Russia at war 1941-1945

country, leaving only detachments to guard the communications, and Teheran was

evacuated by both British and Russian troops on October 18.

[Churchill, op. cit., p. 432. Later, when Iran became the great route for supplies to Russia, numerous Russian, British and American troops were to be seen in Teheran once more.

For a time after the evacuation of the Polish "Anders" army from Russia, the Poles were also very active at Teheran. The Russians, whom I was able to observe there at the end of 1943, made a point of being extremely "correct" in their behaviour, and drunkenness, not uncommon among the British and Americans, was strictly prohibited and

severely punished. The Russians at that time did also engage in a good deal of

propaganda in Persia, notably by opening a large hospital in Teheran. With the support of various public welfare schemes they encouraged a separatist movement in Persian

Azerbaijan. In 1946, under American pressure, they had to abandon these political

schemes and had to withdraw their troops.]

*

The Beaverbrook-Harriman Mission arrived in Moscow on September 28. Several

meetings were held under the chairmanship of Molotov, and on two occasions

Beaverbrook and Harriman had long conversations with Stalin. Beaverbrook was a strong

"help-Russia" man, and the economic conference was a prelude to the granting of a first lend-lease loan of a billion dollars by the USA to the USSR. It was decided to ship a wide variety of arms, raw materials and machinery in considerable quantities to the Soviet Union, while in return certain Russian raw materials were to be delivered to the USA and Britain. The closing speeches of the conference by Beaverbrook, Harriman and Molotov were extremely cordial. Molotov stressed "the great political importance of the conference, which had foiled the Hitlerites' intention to destroy their enemies one by one, demonstrating to the world that a mighty front of freedom-loving peoples had been

created, led by the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the USA." The final communiqué said that Britain and America were going to supply "practically everything that Russia had asked for". As I noted in Moscow on October 4:

The conference is over, and is being acclaimed on all sides as a huge success.

Impressed by the remarkable speed with which the conference got through its work, people aire perhaps apt to forget the limited scope of the talks and the limited

possibilities of delivering the stuff to Russia... The Russian papers are making a big display of the success of the conference, of the "united anti-Hitler front" by three of the greatest industrial powers in the world, et cetera. People reading the papers in tram-cars appear to be pleased, though I don't think they are overwhelmed. They

know that a fearfully hard winter is ahead of them...

Beaverbrook has been very much in the centre of things, and has pretty well

eclipsed everybody, including Harriman ... and Gripps. This may be unfair, for

Cripps and the Military Mission certainly did a lot to prepare the Conference...

Even so, Beaverbrook's dynamics have unquestionably contributed to the success of the Conference; and his nightly talks with Stalin seem to have been decisive in

smoothing away the rough edges... Beaverbrook has fully realised that the Russians are the only people in the world today who are seriously weakening Germany, and