The diplomatic relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States underwent considerable change from 1929 to 1945. While ideologically based tensions between the two nations—one a totalitarian Marxist regime, the other a democratic capitalist state—never disappeared, Nazi Germany created pressing mutual concerns that led the United States and the Soviet Union to cooperate during World War II. By 1945, however, old frictions and new issues produced discord, and the international structure of the postwar era would be defined largely by the developing cold war rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.
In 1929, the United States had no formal diplomatic relationship with the Soviet Union, having refused to recognize its Communist government as legitimate since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. This state of affairs did not change until President Franklin D. Roosevelt extended official recognition to the Soviet Union in November 1933, in hope not only of normalizing relations but also of finding markets to help the American economy during the Great Depression. This change in foreign policy, however, brought no significant change in the substance of Soviet-American relations.
The continuing distrust between the Soviet Union and the western democracies both helped produce and was exacerbated by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939. The Soviets evidently felt they could not rely upon the United States, Britain, or France in the event of conflict with Germany. After signing the nonaggression treaty, they began their own campaign of territorial expansion, invading eastern Poland almost immediately and Finland in October. These actions increased anti-Soviet sentiment in the United States, as did the Soviets’ signing of a neutrality pact with the Japanese in April 1941.
By late 1941, Soviet-American relations had changed dramatically. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the United States extended aid to the Soviets under the Lend-Lease Act in the autumn. Then, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the war, the Soviet Union became a part of the Grand Alliance with the United States and Great Britain and endorsed the war aims set forth in the Atlantic Charter. Because of the Japanese-Soviet neutrality pact, the Soviets did not become involved in the World War II Pacific theater until August 1945, but the Soviet Union was included in strategic discussions throughout the remainder of the war.
The diplomatic relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, however, was never as strong as the one between the United States and Great Britain. Significantly, the Soviets were not included in talks between the Americans and British about the potential uses of the ATomic bomb and were not informed of American progress in the development of the weapon in the Manhattan Project. (The Soviet Union did know about the project, however, as a result of its espionage activities in the United States.)
A series of wartime conferences of the Grand Alliance illuminated differences and disagreements among its members. The “Big Three” leaders of the alliance—Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin—met for the first time at the Teheran Conference in late 1943. Over British objections, Roosevelt agreed to set the invasion of Normandy for the spring of 1944 and thus open the second front in Europe long desired by Stalin to reduce German military pressure on his country. The decision brought Soviet-American relations to their highest point during the war, despite disagreements at Teheran about postwar plans.
By 1944, it was apparent that the United States and the Soviet Union would emerge from the war as the two remaining great powers, but the impending end of the war increased tensions. Disagreements about eastern Europe, liberated from Nazi control and then occupied by the Soviet Union, figured especially prominently. At the Yalta Conference of early 1945, Roosevelt seemed willing to allow the Soviets to create a “buffer zone” of Communist governments in eastern Europe in order to maintain Soviet-Ameri-can cooperation, though with the hope that the Soviet Union would not exercise iron control over this sphere of influence. At Yalta, the Soviets agreed to take part in the postwar United Nations and to enter the war against Japan within a few months after the surrender of Germany. In addition to eastern Europe, however, contention also arose concerning postwar Germany and other matters.
By the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, following the surrender of Germany, difficulties in the Soviet-American alliance were even clearer. Issues involving eastern Europe, Germany, and economic assistance for the Soviets remained unresolved, and Soviet-American relations were further complicated by the atomic bomb. New president Harry S. Truman continued to defend the principles of the Atlantic Charter, not wishing to be accused of selling out eastern Europe, as had happened to Roosevelt following Yalta. Stalin continued to defend the right of the Soviet Union to protect its borders from yet another invasion by surrounding itself with Communist puppet states. Such differences, partly ideological and partly involving national security concerns, became even sharper over the next year and would help dissolve the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union, replacing the world war with a cold war that would last 45 years.
See also Anglo-American relations.
Further reading: Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972); Ralph B. Levering, American Opinion and the Russian Alliance, 1939-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976); William Hardy McNeil, America, Britain, and Russia: Their Cooperation and Conflict, 1941-1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953).
—Mary E. Carroll-Mason
World History
