the kremlin letter book review

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Book Reviews on...

The kremlin letter, by noel behn.

On the surface, it’s one of those men-with-a-mission things, like The Guns of Navarone. But when you read it, you feel like you’re reading Chekhov. It’s an incredibly dense, incredibly dark, incredibly closely described novel, and it’s only really nominally about espionage. What it’s really about is extraordinarily brutalist and cynical men, betraying each other. It’s the only spy thriller that I’ve read that I really thought, ‘Oh God, that is just a bit too unpleasant.’

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“What it’s really about is extraordinarily brutalist and cynical men betraying each other. It’s a very dark but quite fascinating read.” Read more...

The Best Forgotten Cold War Thrillers

Jeremy Duns , Novelist

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Middlemarch by george eliot, war and peace by leo tolstoy, on liberty by john stuart mill, nineteen eighty-four by george orwell, frankenstein (book) by mary shelley, the confessions by augustine (translated by maria boulding).

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Yes! As the publishers hint, it is Mickey Spillane disguised as De Sade under a Hammett hat. But they forgot to include...

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THE KREMLIN LETTER

by Noel Behn ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 1966

Yes! As the publishers hint, it is Mickey Spillane disguised as De Sade under a Hammett hat. But they forgot to include Donald Duck. And Donald is making the scene although the reader won't notice, he'll be too involved. One suspects that even the CIA has never dreamed of such detail. Take the code names: ""The Virgin""- Charles Rone, ex-American Military Intelligence Agent and possessor of a total recall memory and a fatal attraction for women; ""Sweet Alice"" and ""Uncle Morris"" (just reverse indicated sexes); ""The Warlock""- a sweetheart of a fella; ""The Highwayman""- ? They are all part of an independent (and very expendable) operation our government has hired to grab a slippery letter that's drifting around in a three-way Cold War. And when this particular clan moves into Moscow, the way has been paved with an intricate preparation that is too much (particularly when it comes to perversion). There's not a moment's rest as we carry on to ? Finally the reader is allowed to rest. What was that Quack in the background... fading off into ""Q"".

Pub Date: June 21, 1966

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1966

Categories: FICTION

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The Kremlin Letters

Stalin's Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt

Edited by David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov

680 Pages , 5.00 x 7.75 in , 24 b-w illus. & 3 maps

• 9780300247657
• Published: Tuesday, 1 Oct 2019
• 9780300226829
• Published: Tuesday, 27 Nov 2018
• 9780300241044

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• Description

David Reynolds is professor of international history at Cambridge University and the author of eleven books. Vladimir Pechatnov , a prolific scholar of the Cold War, is chair of European and American studies, Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

“Illuminating and insightful. . . . An indispensable resource.” —Jonathan W. Jordan, Wall Street Journal "This is a masterful work of history. It should be read by anyone who wants to understand how the world we live in was shaped not only by the whole sequence of events of 1941-45, but also by the thoughts and feelings of just three extraordinary individuals." —Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph “Fresh and valuable insights into the way Stalin drafted and edited his messages.” — Tony Barber, Financial Times (Books of the Year 2018) “David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov have done a superbly scholarly job in documenting the relationships Stalin had with Churchill and with Franklin Roosevelt through their epistolary contact.” — Simon Heffer, The Daily Telegraph “Two eminent scholars have produced a fascinating and detailed narrative of the war’s decision-making that embeds the leaders’ correspondence and memoirs into other archival material.” —Jonathan Steele, The Guardian This remarkable book collects the wartime correspondence Churchill and Roosevelt received from Stalin – more than 600 letters. Anyone wishing to understand how the Allied powers brought about Hitler’s defeat must read it — Daily Telegraph “A product of great scholarly labors by David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov, it sheds invaluable light upon the delicate negotiations between the wartime triumvirate of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill.”—Jacob Heilbrunn, Spectator USA “This is the most ambitious and important book from Yale University Press’ invaluable series of documentary histories drawn from the Soviet archives. Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin exchanged 682 messages between Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, in June 1941, and Roosevelt’s death, in April 1945. Beyond the messages themselves, what makes this volume so valuable are the editors’ brisk and penetrating historical introductions and the context they provide for each message.”—Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs Winner of the 2020 Link-Kuehl Prize, sponsored by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations "A must-have volume for anyone seeking to elucidate the interplay between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt between 1941 and 1945. The meticulous research of Professor David Reynolds and Professor Vladimir Pechatnov is a unique Anglo-Russian collaboration based on archival material in Russia, the UK and the USA. But this book offers not just the raw material of the key missives between the three leaders. It also provides a detailed commentary explaining the often constrained language of diplomacy and sets it within the context of what was happening at the time. It presents an Anglophone audience with a compelling and comprehensive account of the triangular network of exchanges at the top level which helped shape this vital period of the Second World War.”—Bridget Kendall “The fascinating wartime correspondence between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt is set in historical context by its meticulous editors in an admirably succinct and perceptive narrative: a model of Anglo-Russian scholarly cooperation.”—Sir Rodric Braithwaite “This book will be of great value for historians as an excellent archival reconstruction of an important historical source. In addition to its thorough research, broader audiences it will find it an exciting read. The story of these three world leaders unveils the secrets of politics in the most terrible of wars.”—Oleg Khlevniuk "Is there anything more to learn from the World War II correspondence of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt? I'd have wondered before reading this volume, but Vladimir Pechatnov, David Reynolds, and their international research team have changed my mind. For not only is  The Kremlin Letters  filled with new information: it's also a pioneering effort to embed documents within a single sustained narrative, all the more compelling for the collaborations that produced it. Which simultaneously give it precision, great sweep, and best of all  freshness —a magnificent accomplishment!"—John Lewis Gaddis, Yale University “Here the leading British and Russian historians of the Grand Alliance present a gripping and all-encompassing documentary history of Stalin’s relations with Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War. A feast of scrupulous research, The Kremlin Letters rewrites the history of the War as we knew it.”—Gabriel Gorodetsky, Quondam Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford and editor of The Maisky Diaries

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The Kremlin Letters: Stalin's Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt Hardcover – Illustrated, 2 Oct. 2018

• ISBN-10 0300226829
• ISBN-13 978-0300226829
• Edition Illustrated
• Publisher Yale University Press
• Publication date 2 Oct. 2018
• Language English
• Dimensions 16.26 x 5.59 x 23.37 cm
• Print length 680 pages
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press; Illustrated edition (2 Oct. 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 680 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0300226829
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0300226829
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.26 x 5.59 x 23.37 cm
• 3,433 in Essays, Journals & Letters
• 56,284 in History (Books)
• 127,860 in Society, Politics & Philosophy

About the author

David reynolds.

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The Kremlin Letters: Stalin’s Wartime Correspondence With Churchill and Roosevelt

Reviewed by robert legvold, by david reynolds and vladimir pechatnov.

This is the most ambitious and important book from Yale University Press’ invaluable series of documentary histories drawn from the Soviet archives. Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin exchanged 682 messages between Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, in June 1941, and Roosevelt’s death, in April 1945. Three-quarters of them are published here. Beyond the messages themselves, what makes this volume so valuable are the editors’ brisk and penetrating historical introductions and the context they provide for each message: the author’s mood and calculations, the political advice each leader was receiving, and sometimes the hidden diplomacy complementing the message. Scarcely any aspect of World War II has been more thoroughly written about than the relationships among these three leaders, but documenting their wartime communication in such detail gives new depth to this history. Stalin’s more cordial attitude toward Roosevelt than Churchill, for example, is unmistakable, as is the subtle shift in the dynamic among the three in Stalin’s favor beginning in 1943.

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The Kremlin Letters by David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov – review

“I f that is so,” joked Stalin when told that the big three wartime leaders resembled the Holy Trinity, “Churchill must be the Holy Ghost. He flies around so much.” Britain’s prime minister was constantly on the move during the second world war, clocking up over 100,000 miles, often in unheated military planes,on trips to the US and Moscow, as well as battlefronts in the Mediterranean.

Stalin had a fear of flying. FDR was reluctant because of his use of a wheelchair. So with the exception of two occasions when the three men got together at Tehran and Yalta , they communicated mainly by coded telegram and letter. There were more than 600 of these exchanges, and in a significant collaboration between Britain and Russia two eminent scholars have produced a fascinating and detailed narrative of the war’s decision-making that embeds the leaders’ correspondence and memoirs into other archival material.

The letters were first published in full in Moscow shortly after the dictator died in 1953 and before the US and UK released the English versions. It was the Kremlin’s response to the way Churchill had quoted from them selectively in his six volumes of memoirs, not giving adequate recognition, in Moscow’s view, to the huge Soviet role in defeating Hitler . But in what Reynolds and Pechatnov rightly call the “battle for history”, the Kremlin’s raw publication of the letters was accompanied by no background explanations. This is what their impressive book now provides.

Although the content of the letters is business-like, the varying tone and choice of language give multiple clues as to the writers’ feelings. The authors detect that Stalin had more respect for Roosevelt than Churchill : the US president was open handed, while Churchill was often stingy, uncooperative and verbose. He replied to letters quickly and often emotionally. Stalin by contrast understood the power of silence, sometimes deliberately keeping his interlocutors waiting and letting them worry. Triangular relationships tend to produce jealousies and suspicions and the big three were no exception.

In 1943, as planning for the Tehran summit got under way, Roosevelt proposed to Stalin that they first hold an informal tête-à-tête without Churchill. For six weeks he kept the British PM in the dark and when Churchill found out, FDR lied that it was Stalin who had wanted the meeting with him. Tehran had other extraordinary aspects, not least the fact that FDR stayed in a house in the Soviet embassy compound. Pechatnov has unearthed Soviet and American diplomats’ correspondence which shows that far from being lured into it by Stalin the initiative came from FDR, who wanted to be close to Stalin and have as much facetime together as possible. Of course the US president knew the house would be bugged, but FDR deliberately said things for the benefit of the hidden microphones which he could not say to the dictator officially.

From the Tehran transcript the authors conclude that Stalin was superior as a diplomat to his western counterparts. He had a careful mastery of the issues and interjected with key points at the right moment. The main issue then, as it had been since 1941, was persuading the US and UK to open a second front in northern France. Churchill was focusing on North Africa and the Mediterranean, FDR was involved with the Pacific.

After Tehran the key issue in the letters switched to postwar planning, with FDR emphasising the need for a global body, the United Nations , while Stalin and Churchill sparred over the future governance of Poland. The differences were often deep but the three men developed a certain affection for each other. Stalin gave FDR the code-name Captain, Churchill was Wild Boar. Among themselves FDR and Churchill referred to Stalin as UJ or Uncle Joe. Sometimes Churchill called him Ursus Major.

Both men deluded themselves that there were two Stalins, the flexible negotiator with whom they could do business and achieve results and the other Stalin who was forced to be tough by his hardline colleagues. Why they failed to understand he controlled his comrades through fear seems hard to fathom now.

FDR and Stalin had two ideological positions that partly coincided. One was an anti-imperialist stance that set them apart from Churchill. The other – again differently from Churchill – was a leftwing belief in the role and responsibility of the state to engineer a better world. FDR looked forward to a mutual evolution or convergence of the two systems – the socialisation of American capitalism and liberalisation of Soviet socialism. In 1944 he called for economic rights to be added to the US constitution’s political liberties.

Stalin repeatedly stressed that he wanted the wartime collaboration to continue. In September 1943 he even drafted a proposal for the big three to conclude a military-political alliance to bring about permanent postwar cooperation. He shelved it for unknown reasons. Perhaps he thought it was too ambitious, though the idea’s broad thrust was reciprocated by FDR and Britain’s incoming postwar Labour government, at least initially. When Churchill, by then no longer in government, made his Iron Curtain speech in 1946, Washington and London distanced themselves from it. Only later, when the cold war erupted, did Churchill’s words seem prescient rather than alarmist.

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The Kremlin Letters: Stalin’s wartime correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt edited by David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov

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The Kremlin Letters: Stalin’s wartime correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt  edited by David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov

Bloomsbury, $34.99 pb, 570 pp, 9781472966247

J oseph Stalin wanted this wartime correspondence published, and one can see why: he comes off best. As the authors comment, ‘the transcript of the Big Three meetings demonstrates Stalin’s careful mastery of the issues and his superior skill as a diplomatist, regularly keeping his silence but then speaking out in a terse and timely manner at key moments’. He is the one with his eye on the ball, always remembering what his main objectives are and keeping his correspondents off balance with his adroit switches between intimacy and admonition.

Compared with him, Winston Churchill is impulsive and over-emotional, and Franklin D. Roosevelt is lazy. The two Allied leaders were excited about the opportunity to ‘build a personal relationship with the hitherto reclusive Soviet leader’, while Stalin, pleased at being finally admitted to the A-league, looked forward to ‘the challenges of playing against (and with) his US and British interlocutors’ . One way of reading the epistolary relationship is that Stalin, feigning a personal relationship because that’s what the others wanted, always remained a cold calculator of his nation’s interest. That’s the way Stalin himself surely liked to see it. But it may not be the whole truth.

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Sheila Fitzpatrick

• David Reynolds
• Vladimir Pechatnov
• Non Fiction
• Yale University Press
• World Leaders
• Letter collection

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s most recent books include  The Shortest History of the Soviet Union  (2022),  On Stalin’s Team: The years of living dangerously in Soviet politics (2015), and White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War history of migration to Australia (2020). Her new book Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the birth of the Cold War will be published in November 2024. She is a professor at Australian Catholic University.

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The Kremlin Letters: Stalin’s Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt Hardcover – Illustrated, November 27, 2018

• Print length 680 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Yale University Press
• Publication date November 27, 2018
• Dimensions 6.4 x 2.2 x 9.2 inches
• ISBN-10 0300226829
• ISBN-13 978-0300226829
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press; Illustrated edition (November 27, 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 680 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0300226829
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0300226829
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.76 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.4 x 2.2 x 9.2 inches
• #3,672 in Russian History (Books)
• #6,680 in History & Theory of Politics
• #14,173 in World War II History (Books)

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David reynolds.

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