First Meet­ing, Moscow 1942: WSC's inter­preter Major Arthur Birse, Churchill, U.S. envoy Averell Har­ri­man, Stalin, and Soviet For­eign Min­is­ter Vyach­eslav M. Molotov.

A fact checker from a major mag­a­zine wrote ask­ing if Churchill ever declared, “Stalin never broke his word to me.” The short answer is yes. The long answer shows how care­ful we should be when quot­ing Churchill.

The orig­i­nal source of this quote is the jour­nal­ist C.L. Sulzberger (1912-1993), in his 1970 book, Last of the Giants, page 304. Here Sulzberger reports his “five hours with old Win­ston Churchill” at Chartwell on 10 July 1956.

Churchill, wrote Sulzberger, thought Stalin “a great man, above all com­pared to Khr­uschev and Bul­ganin,” and quoted Churchill as follows:

Stalin never broke his word to me. We agreed on the Balkans. I said he could have Ruma­nia and Bul­garia; he said we could have Greece (of course, only in our sphere, you know). He signed a slip of paper. And he never broke his word. We saved Greece that way. When we went in in 1944 Stalin didn’t inter­fere. You Amer­i­cans didn’t help, you know.

Churchill was refer­ring to the much mis­rep­re­sented “naughty paper,” the “per­cent­ages agree­ment” with Stalin in their Moscow talks (Tol­stoy Con­fer­ence,  9-19 Octo­ber 1944)—which Stalin did honor. The Sovi­ets made no move to inter­fere when Churchill flew to Athens to bro­ker a truce between com­mu­nist and nation­al­ist insur­gents, though Stalin was soon med­dling in Greece in 1948.

Sulzberger was a reli­able reporter, so the source appears valid. As a  gauge of Churchill’s atti­tude toward Stalin, it is more problematic.

By 1956 Churchill was an aged 81, out of power and still smart­ing over his fail­ure to achieve a sum­mit con­fer­ence with the Rus­sians (which Eisen­hower agreed to almost imme­di­ately after Churchill left office, say­ing pri­vately, that he feared “Win­ston might give away the store.”) Churchill had long argued for a three-power meet­ing and “set­tle­ment” with the Rus­sians, based on the brand of per­sonal diplo­macy he’d prac­ticed with Stalin dur­ing World War II.

Cyrus Leo Sulzberger in 1968. (Wikipedia Commons)

After the Yalta Con­fer­ence in Feb­ru­ary 1945, Churchill said he thought he could trust Stalin. He prob­a­bly was refer­ring to Stalin’s Yalta promise to allow free elec­tions in Poland. As early as March 1945 he had  to admit, in cor­re­spon­dence with Roo­sevelt, that he’d been wrong. Even in the imme­di­ate after­math of Yalta, on 23 Feb­ru­ary 1945, he won­dered, after Germany’s defeat, “what will lie between the white snows of Rus­sia and the white cliffs of Dover?” (John Colville, Fringes of Power, 563). Speak­ing at the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy (3 March 1949) Churchill pre­dicted the fall of com­mu­nism, fueled by “a spark com­ing from God knows where and in a moment the whole struc­ture of lies and oppres­sion is on trial for its life.”

It is fair to say that Churchill believed Stalin had not bro­ken his word through 1944. To some extent his 1956 remark to Sulzberger was meant to con­trast what Churchill saw as the giant fig­ure of Stalin. But trust in Stalin was cer­tainly not some­thing Churchill expressed con­sis­tently after the war. In the end, I doubt that he had very much.