When Stalin’s Red Army defeated the Germans in 1945, the Soviet dictator decided to show his appreciation of Allied help by making gifts to the two western envoys who had done most to facilitate his war effort. He presented the British ambassador, Sir Archibald (Call me Archie) Clark Kerr, with a young man, or rather he provided a rare exit visa for Archie’s Russian masseur. To Averell Harriman, President Roosevelt’s man in Moscow, he gave a pair of horses, and, oddly, a large replica of the US Great Seal to hang in the American embassy.
The Stalin Affair is mainly the story of how Averell and Archie befriended Stalin and primed him for the summit meetings with Roosevelt and Churchill which determined the outcome of the war. Pre-war western diplomats had viewed Stalin as a lawless gangster, but after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 the Allies realised that a Nazi victory would make the liberation of Europe almost impossible. It became imperative to befriend Stalin and strengthen the Red Army. But, as Roosevelt admitted, Allied leaders knew little about him.
The US president had already dispatched Averell Harriman to London in March 1941, where the railroad baron embedded himself in Churchill’s circle, going so far as to bed the PM’s flirtatious daughter-in-law, Pamela. After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Averell and Lord Beaverbrook, the UK supply minister, undertook a perilous journey to Moscow, flying via Archangel on the White Sea, to sound out Stalin. They found him bashful, quiet-spoken and given to drawing doodles of wolves during their discussions. After they promised to provide the Red Army with hundreds of aeroplanes, tanks and trucks, a grateful Stalin laid on a banquet at which 32 toasts were made, each requiring a shot of vodka.
Averell’s capacity for alcohol and his charm made him a big hit on that initial visit. He soon returned, this time as US ambassador, bringing with him his smart, elegant daughter, Kathy, who learned Russian (unlike the resident foreign correspondents) and caused a sensation wherever she went.
Diarmaid Ferriter: Why are Irish people so preoccupied with what others might think?
Oppressive regimes and first love: Key teenage themes captured in September’s best YA fiction
Christine Dwyer Hickey: ‘I’m always going to be fragile about my relationship with my mother ... I just try to make it up with my own kids’
Voices of the dead speak again, telling unheard stories of the IRA ceasefire 30 years on
Archie Kerr, a flamboyant, bisexual maverick, who possessed “neither pedigree nor fortune”, arrived as UK ambassador the following January. He found Stalin to be like a pet possum, the kind which “would nip you in the buttocks out of sheer mischief”. At their first meeting, in the Kremlin bomb shelter during a German air raid, the two of them puffed pipes, discussed sex, and chatted over the loud rumbles coming from Stalin’s belly.
Like Averell, Archie could hold his drink, though once, at a Kremlin banquet, in full evening dress, he collapsed with an almighty crash on to the table in the company of Molotov (“old Bootface”) and Mikoyan. No one seemed to mind.
When Churchill himself came to Moscow he was outraged at a perceived insult from Stalin and was intent on storming off home, letting Stalin “fight his battles on his own”. Archie took him for a long walk and talked him out of it, thus preventing a breakdown of the whole project.
As relations warmed, the amount of Allied aid, reached enormous proportions. The author credits Averell, especially, for his role in bringing to Russia via Iran a huge number of US-made Studebaker trucks for Soviet troop transports, which saved “many thousands of lives”. (It might have been worth noting that in 1944, as the war still raged, Stalin secretly used the American trucks to round up and expel the Chechen population from the Caucasus in a deliberate act of genocide).
In January 1944, Soviet officials took foreign correspondents, along with Kathy Harriman, to Katyn Forest to see the exhumation of the mass graves of 22,000 Polish officers, executed on Stalin’s orders. As part of an effort to blame the Nazis, the officials lined up fake witnesses and provided letters allegedly written by Polish officers but in reality forged by Soviet pseudointellectual Alexei Tolstoy, a darling of the Moscow social circuit. This immense cover-up was not exposed fully until the Soviet Union collapsed.
As the war came to an end, Stalin enjoyed considerable popularity in the West, much to the dismay of our two diplomatic heroes who had become disillusioned by his anti-democratic intentions for liberated eastern Europe.
This is a thoroughly enjoyable, well-researched, and delightfully gossipy narrative of one of the most extraordinary diplomatic stories of the second World War. As for those gifts from Stalin: Archie’s Russian masseur ended up running a fish and chip shop on the Scottish island of Bute. Averell proudly hung the Great Seal replica in the American ambassador’s private library, used for top-secret conversations.
Only six years later did the embassy discover that inside it was a sophisticated listening device that enabled the Kremlin to hear everything the Americans were up to, as the Cold War replaced wartime comradeship.
- Conor O’Clery is the author of Moscow, December 25, 1991; The Last Day of the Soviet Union.
