FDR foreign policy if Stalinist crimes are known

[tuxer]

While some people (usually of the "the free market would have ended the Great Depression" variety) claim that FDR held pro-communist views, I think that mostly his foreign policy regarding the Soviet Union resulted of naiveté and overall ignorance of the repression and horrors implemented by the Stalinist regime.

Of course everyone knew that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship, but no one knew the horrors and crimes that were occurring. So, what would be FDR's foreign policy if Stalin's most heinous crimes were known and well documented by 1940, for whatever reason? I highly doubt that FDR would be willing to grant 11.3 billion dollars in the Lend-Lease to the USSR if he was aware of those crimes.

Of course, the role of Lend-Lease is largely overestimated as (unless I am getting my facts wrong) it only started to flow into the USSR in a considerate way after the disastrous battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

 

[CrimsonKing]

Probably no change. His main foreign policy goal was to defeat Germany and ensure that it's bid to establish itself as a continental superpower ended in failure, and that's at the minimum a whole lot harder if the USSR has been defeated or come to a peace arrangement favorable to the Germans.

 

[Johnrankins]

Probably no change. His main foreign policy goal was to defeat Germany and ensure that it's bid to establish itself as a continental superpower ended in failure, and that's at the minimum a whole lot harder if the USSR has been defeated or come to a peace arrangement favorable to the Germans.

No changes until 1943 or 1944 certainly. After that it is clearly a matter of when not if the USSR wins. I don't think FDR would cut off Lend-Lease completely but he could reduce it and hope the Russians bleed a bit more before the Germans go down. It depends on how much of a threat he would consider the USSR would be post-war.

 

[Kurt_Steiner]

Bearing in mind that the discovery of the Katyn Massacre didn't stop him from going to Tehran and making deals with Stalin, I doubt he would have acted otherwise provided that all could be blamed on Goebbel's propaganda.

 

[tuxer]

No changes until 1943 or 1944 certainly. After that it is clearly a matter of when not if the USSR wins. I don't think FDR would cut off Lend-Lease completely but he could reduce it and hope the Russians bleed a bit more before the Germans go down. It depends on how much of a threat he would consider the USSR would be post-war.

Probably no change. His main foreign policy goal was to defeat Germany and ensure that it's bid to establish itself as a continental superpower ended in failure, and that's at the minimum a whole lot harder if the USSR has been defeated or come to a peace arrangement favorable to the Germans.

Bearing in mind that the discovery of the Katyn Massacre didn't stop him from going to Tehran and making deals with Stalin, I doubt he would have acted otherwise provided that all could be blamed on Goebbel's propaganda.

But what about the internal opposition? With the Stalinist crimes no longer "just bourgeois propaganda", the GOP would accuse Roosevelt of being a fellow traveler or holding sympathies towards communists which could be used to defeat him in the 44' presidential election.

 

[CrimsonKing]

But what about the internal opposition? With the Stalinist crimes no longer "just bourgeois propaganda", the GOP would accuse Roosevelt of being a fellow traveler or holding sympathies towards communists which could be used to defeat him in the 44' presidential election.

Unless the greater international awareness of Stalin's atrocities somehow butterflies away Germany going to war with the US, I would think Roosevelt would be able to get LL to the USSR through Congress once it's become an ally.

 

[El Speculador]

Regrettably, there was not much of a chance to block the USSR even if its crimes were known, as they were vital to defeating the Nazis. The deals made were necessities also to minimize suffering. They were not the first or last distasteful ally acquired by the US for the "greater good", whatever it meant at whatever time. Knowing that Stalin was going to backstab them would be entirely different than knowing of the crimes. Of course, this is easy to say from a detatched historical perspective, and voters may think differently, altering policy via congress in 1942, and again in 1944. Also, there is a longshot chance that operation unthinkable could get public support. Probably not, but possible. Just my 2 cents.

 

[Just a Rube]

It makes propaganda better during the early Cold War, but otherwise no change. There were plenty of unsavory allies during WWII (to say nothing of the Cold War); the public determination to beat the Axis is still going to be stronger.

Operation Unthinkable is still unthinkable (Americans have been fighting for years at this point, and have no desire to fight another war). Tehran/Yalta/Potsdam are all going to go more or less as expected; the US still wants Soviet aid against Japan, and still doesn't want to fight a war with the Soviets.

Besides, the US had enough control over the media during the war to limit the coverage of the atrocities as needed.

 

[Halagaz]

At least some of Stalin's crimes were known. The problem was, they were known by the Nazis, their collaborators and allies. In some places, they even played a huge part in pro-German propaganda during occupation (the very real massacres at Katyn and Vinnytsia were mainstays of German/collaborationist propaganda over here; not sure what other crimes were used and how much the Nazis bothered to focus on real cases, either).

Being publicized and exploited by the Axis maybe didn't actively hurt the efforts to bring light to these crimes, but it certainly didn't help. So the influence of the Nazis ruins the short-term credibility of anti-Soviet accusations even when those accusations are actually true, and in any case the common Allied war effort is too important to allow for major changes.

 

[BBadolato]

I'd doubt it, to a lesser extent aid kept on coming to the Nationalists in China even with all the reports of corruption, misuse of material aid and incompetence. After the war if it's even possible for FDR to live that long, might be another story.

 

[ObssesedNuker]

I think that mostly his foreign policy regarding the Soviet Union resulted of naiveté and overall ignorance of the repression and horrors implemented by the Stalinist regime.

From the man himself:

More than twenty years ago, while most of you were very young children, I had the utmost sympathy for the Russian people. In the early days of Communism, I recognized that many leaders in Russia were bringing education and better health and, above all, better opportunity to millions who had been kept in ignorance and serfdom under the imperial regime. I disliked the regimentation under Communism. I abhorred the indiscriminate killings of thousands of innocent victims. I heartily deprecated the banishment of religion—though I knew that some day Russia would return to religion for the simple reason that four or five thousand years of recorded history have proven that mankind has always believed in God in spite of many abortive attempts to exile God.

I, with many of you, hoped that Russia would work out its own problems, and that its government would eventually become a peace-loving, popular government with a free ballot, which would not interfere with the integrity of its neighbors.

That hope is today either shattered or put away in storage against some better day. The Soviet Union, as everybody who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world. It has allied itself with another dictatorship, and it has invaded a neighbor so infinitesimally small that it could do no conceivable possible harm to the Soviet Union, a neighbor which seeks only to live at peace as a democracy, and a liberal, forward-looking democracy at that.

Many of Stalin's crimes, although not quite their full extent and horror, were rather known to the west in the 1930s. In fact, it was much better known in the west then the holocaust was in the 1941-1944 period, as there was no war between the west and the Soviet Union to prevent American, British, or French reporters from travelling within Russia and reporting on the famines or the show trials. But the fact these atrocities were almost entirely domestic affairs taking place in a part of the world that was relatively remote from the Anglo-Americans point of view meant there was simply no incentive to pay attention, so the issue didn't persist in the public memory or draw any political attention. The Anglo-Americans simply didn't care about what Stalin did for most of the 30s because none of it was dangerous to them or their interests yet. And by the time he did start doing anything to other small countries, their attention was already committed to the much more immediate threat posed by Hitler. They couldn't do anything more then token acknowledgement of Stalin's evil.

And then when the war developed so that the Anglo-Americans found themselves on the same side as the Soviet Union, it was more militarily expedient to forget about what little was remembered then to harp upon it.

 

[Genrexx]

... I think that mostly his foreign policy regarding the Soviet Union resulted of naiveté and overall ignorance of the repression and horrors implemented by the Stalinist regime.

1. FDR wasn't naive at all. Soviets did 90% of the fighting, suffering 10 Million military casualties and inflicting 5 Million on Nazis. US had only 300,000 military deaths in Europe and Asia.

The Soviets won the war; the US won the peace.

2 FDR wanted Soviets to attack Japanese Army in Manchuria, to prevent reinforcements to Japan Home Islands if US and Commonwealth invaded Japan itself. Nobody knew if Atomic bomb would work; or if it would force surrender.

3 There was no way to keep the Soviets from occupying Eastern Europe and East Germany - by the summer of 1944, US and UK had barely broken out of Normandy, while Soviets had taken half of Poland, Romania and Bulgaria.

4. US was already war weary.

 

[Marc Pasquin]

If its only peronnal knowledge, no change. If it becomes public knowledge, the USSR is presented as co-belligerent, better to work with then shung them, devil-you-know sort of thing with little actual differences in policies.

 

[Anarch King of Dipsodes]

While some people (usually of the "the free market would have ended the Great Depression" variety) claim that FDR held pro-communist views, I think that mostly his foreign policy regarding the Soviet Union resulted of naiveté and overall ignorance of the repression and horrors implemented by the Stalinist regime.

Of course everyone knew that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship, but no one knew the horrors and crimes that were occurring. So, what would be FDR's foreign policy if Stalin's most heinous crimes were known and well documented by 1940, for whatever reason?

1) It is very hard for people in normal societies to grasp what is happening in totalitarian dictatorships. To this day, there are devotees of Stalin. Even though Stalin's crimes have been publicized in Russia, there are Russians who still say "He made our country strong!" For that matter, there were people who simply could not accept the reality of the Nazi mass murders till after the war, when Nazi Germany was crushed and the evidence was in the hands of the Allies. So - even if the true nature of the USSR was clearly published - the regime would still exist. Many on the Left would still doubt or dismiss it, and many others would simply fail to "get it". They would unconsciously accept the superficial normality of Soviet life.

2) Unless the revelations about Soviet crimes were personal to FDR, they would affect the foreign policies of many countries, and indeed the political climate of the whole world.

3) When did the revelation occur? Before 1940? During the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact? After BARBAROSSA started? That makes a difference.

 

[Ingsoc]

"If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons"

This was very much the opinion in the West at the time. It wasn't that people somehow 'forgot' about the famines and show trials, it was that the USSR wasn't an existential threat and Hitler was.

The enemy of my enemy, and all that.