Giles Milton's book offers a gossipy glimpse into wartime elites, history

The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance that Won the War

Author: Giles Milton

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 372

Price: Rs 999

In 2019, Giles Milton discovered a “cache of curious letters” dated between 1942 and 1945. They were written by Kathy Harriman, the 20-something socialite daughter of the railroad millionaire Averell Harriman, USA’s wartime lend-lease czar based in Britain and then ambassador to the Soviet Union. Later, Kathy’s son showed him scrapbooks, press cuttings, photographs and letters that his mother had preserved but which he discovered a few weeks before her death.

“Oh that,” she said when her son asked her about them. Kathy never spoke of those wartime years, perhaps because she was smart enough to understand that the artless observations of a giddy girl could scarcely be critical source material for a book examining World War II’s most consequential alliance. As her father’s hostess in London and Moscow, she was privy to critical negotiations during the war. Yet her diary and letters offer such observations as Churchill “has a wonderful smile and is not at all hard to talk to”; Roosevelt, with whom she dined at Yalta, was “absolutely sweet”; Stalin was a “splendid host”; Molotov had a “hell of a swell sense of humour” (he had ventured to make a joke about Stalin). She is constantly amazed that the Americans were more popular than the British in Russia, though she must have been aware that it was American lend-lease that underwrote Stalin’s victory. Vanity Fair  captured Kathy’s war best in the title of a 2011 article based on her scrapbooks:  “The War in Silk Stockings”.

Nevertheless, Mr Milton quotes her diaries, letters and scrapbook so extensively that The Stalin Affair  seems to be written from her point of view, with other memoirs added for variety in a shallow, gossipy narrative. Rather than a “sizzling, high-stakes tale”, the cover endorsement vouchsafed by popular historian James Holland, this book is more in the nature of what journalists call colour copy.

If The Stalin Affair  — the title alone suggests a Daniel D’Silva bestseller— were judged by that yardstick, it’s done its job. It offers, for one, an evocative portrait of wartime London and Moscow as experienced by the elite. What a great time to be a politician. Starvation, privation, rationing and death found little place in the lives of the leaders who determined the fate of millions. Instead, champagne, pate, caviar, vodka and all manner of scarce luxuries appeared at serial banquets, tete-a-tete dinners and lunches. Several protagonists had time to conduct torrid affairs — Averell Harriman with Churchill’s amoral daughter-in-law Pamela, who became his last wife years later via serial romps with other millionaires; British ambassador Archie Clark Kerr’s obsession with a Russian footman, for whom he importuned Stalin for an exit visa, gets detailed treatment. 

The prose, too, is admirably creative. In the Prelude, Mr Milton prepares the reader for the start of Operation Barbarossa, Adolf Hitler’s ill-fated invasion of his former ally, the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. “It was the shortest night of the year…The waning moon appeared as no more than a faint sliver”… you get the drift.

The Stalin Affair  covers the essentials of the story — how Stalin was caught off-guard by the invasion, Churchill’s quick thinking, Roosevelt’s response, and Stalin’s grudging agreement, tension over delays in opening the Second Front in Europe to take the pressure off Soviet troops and the descent from allies to Cold Warriors.

It’s the nuance that’s missing. Britain stood alone against the Luftwaffe in 1940, so Churchill, who had advance intelligence of Hitler’s intentions, rapidly understood the “enemy’s enemy” principle and reached out to the Soviet Union with offers of support. The author suggests it was Stalin’s visceral suspicions that weakened the alliance. But the British establishment had held the regime in deep contempt since 1917. As Chris Bellamy points out in his monumental study Absolute War  Churchill avoided the word “ally” in his broadcast of support on the evening of June 22; Britain and Russia were “co-belligerents”. Mr Milton offers a broad-brush account of the negotiations that prefaced this “impossible alliance” —  but with minute details of fearsome toasts with which Russians rounded off each banquet.

He tells us that the Wehrmacht advanced to 24 km of Moscow. But readers won’t find out why the Germans couldn’t capture the Soviet capital or why that failure doomed Hitler. There is no appreciation for the capabilities of Russian generals, the Soviet armies and the astonishing speed with which Soviet industry relocated behind the Urals and produced materiel to fend off the better equipped Germans. He concedes that lend-lease supplies accounted for a fraction of the tanks and aircraft the Soviet Union produced over the course of the war but that specialist supplies and food played a key role in the Soviet war effort, which Stalin acknowledged. With the northern route for lend-lease supplies via Archangel frozen in the winter, Mr Milton describes how Harriman opened an alternative railway supply line via Iran but in frustratingly sketchy detail.

As to why the alliance foundered, we get Churchill and Harriman’s perspectives; both “go rogue” in different ways in their dealings with Stalin. These views overlook an updated understanding that Stalin wanted a  cordon sanitaire  to ensure that his empire was never invaded again. Both viewed Roosevelt’s attempts to leverage his personal charisma to woo Stalin as misguided. Since Roosevelt died before the war ended, we have no idea how his presence would have impacted post-war negotiations.

Mr Milton’s book follows the “scholarship lite” school of history writing. It has some swell photographs from Kathy’s scrapbooks. But there are better books out there to understand that extraordinary collaboration between democracy and totalitarianism that determines the world we live in today.