From the time Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 until the defeat of Japan, World War II, or The Great Patriotic War, as the Russians like to call it, had been an absolute bonanza for Stalin. Sure tens of millions of Russians had died, been shockingly wounded, been psychologically damaged, but for Stalin that was all a cost of doing business – building an enormous empire in just 6 short years.

Stalin’s view of the horrors of World War II is captured in the comment he made during the Korean War. Things had stabilised at the 38th Parallel. But it suited Stalin to keep the war going. But the Koreans and the Chinese were losing a lot of men in the ongoing fighting. They begged Stalin to end the war. Stalin replied that there was no reason why the North Koreans and Chinese should not continue fighting. He replied:

“they lose nothing except for their men.”

Many of the soldiers fighting heroically for their Russian motherland suffered the loss of all four limbs – both legs and both arms. Those men were, quite frankly, rather unsightly and quite bad for morale. Stalin had them sent to towns above the Arctic Circle so no-on would have to look at them. The Russians called them samovars – like the Russian teapots that stand on four tiny stumps of legs.

The Americans and the British, well especially the Americans, had made sure that Russia awash with their military and civilian equipment. Whole factories were even shipped to Russia by the Americans and assembled there. No American secrets were kept from them, except for the atomic bomb, and they easily got that, what with so many spies and fellow travellers in the US, including at the White House.

Russia started the war as just being Russia but when it was over it had all of Central Europe, a lot of territory that the Japanese had owned, and it oversaw Mao Zedong taking over mainland China.

At Tehran Roosevelt and Churchill had given Stalin everything he wanted, or hadn’t been strong enough to oppose him and to say no.

Now, at Yalta, Roosevelt again raised his desire to have the Russians help to beat the Japanese, the empire of the Rising Sun, and end the war. A request he had made previously at Tehran, but now he needed to get it firmed up. That is what this programme’s all about.

Tag words: Stalin; Tehran Conference; Roosevelt; Churchill; Sakhalin Islands; Kurile Islands; Yalta Conference; Admiral Ellis Zacharias; General Marshall; Chiang Kai-shek; ALSIB; Guandong Army; Alger Hiss; Harry Hopkins; Oleg Smirnov; Marhsall Vasilevsky; President Truman; 38th parallel; Hamilton Fish III;

It’s a fact of life that your bargaining power is at its weakest when you’re at your weakest. As I’ve discussed before this, paradoxically, didn’t apply to Stalin in World War II. Stalin could as easily have swapped sides, again. He had already been aligned to Hitler, during World War II. He could have joined with Hitler again if the right deal was offered. For the English, who should have done a deal with Hitler in May of 1940 after the fall of France, that was out of the question. To do that would have been morally wrong.

For Stalin, even with tens of millions of his fellow citizens killed by the Germans and vast amounts of his cities, their factories and infrastructure destroyed, that wouldn’t have mattered. If Hitler ever had an offer that he was willing to put to Stalin, that was better than what the Americans and British had on offer, he would have changed sides at the drop of a hat. Mind you Hitler, although in 1942 he had toyed with making a deal then rejected it – preferring to fight to the death.

So during World War II, when Russia was weak and on the backfoot, and that was the case pretty much from June 1941, when Hitler invaded, until at least mid-1943 to the end of 1943, the Americans and the British, in theory, should have had the better bargaining hand. But their relations with Stalin never worked out like that.

By February 1945, when the Yalta meeting took place between America, Great Britain and Russia, Russia was then clearly the strongest military power in the world on the basis of raw coal face power.

At the time of the Yalta Conferencein February 1945, America especially, but also England to some extent, had just been beaten up by the German attack known as the Battle of the Bulge. That attack most likely happened with them, and not Russia as the target, largely as a result of the Germans finding out about the Morgenthau Plan that Russian agents, at the highest level in the Roosevelt administration, had prompted the Americans and the British to adopt. If implemented it would have reduced Germany to a farm.

That offensive had removed vast amounts of tanks and troops from the Eastern Front facing Russia – against the wishes of General Heinz Guderian. It had allowed the Russian offensives in late 1944 and the beginning of 1945 to gain real ground against minimal opposition.

The Russians had launched their offensive on 12 January 1945 about the time that the Allies had finally halted Hitler’s Ardennes offensive, were starting to recover from the punishing blows they had suffered and were then pushing back to the lines they had held in mid-December.

Our friend Rokossovsky, who had had a box seat for the Warsaw Uprising, which destroyed the Polish resistance, now smashed his way into central and northern Poland and East Prussia. His Second Belorrussian Army Group came to a halt on the Oder River just 65 kilometres from Berlin.

On 17 January 1945 the Red Army had marched into the ruined capital of Warsaw. At the start of the war, Warsaw had had a population of 1.3million. By the time the Red Army entered the city in 1944 its population was reduced to just 130,000. If you want to get a good visual on what Warsaw looked like at this time watch the last scenes in the 2002 movie The Pianist.

Romania had been overrun in late 1944, and so had Hungary.

So what would Stalin want now that he was the strongest of the three Allies?

Tag words: Churchill; Prince Michael Vorontsov; Roosevelt; Livadia Palace; Tsar; Stalin; Gromyko; Uncle Joe; Rokossovsky; Stanislaw Mikolajczyk; Zygmunt

Berling; Lublin government; United Nations; Red Army; Ilya Ehrenberg; The Brothers Karamazov; Dostoevsky; Vasily Grossman; The Great Patriotic War; Red Star newspaper; Panzer General Heinz Guderian; Lavrenty Beria; Kathleen Harriman; Averill Harriman; Charles Bohlen;

On 3 September, 1939, England and France, and as a consequence, the dominions of the Empire, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, found themselves at war. The declaration of war followed the German invasion of Poland. The war was to preserve the independence of Poland as a free nation. Freed from the yoke of a tyrannous regime.

60 million lives lost later, including in the Pacific, the last meeting of the wartime leaders, before the fall of Nazi Germany, and before Hitler took his own life, took place at Yalta in the Crimea between 4 and 11 February 1945.

The world leaders present at that meeting, were Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of England, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, (a man so sick that he would be dead just 10 weeks later) and Stalin, the Vozd, the leader of the Soviet Union.

On 6 February, 1945 the leaders discussed the future of Poland. With most of Poland overrun, and with 10 million Russian soldiers occupying most of eastern Europe, including parts of Germany, the Allies had no choice other than to let Stalin set up a puppet regime in Poland which became a slave state to the Soviet Union.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the original reason for going to war had, by that agreement, completely failed.

I’m going to look at what happened that winter on the Black Sea in Crimea. If nothing else, Stalin gave some of his best quips over those few days.

Tag words: Big Three; President Roosevelt; Edward Stettinius; Churchill; Stalin; Lord Moran; Yalta; Riviera of Hades; Tolstoy Conference; Stanislaw Mikolajczyk; Wladyslaw Sikorski; Polish Home Army; AK; Polish Committee of National Liberation; Boleslaw Bierut; Warsaw Ghetto uprising ; General Rokossovsky; Heinrich Himmler; George Kennan; Tito;

Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, steered by the Communist agent, Harry Dexter White, had done as much as anyone to bring about the war in the Pacific. Now he was manoeuvring to have Germany dismembered mainly for the benefit of his boss, Joseph Stalin. He also was hoping to bring about the deaths of 30 million Germans by starvation, and the mass shootings, without trial or any other legal process, of upwards of 100,000 German officers. Well, on the bright side they wouldn’t starve.

Tag words: Henry Morgenthau; Harry Dexter White; Joseph Stalin; Harry Hopkins; Roosevelt; Cordell Hull; Churchill; USSR; Anthony Eden; Morgenthau Plan; Lieutenant Colonel Marshall Knappen; NKVD; Andrei Gromyko; Nathan Silvermaster;

In Sean McMeekin’s book, “Stalin’s War”, with the benefit of extensive access to what had been the secret, and closed to Western eyes, records of the USSR, until after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, we are given a breathtaking view into how Communist spies in Washington, with the willing, if uninformed enthusiastic support of President Roosevelt, had successively led America to vast and unlimited supplies of American manufactured war and civilian materials, foodstuffs and fuels, oils and lubricants, without which Russia could not have survived the Nazi onslaught, and the provision of vast amounts of intellectual property that set up the Soviet Union for decades to come in what would turn into the Cold War.

After the successful landings on D-Day, and then the breakout of the American, British and Canadian forces in August 1944, winning the war was now just a matter of time. So thoughts had to turn to what was going to happen when the war was over. Particularly, what was going go happen to Germany.

The Treasury, under Henry Morgenthau, a Jew, I’m not being anti-semitic and shortly you’ll see why, and one of the most influential people in the Treasury, advising Morgenthau, was one of the top Communist assets in Washington, was Harry Dexter White, and they were going to play a big part on American thinking on what should happen to Germany after the war. Harry’s thoughts, surprise, surprise, fitted in with what would help Communist Russia.

From a previous programme, if you were listening, and for those who weren’t Harry Dexter White was the man who almost single handedly caused the Americans to provoke the Japanese into attacking them.

Now Sean McMeekin, described how the almost totally Soviet controlled Roosevelt government looked at the question of post-war Germany. He says this:

“…. a long-running policy discussion in the Treasury on how to administer the German economy after the war morphed into an open-ended revenge fantasy.”

Tag words: Henry Morgenthau; Harry Dexter White; Franklin Delano Roosevelt; FDR; Stalin; Tehran Conference; The Brothers Karamazov; Leo Tolstoy; The Vozhd; Handbook for Military Government in Germany; Anthony Eden; Frank Coe, Solomon Adler; David Irving; Philip Mosely; Francis Penrose; Henry Stimson;

After the Second World War, between 1947 and 1957 there was a scare, in America and other countries that had only just recently been allies of Communist Russia against Nazi Germany. These included England, Australia, Canada. The scare was that their countries were infiltrated with Communist agents everywhere. As the old Garfield joke goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t meant they’re not out to get you.

The scare had more substance that people ever knew. It's not the number of Communists working in your country to betray your country that mattered, it was what power they had, what positions they held and what access to vital, top secret information they had.

The Democratic regime that was ushered in with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, swept into office with it’s supporters, many significant people who were either Communist spies, or fellow travellers. People sympathetic to Communism. They were the people who Lenin called useful idiots. So the problem of having your top secrets, including vital intellectual property, handed over to the Communists didn’t begin in 1947, it began in 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt was sworn into office.

The man who was destined to play a major role in dragging America into a war with Japan, to advance Joseph Stalin’s goals, was a man with the very traditional and American sounding name of Harry Dexter White. He was not then and never was a member of the United States Communist Party, but he was a spy working and reporting variously to members of the United States Communist Party and later Stalin’s secret service agents, in the GRU, located in the United States, mostly thanks to Roosevelt giving diplomatic recognition to Russia against his experts’ advice.

What motivated Harry to betray his country isn’t known but he had more than almost anyone else to do with the air force of the Imperial Japanese Navy arriving over Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941 to attack his own country. In this programme I’m going to look at how America and Japan were tricked by Stalin into going to war with each other. This programme isn’t the end of what Harry got up to – but that’s for another programme in this series.

Tag words: Henry Morgenthau; Harry Dexter White; GRU; Stalin; Hitler; Iskhak Akhmerov; Bill Grienke; NKVD; Vitaly; Old Ebbitt Grill; Hideki

Tojo; Saburo Kurusu; Roosevelt; Cordell Hull; Emperor Hirohito;

One of history’s most significant speeches was delivered to a joint meeting of both houses of Congress on 8 December 1941, by the United States President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In his speech he focussed on the surprise attack that had been launched on the United States naval base at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii by aircraft launched from 3 squadrons, 6 aircraft carriers, of the Empire of Japan following the breakdown in peace negotiations between Japan and the United States.

In this programme I am going to tell you a remarkable, true story, that has been learnt from the recent release of secret archives in Russia, after the fall of the USSR. It tells how Joseph Stalin manipulated both Japan and the United States into the war, one with the other, as part of his aims of saving the Soviet Union from the German invasion, which had gone far far worse for Russia than Stalin had ever imagined possible, to pursuing the eternal Communist goal of overthrowing every regime in the world that wasn’t Communist and replacing them with Communism.

Tag words: Chang Kai-shek; Mao Zedong; William Bullitt; Stalin; Nomonohan; Georgii Zhukov; BT7 tank; Khalkin Gol; Tripartite Pact; Operation Barbarossa; Yosuke Matsuoko; Fumimaro Konoe

The two most evil empires in Europe, by mid-1941, Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany, had divied up between themselves all the spoils. They had been able to share out Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, parts of Finland, and Russia had grabbed parts of Hungary.

Germany, without any help from Russia, had grabbed Denmark, Norway, France, Holland, Belgium, Yugoslavia and Greece. And now all that was left was to devour was each other.

The myth that has grown up, because it was the only story being told by the Russians, that they were the hapless victims of Adolf Hitler’s unprovoked invasion in 1941. But now we know that that wasn’t true. Stalin had been building up his armaments since 1929 ready to take over Europe.

Here’s a little illustration of how strong Russia was by 1939. Russians deployed 3,885 aircraft against tiny Finland during the Winter War of 1939-1940. That was more than the combined number of aircraft used by both Germany and Britain in the Battle of Britain.

By mid-1941 Stalin was ready to move against Germany, which would mean that he would then be in control of all of Germany’s conquests too.

In this programme I’m going to tell you about Russia’s incredible preparations for war. It was ironic that a man who was at least as evil as Hitler, and who was ready to launch his war of aggression against Europe became the heroic and much-admired ally of England and the United States. But the warning that the recalled, and astute, US ambassador to Moscow, William Bullitt, had given to President Roosevelt in July 1935, proved to be right on the money:

As for the prospect of a new European war, I don’t doubt that current Soviet policy is "peaceful, but this is only because Stalin has not yet completed his armament drive. It is the primary object of the Soviet Foreign Office to maintain peace. . . until the strength of the Soviet Union has been built up to such a point that it is entirely impregnable to attack and ready, should Stalin so desire, to intervene abroad."

By May 1941 Stalin believed that that build-up had been accomplished and he was ready to strike.

Tag words: Stalin; Molotov; Marshal Tukhachevsky; NKVD; Kahlkin Gol; General Pavlov; Georgi Zhukov;

In 1941 was Russia planning to engage in a war with Germany, to defeat Hitler’s Third Reich, and then take over his empire in Western Europe.

This programme is going to explore that question and what the evidence shows. The most important evidence that has to be closely examined are the records in the Russian archives that were opened up some years after the fall of the Soviet Union. You will be shocked. And if you’re not shocked you should be.

Tag words: Yang Jisheng; Tombstone; Nicholas von Below; Nicholas von Below; Reinhardt Gehlen; William Bullitt; Robert Kelley; Timoshenko;

Hamilton Fish III was a congressman from western New York. His grandfather had been a secretary of state. On a nationally syndicated radio broadcast he thundered:

“Opposed though I am to Nazism, I am certain that American mothers will not willingly sacrifice their sons to make the world safe for Communism. It is "preposterous to think of America being aligned with Joe Stalin as our pal and comrade, with his hands dripping with blood of murdered priests and nuns and the same dagger in his hand which he plunged into the backs of Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and our friend the little honest Republic of Finland."

That was pretty hard to argue with.

But something strange was happening at the very top of this brand new Roosevelt administration about how the Democrat, socialist regime, saw Stalin’s Russia. You might expect the State Department (responsible for overseeing America’s relations with foreign countries) would protect the interests of capitalist America. They’d done a great job so far, so there was nothing to worry about – or was there?

Tag words: Robert F. Kelley; Robert Kelley; Comintern; William Bullitt; Joseph Davies; Stalin; Loy Henderson; Loy Henderson; Ray Atherton; Charles "Chip" Bohlen; George Kennan; Eastern Division; State Department; Sumner Welles; Pravda; Izvestiya; Nicholas von Below; General Reinhard Gehlen; Paul Carrell;