The focus of this essay is on the intersection of policy, conceived in Washington, and the lived experiences of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s diplomats in the USSR during 1939–45. Roosevelt employed three men as ambassadors. The first was Laurence Steinhardt. His residency in Moscow began fewer than two weeks before the signing of the Soviet–German nonaggression pact (23 August 1939) and ran through mid-November 1941. He was persuaded by the time he left his post that Hitler’s empire was on the brink of destroying Soviet power. Roosevelt subsequently appointed a retired naval officer, Admiral William Standley, as envoy to the Soviet Union. His mission was to bolster Soviet–US co-operation against the Third Reich. He witnessed during his tenure (1942–3) the stunning reversal of fortune that marked Soviet–German fighting. His difficult career in the USSR seemed to confirm Leon Trotsky’s apt observation: ‘An ally has to be watched just like an enemy.’ The halcyon period of Soviet–US relations coincided with Roosevelt’s third ambassador to the wartime USSR: W. Averell Harriman. Yet despite his earnest efforts (1943–6), he never dispelled the pall of wariness that hung over Soviet–US collaboration, manifest even during bright days of Allied military advance. Imperceptibly at first, almost against his will, he gradually changed into one of the early cold warriors. He warned Roosevelt, then Harry Truman, against Soviet policy in Europe as constituting something antithetical to US interests. By war’s end in summer 1945, the Soviet Union, alone among nations, occupied a position to challenge the United States’ emergent global writ. The main outlines of the post-war Soviet–US contest of wills (the cold war) had taken their main shape during the anti-German alliance that Standley and Harriman had once thought to foster.

Read more here from the International History Review : http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07075332.2011.555448#preview

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