The Moscow Conference of 1944

On the afternoon of 9 October 1944 an aircraft carrying the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, landed at a Moscow airfield. They had flown via Naples and Cairo, and were welcomed on the tarmac by the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, with a guard of honour and a band. At ten o’clock that evening Churchill and Eden sat down in the Kremlin opposite Joseph Stalin and Molotov. So began the meeting code-named “Tolstoy” on the British side and known in the literature as the Fourth Moscow Conference or the Moscow Conference of 1944. It lasted until 19 October.

It was Churchill’s second visit to Moscow, after that of August 1942, and his first face-to-face meeting with the Soviet dictator since the Tehran Conference. This time President Franklin D. Roosevelt was absent, campaigning ahead of the November election. There were three subjects: the future of south-eastern Europe, which the Red Army was just entering; the Polish question; and Soviet participation in the war against Japan. Yet the conference’s best-known outcome was a sheet of paper with figures on it, described by Churchill in his memoirs, which historians call the percentages agreement.

Why Churchill flew to Moscow

In the autumn of 1944 the map of the Balkans was changing from week to week. After King Michael’s coup of 23 August, Romania went over to the Allies and on 12 September signed an armistice in Moscow. In September the Red Army entered Bulgaria, where a coup during the night of 8–9 September handed power to the Fatherland Front, in which the communists took part. At the turn of September and October Soviet troops crossed the Yugoslav border and advanced on Belgrade in the Belgrade offensive, and on 6 October the 2nd Ukrainian Front opened the Battle of Debrecen in Hungary. The government of Miklós Horthy had already sent a delegation to Moscow to ask for an armistice.

Churchill feared that the Red Army would fill the whole space between the Black Sea and the Adriatic before the Western Allies could settle anything. He cared above all about Greece. The British were just preparing to enter the mainland – on 23–24 September their troops had landed in the Peloponnese, and on 4 October they took Patras – and the Caserta Agreement of 26 September had placed the Greek partisan forces under British command only on paper. The strongest force in Greece, more powerful than all its rivals, was the communist EAM with its army, ELAS. Churchill wanted to make sure that Moscow would not back the communists in Greece, and in return he was prepared to recognise Soviet predominance where the Red Army already stood.

The second matter was just as urgent. On 2 October the Warsaw Uprising had surrendered, and since July the Moscow-controlled Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) had been operating in Lublin. The Polish government in London and the Kremlin had had no diplomatic relations since April 1943. The British believed that the longer the questions of the border and the government remained unresolved, the weaker the position of Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk would become.

Roosevelt could not come, but he did not want the talks to proceed without the Americans. In a cable to Stalin of 4 October he wrote that in this global war there was literally no question, political or military, in which the United States was not interested. He asked that the ambassador in Moscow, W. Averell Harriman, attend the meetings as his observer. Harriman did not, however, take part in Churchill’s first and most important conversation with Stalin. He was present at some of the later sessions, including the Polish and military talks, and he kept Roosevelt informed by cables which – as historians later established – made no mention of percentages.

The “naughty document”

According to Churchill’s memoirs, published in 1953 in the sixth volume of his history of the war (Triumph and Tragedy), after a brief discussion of Poland the Prime Minister turned to the Balkans. He proposed to Stalin that they should not work at cross-purposes in countries where both had interests, military missions and agents. While this was being translated, he wrote a list on half a sheet of paper:

• Romania: Russia 90 per cent, the others 10 per cent;
• Greece: Great Britain (in accord with the USA) 90 per cent, Russia 10 per cent;
• Yugoslavia: 50–50;
• Hungary: 50–50;
• Bulgaria: Russia 75 per cent, the others 25 per cent.

Churchill wrote that he pushed the paper across the table, and that after a slight pause Stalin made a large tick on it with a blue pencil and passed it back. There followed a long silence. Churchill then supposedly asked whether it might not be thought rather cynical that they had disposed of issues so fateful to millions of people in such an offhand manner, and suggested burning the paper. Stalin told him to keep it. Churchill himself called it the “naughty document”. The original is held at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge.

Because the scene is known chiefly from Churchill’s memoirs, its details are sometimes questioned. In 1978 the American historian Albert Resis, comparing it with the British record of the conversation, showed that the conversation about percentages did take place and that the record mentions the “naughty document”. At the same time the percentages were not an agreement in any legal sense: no one signed them, they appeared in no communiqué, and they were not formally revisited at the Yalta Conference. Churchill himself wrote in a draft letter to Stalin that the figures were merely a way of seeing “how close we are” to each other. The numbers did not signify a division of populations or territories, but a measure of the two powers’ influence over the policy of each country, especially in the control commissions that were to oversee the implementation of the armistices.

At the same meeting Churchill declared that Britain must be the leading power in the Mediterranean, and obtained Stalin’s assurance that the Red Army would not enter Greece. Stalin, for his part, remarked that the Montreux Convention of 1936, which governed passage through the Turkish Straits, was unfavourable to the USSR and would have to be changed. Italy was also discussed: Churchill asked Moscow to restrain the Italian communists, and Stalin replied that Palmiro Togliatti was a sensible man who would not start any adventure in Italy.

Eden and Molotov bargain

The general figures needed to be worked out in detail, and this was left to the foreign ministers. On 10 and 11 October Eden and Molotov haggled above all over Bulgaria, which mattered to the British because of its neighbours, Greece and Turkey. Eden complained that Bulgarian troops in Greek Thrace were mistreating British officers, and demanded that the Bulgarians withdraw from the Greek and Yugoslav territories they had occupied since 1941. Molotov stressed that Bulgaria lay on the Black Sea and was neither Italy nor Greece. The dispute had a concrete subject: the American draft provided that the Allied Control Commission in Bulgaria would answer to the governments of the three powers, while the Soviet draft – as in the armistices with Romania and with Finland (the Moscow Armistice) – placed it under the direction of the Soviet High Command.

In the end Molotov offered the British 20 per cent influence in Bulgaria and a formula under which the commission would act on the instructions of the Soviet command with the “participation” of British and American representatives. Eden agreed. The figures for Bulgaria and Hungary were shifted to 80–20 in the USSR’s favour, and Eden accepted that a future armistice with Hungary would be framed in the same way as the Bulgarian one. Yugoslavia remained at 50–50, which in practice meant joint support for an agreement between Josip Broz Tito and the prime minister of the government-in-exile, Ivan Šubašić, and an undertaking that the Yugoslavs themselves would decide their country’s political system. Molotov also promised that Bulgaria would leave the Greek and Yugoslav territories it had occupied.

On 11 October Churchill cabled Roosevelt that he and Stalin were trying to reach a common view on the Balkans “so that we may be able to prevent civil war breaking out in several countries”, and assured him that nothing would be settled beyond preliminary Anglo-Soviet understandings. He made no mention of percentages in the cable. That same day the Hungarian envoys in Moscow accepted the preliminary armistice terms – a matter that a few days later ended in Budapest quite differently from what had been expected.

The Polish question

On the very first evening Churchill obtained Stalin’s consent to invite Prime Minister Mikołajczyk to Moscow. Mikołajczyk flew in on 12 October together with the Foreign Minister, Tadeusz Romer, and the chairman of the National Council (the parliament-in-exile), Professor Stanisław Grabski. It was his second stay in Moscow within a few months: in August, in the first days of the Warsaw Uprising, he had already held talks with Stalin and with representatives of the PKWN, without result.

On 13 October the Poles met Stalin, Molotov, Churchill and Eden in Harriman’s presence. Mikołajczyk set out the government’s position: an agreement with the USSR, a government including five parties, the communists among them, and the deferral of the border question to a peace conference. Stalin laid down two conditions – recognition of the Curzon Line as the eastern border, and a future government based on the Lublin Committee. When Mikołajczyk pointed out that nothing had been agreed on the matter, Molotov declared that the border had already been settled at Tehran. Churchill and Harriman did not contradict him. According to Mikołajczyk’s own account and the historians who have analysed it, only then did the Polish Prime Minister learn that his allies had agreed to the Curzon Line almost a year earlier without the knowledge of the Polish government.

That same evening Churchill and Stalin received a delegation of the Lublin Committee: Bolesław Bierut, Edward Osóbka-Morawski and General Michał Rola-Żymierski. They spoke in favour of a border on the Curzon Line and of a government in which the London Poles would have a few seats at most. Churchill came away from the meeting with a poor impression and made no secret of it in his conversations with Eden. It did not, however, change his view that the London government must give way on the border if it wished to retain any influence over the question of the government.

The following days were taken up with talks between the British and the Poles. On 14 October, in a very heated conversation – whose course is known from Polish notes – Churchill pressed Mikołajczyk to accept the Curzon Line, threatening that otherwise Britain would wash its hands of the Polish question. Mikołajczyk replied that he had no right to give up half the country’s territory without the consent of the nation. Grabski drew up a formula under which the Curzon Line would be a “line of demarcation”, subject to a final decision at the peace conference, but Stalin rejected it: he would accept the Curzon Line only as the “basis of the frontier”. On 18 October Mikołajczyk spoke with Stalin in private. Stalin assured him that he had no intention of sovietising Poland, but the majority in the future government was to go to the Lublin men.

The Polish talks came to nothing. Mikołajczyk returned to London convinced that a compromise was unavoidable, but most of the government and the political parties would not accept the Curzon Line. Nor did he obtain the guarantees he had asked of the British and Americans. On 24 November 1944 he resigned.

The war with Japan and other understandings

A less well-known part of the conference, but the most important for the Americans, was the military talks. On 14 October, after a gala performance at the Bolshoi Theatre, Stalin, Churchill, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, the head of the US military mission in Moscow, General John R. Deane, and Harriman met in the Kremlin. Brooke reviewed the situation on the Western Front and in Italy, Deane the war in the Pacific, and the deputy chief of the Soviet General Staff, General Aleksei Antonov, the situation on the Eastern Front. The next day, 15 October, Soviet participation in the war with Japan was discussed. According to American reports, Stalin announced that the Red Army would enter the war roughly three months after Germany’s defeat, provided that stockpiles were built up in the Far East – which the Trans-Siberian Railway could not deliver on its own – and that the “political aspects” of the step were clarified. It was from this proviso that the later Soviet territorial demands on Japan and China grew.

In addition, on the margins of the conference Churchill and Stalin exchanged views on the future of Germany, including its division into several states, and on the great powers’ right of veto in the future United Nations – a matter left unresolved at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference. The British also agreed in principle to the return to the USSR of Soviet citizens freed from German control, including prisoners of war who had been enlisted in the German forces. The details of this agreement were settled at Yalta.

On 19 October Churchill flew out of Moscow. According to his account, Stalin for the first time saw him off at the airfield in person. The communiqué that was issued spoke in general terms of agreement on policy towards the Balkan countries, including Hungary and Turkey, and of progress on the Polish question. It said nothing about percentages.

The conference’s place in the war

The Moscow understandings were put to the test within weeks. On 15 October in Budapest the Germans overthrew Horthy and handed power to the Arrow Cross, so the Hungarian armistice was concluded only in January 1945, by the provisional government in Debrecen. On 28 October an armistice with Bulgaria was signed in Moscow, with a control commission under Soviet chairmanship and with the participation of the Western Allies, as Eden and Molotov had agreed. In Greece the British entered Athens in mid-October, and in December 1944 their troops were fighting ELAS in the city’s streets. Stalin then behaved as he had promised: the Soviet press stayed silent, and Moscow gave the Greek communists no help. Churchill recalled this restraint with appreciation. Conversely, in March 1945, when Moscow imposed Petru Groza’s government on Romania, Churchill did not protest firmly, explaining in private correspondence that Stalin had kept his word over Greece.

On the Polish question the conference hastened a settlement on Stalin’s terms. After Mikołajczyk’s resignation the new government of Tomasz Arciszewski lost British support, and on 31 December 1944 the PKWN turned itself into a Provisional Government, recognised by the USSR in January 1945. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945 the three powers accepted the Curzon Line as the basis of Poland’s eastern border, and Stalin’s announcement of 15 October became a formal undertaking that the USSR would enter the war against Japan within two to three months of Germany’s surrender. He kept his word on 8 August 1945.

The assessment of the percentages agreement still divides historians. Some see in it a cynical carve-up of east-central Europe and the Balkans that deprived their peoples of a choice and heralded the Cold War. Others stress that Churchill gave nothing away – Romania and Bulgaria were already occupied by the Red Army – and gained Greece, which Britain could not have secured without Soviet consent. The Americans learned the details only over time and regarded them as contrary to the principles of the Atlantic Charter. Whatever the verdict, the October talks in Moscow revealed the balance of power in the last year of the war: the fate of the countries the front passed through was in practice decided by whose troops entered them.