A cry for help

As German troops surge into Russia, Stalin pleads for Churchill’s assistance

3 SEPTEMBER 1941

August 1941 was a bleak month for Josef Stalin. On 22 June, German forces had invaded the USSR, and soon Hitler’s Wehrmacht was advancing rapidly, capturing several million Soviet troops. Stalin was desperate for allies, and his British counterpart, Winston Churchill, was prepared to help any enemy of Nazism.

As Soviet losses mounted, Stalin’s pleas for help grew shriller. But Churchill had little to offer: the British Army was locked in battle with the Germans and Italians in north Africa. In any case, it was far from clear whether the Soviet Union would survive.

By the end of August, Stalin was furious with what he called Britain’s “passive wait-and-see policy”. Ivan Maisky, his ambassador in London, advised a direct appeal to Churchill himself. There was no time for a Foreign Ministry draft: Stalin’s secretary took down the boss’s dictation on sheets of paper (one of which is pictured above) torn from a little notebook. The telegram was then typed up, encrypted and sent in just 90 minutes. In it, the Soviet leader said that the only thing that could help was for Britain to “establish already this year a second front somewhere in the Balkans or France, which would be able to divert from the eastern front some 30 to 40 German divisions”.

Churchill was incredulous. He didn’t have sufficient combat units in the whole of the British Army to engage that many German divisions. But his advisors insisted that his draft reply was too negative: “This is a historic telegram, perhaps the most important you have ever sent to a foreign head of state.” So Churchill promised to send 200 planes and 250 tanks each month, expressing the hope that this would be matched by the USA.