away from the Eastern Front, and operations in the Arctic. In his reply, which Stalin received on 21 July, Churchill explained that the Chiefs of Staff saw no possibility of a landing in France on a scale that could make any difference, as the Germans had forty divisions there and had been fortifying the coast for a year. He promised air and naval action in the north and supplies, and on 26 July announced the dispatch of two hundred Tomahawk fighters to Archangel. The dispute over the second front was to weigh on relations between the allies right up to the Normandy landings in June 1944.

At the turn of July and August President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s envoy Harry Hopkins flew to Moscow, opening the way to American aid for the USSR. On 30 July the Sikorski–Maisky agreement was signed in London, restoring Polish–Soviet relations and allowing a Polish army to be formed in the USSR. On 16 August Cripps and the People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade, Anastas Mikoyan, concluded an agreement on supplies and credit in Moscow, and at the end of the month the first British convoy reached Archangel. On 25 August British and Soviet troops entered Iran in order to open a supply route across its territory and remove German influence from it. In the autumn, in Moscow, Lord Beaverbrook and the American Averell Harriman agreed the first large supply programme with Stalin.

The issues the agreement of 12 July left untouched soon returned. When Eden came to Moscow in December 1941, Stalin demanded recognition of the USSR’s borders of June 1941, and thus of the annexation of the Baltic states and of Poland’s eastern lands. The British refused, and the Anglo-Soviet Treaty signed in London on 26 May 1942 replaced the July agreement with a twenty-year alliance but was silent on borders. The principle that neither ally would conclude a separate peace passed into the Declaration by United Nations of 1 January 1942 and remained in force until the end of the war. The agreement of July 1941 was a fragile beginning, but it was what made Britain and the Soviet Union fight Germany from the summer of 1941 as allies, and not merely as two states attacked by the same enemy.