The US recognises the USSR

On 16 November 1933 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Soviet People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, exchanged a series of letters at the White House under which the United States and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations and agreed to exchange ambassadors. This ended almost sixteen years during which Washington had refused to recognise Bolshevik rule. The United States was the last great power to do so. In return Moscow undertook not to interfere in America’s internal affairs and guaranteed American citizens in the USSR freedom of worship and legal protection, while the dispute over debts was put off for further negotiation. None of these promises was fully kept, but recognition opened a road that eight years later brought the two states into an alliance against Hitler.

Sixteen years of silence

After the October Revolution the administration of Woodrow Wilson refused to recognise the Bolshevik government. There were several reasons. Lenin’s government had repudiated the debts of Tsarist Russia and of the Provisional Government, including the loans the United States had made in 1917 to the government of Alexander Kerensky; it had nationalised the property of American companies and citizens without compensation; and in March 1918 it had concluded a separate peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk. America took part in the armed intervention during the Russian Civil War: its soldiers fought around Arkhangelsk (Archangel), and several thousand were stationed in Siberia as part of the Siberian intervention. The troops were withdrawn in 1919–1920, but the policy of non-recognition survived. In August 1920, during the Polish–Soviet War, Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby set it out in a note stating that normal relations were impossible with a government that preached world revolution and did not honour its obligations.

Wilson’s Republican successors – Harding, Coolidge and Herbert Hoover – held to this line. The other powers took a different path. Germany established relations with Soviet Russia at Rapallo in 1922; Britain, Italy and France recognised the USSR in 1924, and Japan in 1925. The absence of official relations did not, however, mean an absence of contact. Hoover’s American Relief Administration fed the victims of the Volga famine in 1921–1923, and from 1924 the Soviet trading company Amtorg operated in New York, buying American machinery. During the first Five-Year Plan American engineers and firms, among them the works of Henry Ford, helped to build Soviet industry. In 1930 the United States was one of the Soviet Union’s largest suppliers.

Why Roosevelt

When Roosevelt took office in March 1933, the case for a change of policy was stronger than ever. The first argument was economic. After the Wall Street Crash, American firms were desperately looking for markets, and advocates of recognition promised that the Soviet Union would become a great buyer of American goods. These hopes were exaggerated: Soviet imports from America had already fallen sharply in 1932 because Moscow was short of foreign currency.

The second argument was strategic. In September 1931 the Mukden incident had opened the Japanese conquest of Manchuria, and in March 1933 Japan left the League of Nations. The Japanese army now stood along a long border with the USSR. Washington hoped that normal relations between America and the Soviet Union would serve Tokyo as a warning. Moscow thought similarly, and it saw a second threat in Europe. Since January 1933 Hitler had been Chancellor of Germany, and in October Germany left the League of Nations. Joseph Stalin and Litvinov were looking for allies against both these states.

Finally, Roosevelt, unlike his predecessors, believed that refusing to recognise a state of 160 million people was abnormal and achieved nothing. Part of public opinion was opposed. The Catholic Church, the American Federation of Labor and veterans’ organisations objected, fearing communist propaganda and outraged by the persecution of religion in the USSR. Most of the press and of the business community, however, supported the change.

Letters and talks

Roosevelt worked through trusted men, bypassing the cautious State Department. In the autumn of 1933 Henry Morgenthau, then head of the federal Farm Credit Administration, and William Bullitt, special assistant to the Secretary of State, who in 1919 had gone on a secret mission to Lenin, handed a letter from the President to Boris Skvirsky, the unofficial Soviet representative in Washington. On 10 October 1933 Roosevelt wrote to Mikhail Kalinin, Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, that he wished to end the “abnormal relations” between the 125 million people of the United States and the 160 million people of Russia, and invited a Soviet representative to talks. Kalinin replied on 17 October that he regarded the situation as “most abnormal and regrettable” and would send Litvinov to Washington.

Litvinov arrived by sea in New York on 7 November, the sixteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. His talks with Secretary of State Cordell Hull stalled after two days, so from 10 November the President conducted them in person, with Bullitt and Morgenthau. Three issues were in dispute. The Americans demanded a guarantee that Moscow would not support communist propaganda and subversion in the United States, freedom of worship for Americans living in the USSR, and repayment of the debts. Litvinov long resisted any commitment on religion, arguing that Soviet law already guaranteed it, and on the debts he produced bills for the damage caused by the American intervention.

The agreements of 16 November

The letters Roosevelt and Litvinov exchanged on 16 November 1933 later became known as the Roosevelt–Litvinov Agreements. In two short notes both men stated that their governments were establishing normal diplomatic relations and exchanging ambassadors, expressing the hope that these relations would “forever remain normal and friendly”. In a further note Litvinov gave an assurance that it would be the “fixed policy” of the Soviet government not to interfere in the internal affairs of the United States and to restrain all persons and organisations under its control or receiving financial assistance from it from agitation and propaganda aimed at changing the American political order by force. The Soviet Union also promised not to permit groups seeking to overthrow the American government to operate on its territory. Roosevelt made the same commitment towards the USSR.

In separate letters Litvinov guaranteed Americans in the Soviet Union the right to hold religious services, to give their children religious instruction and to bury their dead according to their own rites, as well as legal protection no less favourable than that enjoyed by citizens of the most-favoured nation, including the right of a consul to be informed promptly of an arrest and to visit the detainee. Having examined American documents from 1918–1921, the Soviet government waived all claims arising from the actions of American troops in Siberia. It also assigned to the United States the sums due to it in America as successor to the previous Russian governments, to be used to settle American claims.

The hardest issue, the debts, was resolved only on paper. On 15 November Roosevelt and Litvinov concluded a “gentlemen’s agreement”, recorded in a memorandum initialled by both. The Soviet Union was to pay no less than 75 million dollars for the Kerensky debt and other claims, in the form of additional interest on a future American loan. Roosevelt said that Congress would accept at most 150 million, and the exact sum within these limits was to be settled later by Litvinov, Morgenthau and Bullitt. In a communiqué issued the next day both sides expressed the hope of a “speedy and satisfactory” solution of the question.

The first ambassadors

The first United States ambassador in Moscow was Bullitt, an enthusiast for agreement with the USSR. In December 1933 he presented his credentials to Kalinin and declared that relations would be not merely normal but very friendly. Among the young diplomats he took with him to Moscow was George Kennan, later the author of the doctrine of containment. The Soviet ambassador in Washington was Alexander Troyanovsky.

The honeymoon was brief. Litvinov almost immediately proposed to Bullitt an American–Soviet understanding against Japan, and the ambassador had to explain that Congress would never agree to it. In April 1934 Congress passed Senator Hiram Johnson’s Act, which banned loans to governments in default on their debts to the United States, depriving the American side of its main bargaining chip: credit. The debt negotiations collapsed in early 1935. That summer the Seventh Congress of the Communist International met in Moscow, with American communists among the speakers, and Washington protested that this broke the undertaking of 16 November. A disillusioned Bullitt moved to the Paris embassy in 1936 and became one of the sharpest critics of Stalin in the President’s circle. His successor, Roosevelt’s friend Joseph Davies, played down the Moscow show trials during the Great Purge, alienating the embassy’s career diplomats.

The shadow of the famine

Recognition came a few months after the great famine of 1932–1933, which by various estimates killed anywhere from several million to more than seven million people in the USSR, above all in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The Soviet authorities concealed it, and the influential New York Times correspondent in Moscow, Walter Duranty, who covered Litvinov’s mission and received an ovation at a New York banquet held to celebrate recognition, denied reports of mass death. The American government received information about the famine but did not make it a subject of the talks. To critics, recognition was an example of putting interests before the truth about a regime’s crimes. Its defenders reply that every other power had maintained relations with Moscow for years, and that non-recognition had helped no one in the Soviet Union.

Significance

The agreements of 1933 brought neither large-scale trade, nor repayment of the debts, nor a common front against Japan. The trade agreement of July 1935 provided for Soviet purchases in America of about 30 million dollars a year, less than at the start of the decade. The United States, shut away in isolationism, had no intention of joining the system of collective security Litvinov was building, and the Great Purge of 1936–1938 and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 drove relations to their lowest point. After the Soviet attack on Finland in the winter of 1939–1940, Roosevelt announced a “moral embargo” on the USSR.

And yet the diplomatic channel opened on 16 November 1933 proved invaluable when Germany attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. That summer Roosevelt’s envoy Harry Hopkins flew to Moscow, in the autumn the Lend-Lease Act was extended to the USSR, and Litvinov returned to Washington as ambassador. American deliveries of lorries, aircraft, food and raw materials helped the Red Army to survive and go over to the offensive. Recognition in 1933 was the first step on the road to the Big Three, who decided the outcome of the Second World War and the post-war fate of Central Europe, Poland included.