Russia at war 1941-1945

Without these two kinds of aid the Soviet Union will be either defeated or weakened to the extent that it will lose for a long time its ability to help its allies by active operations at the front against Hitlerism.

[Correspondence between the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Presidents of the USA and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-5, vol. I, p. 21 (Moscow, 1957), to be later referred to as Stalin-Churchill Correspondence or Stalin-Roosevelt Correspondence.]

And, ten days later, on September 13, Stalin again wrote to Churchill, saying that if the opening of a second front was not feasible at present, then—

it seems to me that Britain could safely land twenty-five to thirty divisions at

Archangel or ship them to the southern areas of the USSR via Iran for military cooperation with the Soviet troops on Soviet soil in the same way it was done during the last war in France. That would be a great help.

[Ibid., p. 24.]

The suggestion that British troops should come to help Russia on Russian soil, as well as the warning that Russia might be defeated betrayed real anxiety on Stalin's part;

nevertheless, he concluded his message to Churchill on a characteristic note of bravado.

In reply to a British proposal that if, as a result of the situation at Leningrad, the Baltic Fleet were lost, the British should, after the war, make up for these Russian losses, Stalin remarked:

The Soviet Government... appreciates the British Government's readiness to

compensate for part of the damage... There can be little doubt that, if necessary, the Soviet people will actually destroy the ships at Leningrad. But responsibility for the damage would be borne not by Britain but by Germany. I think, therefore, that

Germany will have to make good the damage after the war.

[Ibid., p. 25.]

The most direct example of Anglo-Soviet co-operation in 1941 was the joint occupation of Iran. After previous consultations with the British Government, the Soviet

Government informed the Iranian Government that it would "introduce Soviet troops into Iran in connexion with the widespread anti-Soviet activity of German agents in that

country". The troops would be "introduced" in virtue of Article 6 of the Soviet-Iranian Agreement of 1921 which provided for such an occupation in the event of a third party threatening the independence of Iran and the security of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Note recalled that, since the German invasion of Russia, the Soviet Government had

already sent three warnings to the Iranian Government but without any effect.

It was also on August 25 that the British Ambassador in Iran, Sir Reader Bullard,

informed the Iranian Government of the entry of British troops into Iran. This joint occupation had the double purpose of preventing Germany from using Iran as a base of operations against both Russia and the Iranian oilfields, and of opening a supply route from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea. Since the Allies, and, in particular, Churchill, considered both the other routes—via Vladivostok or via the Russian Arctic—highly

precarious, this project was held to be of vital importance as an alternative. The joint operation went off remarkably smoothly; a new Iranian Government was set up, and

before long, the pro-German Rezah Shah abdicated, to end his days in exile in

Johannesburg, where he died in 1944.

British and Russian forces met in amity, and Teheran was jointly occupied on

September 17, the Shah having abdicated on the previous day in favour of his gifted twenty-two-year-old son. On September 20 the new Shah, under allied advice,

restored the Constitutional Monarchy... Most of our forces withdrew from the