Molotov in London

On 20 May 1942 a Soviet four-engined long-range bomber landed at the military airfield of Tealing near Dundee in Scotland. On board was the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR, Vyacheslav Molotov, Joseph Stalin’s closest associate, who had flown to a Western country for the first time since the outbreak of the German–Soviet war. From Scotland he travelled by train to London; according to a statement by Anthony Eden in the House of Commons, he reached the capital on 21 May and talks began the same day. They were meant to deliver the two things Moscow cared about most: a formal treaty with Britain recognising the borders of the USSR as of June 1941, and a promise of a second front in Europe in 1942. The first aim proved unattainable, and after three days of argument the talks reached a deadlock from which they were rescued only by Eden’s proposal of 23 May.

The dispute over borders since December 1941

Britain and the USSR had been allies since the agreement of 12 July 1941, which bound them to mutual assistance and ruled out a separate peace. It was, however, a short wartime document, and Stalin wanted more. When Eden came to Moscow in December 1941, during the Soviet counter-offensive outside the city, Stalin presented him with drafts of two treaties, one of alliance and one on the post-war settlement, the second accompanied by a secret protocol on the future shape of Europe. In it Britain was to recognise the western borders of the USSR as of 22 June 1941: the annexation of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, the border with Finland after the Winter War, Bessarabia, taken from Romania, and, with minor adjustments, a border with Poland close to the Curzon Line – in practice the gains of 1939–1940, made while the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was in force. Eden replied that he could not accept such commitments without consulting the government in London, the Dominions and the United States.

Over the following months the British position shifted. Winston Churchill, who in January 1942 had written to Eden from Washington that the Soviet demands concerning Finland, the Baltic states and Romania were contrary to the Atlantic Charter, concluded in March that, given the growing weight of the war, the principles of the Charter should not be interpreted so as to deny Russia the frontiers she had occupied when Germany attacked her. The Cabinet was prepared to recognise the annexation of the Baltic states on condition that those of their inhabitants who did not wish to live under Soviet rule could leave with their property. This clause had been suggested to the British by the Americans. London had no intention, however, of giving away Polish territory: it was bound to Poland by the Anglo-Polish alliance of 25 August 1939.

The strongest opposition came from Washington. As early as February 1942 the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, had warned President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that an agreement with territorial provisions would undermine the Atlantic Charter and the whole programme of the United Nations. Roosevelt wanted to put off all questions of frontiers until the peace conference, and said so to the Soviet ambassador, Maxim Litvinov. The Polish position was unequivocal. The Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief, General Władysław Sikorski, who had talked with Roosevelt in Washington in March 1942, argued to the British and the Americans that recognising the annexation of the Baltic states would set a precedent for Poland’s eastern territories. The matter also concerned Poland directly: recognising Soviet Lithuania would mean recognising that Wilno (Vilnius), handed over to the Lithuanians by Moscow in the autumn of 1939, also belonged to the USSR. The Polish government also remembered that Stalin, despite the declaration of 4 December 1941, had not given up the territories seized after 17 September 1939.

Eden had invited Molotov to London while still in Moscow. In April Roosevelt issued an invitation to Washington. The journey kept being delayed. On 7 May Eden told the American ambassador, John Winant, that Molotov had postponed his trip, and that in his view the reason was British insistence on the clause on the inhabitants’ right to leave and on other amendments to the Soviet text.

A flight over wartime Europe

Molotov finally flew on the night of 19–20 May in a TB-7 bomber, later designated the Pe-8. The aircraft was piloted by Endel Puusepp, an airman of Estonian origin who had taken part in the raid on Berlin in August 1941 and now replaced the pilot originally chosen for the flight, who had been killed in a crash in England at the end of April. The route led over German-occupied northern Europe and the North Sea. The flight at high altitude, in the cramped fuselage of a bomber, lasted many hours. The journey was kept strictly secret: Molotov asked that neither the British nor the Americans announce his visit until he had returned to Moscow via London and Washington, and Stalin backed the request.

The guest was lodged at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country residence in Buckinghamshire. Churchill later recalled the Soviet delegation’s mistrust: its members demanded the keys to their bedrooms, and the staff found a pistol under Molotov’s pillow. The delegation drove up to London for the talks. On the Soviet side they were attended by the ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky; on the British side, besides Churchill and Eden, by the Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, and the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Alexander Cadogan, among others.

21 May: Molotov’s two demands

From the first meeting Molotov spoke of two matters: the treaty and the second front. On the morning of 21 May there was a short preliminary conversation, which Eden described to Winant as easy and friendly, and a second was planned for the afternoon. The tone was courteous, but the Soviet position had not changed. Molotov still demanded recognition of the annexation of the Baltic states and of the 1940 border with Finland. Eden explained the American position to him and Britain’s dependence on the United States, arguing that the three powers should act together. Molotov replied that Russia, too, had a public opinion that the government had to take into account.

The subsequent sessions, attended by Churchill and Eden, revealed three main points of dispute. The Soviet side wanted to include in the treaty a formula concerning Poland that Eden would not accept, because it conflicted with British obligations to the Polish government. Molotov rejected outright the clause protecting the persons and property of the inhabitants of the Baltic states and allowing them to emigrate. He also demanded a secret agreement in which Britain would support Soviet claims against Finland and Romania – that is, on the Finnish border and Bessarabia. Churchill could not accept these demands, and on Poland he would not. He himself was prepared to make concessions over the Baltic states, but not at the price of a break with the United States and the Polish government. The talks stalled.

At the same time Molotov pressed for a landing in Western Europe that would draw a substantial part of the German forces away from the Eastern Front. The British told him that London and Washington were acting jointly in this matter, but gave no binding commitments for 1942. According to Winant’s account, the Russians believed that Churchill and Eden were sympathetic to their requests and that it was the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, who was holding them back. Molotov stressed that what he wanted was a front in Western Europe, not Soviet participation in the war against Japan.

23 May: a treaty without borders

By midday on 23 May both sides had concluded that agreement was unlikely. The Soviet delegation said that the talks had been useful even if there was to be no treaty. It was then that Eden proposed an entirely different document: instead of an agreement settling the borders, a twenty-year treaty of alliance that said nothing about them at all. The first part was to confirm the wartime alliance of July 1941 and the ban on a separate peace; the second was to commit both states to mutual assistance against renewed aggression by Germany and its allies and to post-war cooperation, while renouncing territorial gains and interference in the internal affairs of other states. The draft was prepared with the help of Winant, who was looking for a formula acceptable to Moscow and at the same time free of territorial provisions, as Washington wanted.

In the afternoon the Russians began to give ground. They withdrew their demands concerning Poland, agreed to the clause on the right to leave, but only for national minorities – Poles from Lithuania, for example – and abandoned the secret agreement, asking in return for a reference to the special interests of the USSR in Finland and Romania. Molotov consulted Stalin. According to Soviet correspondence published years later, in a telegram to Moscow he dismissed Eden’s draft as an “empty declaration” that the USSR did not need. Stalin’s reply of 24 May took a different view: he regarded the draft not as an empty declaration but as an important document; it lacked the question of the security of the frontiers, but that was “perhaps not a bad thing”, since it left Moscow a free hand, and the frontiers would be decided by force in any case.

On the evening of 24 May Winant met Molotov and Maisky at the Soviet embassy. He told them plainly that both Roosevelt and Hull were firmly opposed to an Anglo-Soviet treaty with territorial provisions. Molotov replied that the President’s position required serious consideration and asked whether Winant knew Eden’s draft. That same evening he asked Eden for a meeting, and on the morning of 25 May he went through the text with him. He said that the statements of Churchill, Eden and Winant had convinced him that a treaty on frontiers would provoke serious opposition in the United States, and that he had recommended to Moscow the conclusion of an agreement on the basis of the British draft.

Moscow’s weakening position?

Molotov’s about-turn is sometimes linked to the worsening situation on the Eastern Front. It is true that in those same days the Red Army suffered two heavy defeats. On the Kerch Peninsula Manstein’s offensive smashed the Crimean Front, whose remnants had been destroyed or evacuated across the strait by 20 May. At Kharkiv, from 17 May, Kleist’s counter-offensive was cutting off the Soviet forces in the westward bulge at Barvenkovo; on 23 May the German pincers closed. Historians who have used the correspondence between Moscow and London point above all, however, to two causes: firm American opposition, which the Kremlin had to take into account because it needed supplies and a second front, and Stalin’s own calculation that a treaty without borders cost him nothing and closed off nothing. The defeats at the front may have hastened the decision by underlining still further the importance of Western aid, but Stalin’s telegram speaks of self-confidence rather than weakness.

Place in the war

By the evening of 25 May the change of position was settled. After minor amendments by the Soviet side emphasising the treaty’s character as an alliance, Eden and Molotov signed a twenty-year treaty of alliance without territorial provisions in London on 26 May, and the next day Molotov flew to Washington. For the Polish government the outcome of the talks was a relief: Britain had recognised neither the annexation of the Baltic states nor the Soviet acquisitions at the expense of Poland and Romania.

The dispute had not been resolved, however, only postponed – and on the terms Stalin had spelt out in his telegram. The borders of the USSR were to be decided by where the Red Army stood at the end of the war. At the Tehran Conference in 1943 Churchill and Roosevelt agreed in principle to the Curzon Line as Poland’s eastern border, and at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 they sealed it, when the Red Army was already on the Oder. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia remained in the USSR until 1991, although the United States and many other countries never formally recognised their annexation. Bessarabia, too, was part of the USSR until 1991, as the core of the Moldavian SSR. The May talks in London showed for the first time that the West would not sign a recognition of borders drawn in agreement with Hitler – but also that it had no means of taking those lands away from Stalin.