Diplomatic History by Joseph M. Siracusa

Author:Joseph M. Siracusa [Siracusa, Joseph M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192646019
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2021-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Stalin ‘ready to discuss anything’

At the outset of his meeting with Stalin on the evening of 9 October, Churchill had ‘hoped they might clear away many questions about which they had been writing to each other for a long time’, to which Stalin replied ‘that he was ready to discuss anything’. Turning from a discussion of the Polish Question, whose ramifications would ultimately dominate the conference proceedings until the departure of the British delegation on 18 October, Churchill declared, ‘Britain must be the leading Mediterranean Power and…hoped Marshal Stalin would let him have first say about Greece in the same way as Marshal Stalin [would have the first say] about Rumania.’ Without once alluding to the May Agreement, Stalin concurred, pointing out that ‘if Britain were interested in the Mediterranean then Russia was equally interested in the Black Sea’. It was further agreed that the two powers should share equal interests in Hungary and Yugoslavia.

The sticking point, however, was Bulgaria, which posed the single greatest threat to the British position in Greece. According to the records of the meeting, ‘The Prime Minister suggested that where Bulgaria was concerned the British interest was greater than it was in Rumania’, where London’s influence on the Soviet-controlled Allied Control Commission was admittedly nominal. Stalin, who suggested that the Prime Minister claimed too much for Britain in the area, countered that Bulgaria was after all a Black Sea country and, by extension, a matter of Russian concern. In response to Stalin’s query, ‘Was Britain afraid of anything?’, Eden, who until now had remained silent, retorted ‘that Britain was not afraid of anything’. He also reminded the Soviet leader ‘that Britain had been at war with Bulgaria for three years [in contrast to recent Soviet–Bulgarian belligerency] and wanted a small share of the control of that country’. The Bulgarian armistice issue, together with a change in the ratio of Soviet predominance in Hungary (80 per cent–20 per cent), was eventually settled by Eden and Molotov in the course of discussion over the next two days. Thus, a bargain of sorts had been struck over a division of Anglo-Soviet responsibilities in the Balkans; what it meant, exactly, was of course another matter.

From another level of analysis, it is interesting to note the missing President’s influence on the participants’ manoeuvrings. When it came to phrasing the division of responsibilities, Churchill, with the recent American experience fresh in his mind, thought it ‘better to express these things in diplomatic [more euphemistic] terms and not to use the phrase “dividing into spheres”, because the Americans might be shocked’. Still, ‘as long as he and the Marshal understood each other he could explain matters to the President’, no doubt at a time and place of the Prime Minister’s choosing.

At this juncture, Stalin interrupted his guest ‘to say that he [too] had received a message from President Roosevelt’, indicating FDR’s desire both to have the American Ambassador stand in as his observer and to regard the talks themselves as of a preliminary nature.

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