Russia at war 1941-1945

Then followed a passage on the Allies' "inflexible purpose to destroy German militarism and Nazism... to disarm and disband all German armed forces, to break up for all time the German General Staff... to remove or destroy all German military equipment ... to bring all war criminals to just and swift punishment and exact reparation in kind... wipe out the Nazi Party, Nazi laws, organisations and institutions, remove all Nazi and militarist influence from public offices and from the cultural and economic life of the German

people... It is not our purpose to destroy the people of Germany, but only when Nazism and militarism have been extirpated will there be hope for a decent life for Germans, and a place for them in the comity of nations."

In the Protocol of the Yalta Conference (not published at the time) the Surrender Terms for Germany included a provision under which the Big Three would take "any such steps as they deem requisite for future peace and security, including the complete disarmament, demilitarisation and the dismemberment of Germany." The study for the procedure of dismemberment was referred to a committee consisting of Mr Eden, Mr Winant and Mr

Gusev (the Foreign Secretary and the US and Soviet Ambassadors in London).

[The post-war History claims that at Yalta, the Russians were against dismemberment and looked with suspicion at any Western dismemberment plans. (IVOVSS, V, pp. 130-5). If at Teheran Stalin still favoured the dismemberment of Germany, he appears to have changed his mind by the time the Yalta Conference met. The "dismemberment" question was discussed at a number of meetings, particularly between the November 1944 meeting of the European Advisory Commission and Potsdam in July 1945. At the EAC meeting in

March 1945 the Russians had clearly changed their minds about the desirability of

"dismemberment". In claiming that they had already changed their minds at Yalta, i.e. a month before, the Russians are now stretching a point only slightly.]

A Reparations Committee was set up in Moscow under the chairmanship of Mr Maisky

which would take "in its initial studies as a basis of discussion " the twenty billion dollars (half of it for the Soviet Union) proposed by the Russians.

The Russians were not particularly pleased with this deliberately non-committal protocol of Reparations, and were later to claim that Roosevelt had agreed to their getting ten billion dollars (from equipment, current production and labour), despite very strong opposition from Churchill, who had kept recalling the fearful reparations muddle after World War I. But there is little doubt that, apart from this Reparations question, the Russians were well satisfied with the Protocol on the de-nazification and the

demilitarisation of Germany. It is also certain that Stalin took the World Organisation, based on the unity of the Big Three, very seriously—though not quite seriously enough to run any grave risks with Poland, Rumania and the rest of his east-European sphere of influence.

The atom bomb had not yet been exploded, and American military men feared that,

unless Russia joined in, the war against Japan might well last till 1947, and cost the United States at least another million casualties. Britain and the USA were therefore anxious, at the time of Yalta, to get Russia to join in the Japanese war. After all the loss of life in the war against Germany, the Russians were not at all keen on another war, and Stalin argued that he would "have to show something for it" before they would readily accept war against Japan. He therefore demanded first, the maintenance of the status quo in outer Mongolia; second, the restoration of Russia's former rights violated by Japan in 1904—the return of southern Sakhalin; the restoration (subject to an early agreement with Chiang Kai-shek) of Russian interests in respect of Dairen, Port Arthur and the Chinese Eastern and South-Manchurian railways, to be operated jointly by a Soviet-Chinese

Company, with China retaining full sovereignty in Manchuria; and third, the handing

over of the Kurile Islands to the Soviet Union (even though these had in effect belonged to Japan for a long time). This was a satisfactory pourboire for Russia to receive in the Far East. Stettinius quoted a significant remark of Molotov's, which suggests that the Russians were perfectly content to pursue a Big-Three policy even in China, i.e. to coexist peacefully with Chiang Kai-shek:

Molotov told General Patrick Hurley that the Soviet Union was not interested in the Chinese Communists; these weren't really Communists anyway.

[ Stettinius, op. cit., p. 28. One can only wonder whether today Khrushchev agrees with his old friend Molotov! See also p. 1030 for Stalin's remarks on the Chinese Communists to Hopkins in May 1945.]