These views played a first decisive role in making western politicians negatively inclined to the new Russian government. The United States declined to recognize the Soviet state.
During the interwar years, Russia was treated as a leper by the west due to its revolutionary and radical new ideology. It was also because America took the Soviet ‘threat’ of world revolution very seriously. An understanding of the real goals of the October Revolution and the resulting communist government was not achieved by any of the western powers. The Bolsheviks themselves, however, did not seem to be interested in rapprochement either. To them, capitalist strongholds, especially the United States, were only temporary establishments which in due time would give way to communist revolution.
While Stalin tried to catch up with western industry during the 1930s and early 40s, the West saw its views of an aggressive Russia confirmed with the Stalinist purges, the German-Russian Non-Aggression pact of 1939 - a rather un-natural alliance, and the subsequent division of Poland.
To each of the "big three"; Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, it was clear already during the war that Soviet and western objectives for postwar Europe were quite different. An early indication of this is the Atlantic Charter of August 14th, 1941, which was signed by President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill during a highly secret meeting. The charter defined the objectives of the two strongest western powers for postwar Europe, which, with the demand for the right of self-determination for European countries, was bound to conflict with Stalin's policy at a later stage.
A first meeting between the "big three" was held at the conference of Tehran in November-December 1943. With the war still going on, none of the politicians was willing to risk a break over postwar problems before the conflict was actually won. Churchill, in this spirit, gave in to Stalin's demand for acceptance of Russian territory gained before the invasion of Russia by Hitler.
At the conference of Yalta in February 1945, clashes between Stalin and his Western Allies were to become more apparent. Mainly the question of Poland was an item of concern: Britain had entered the war with the objective to free Poland from Nazi rule and was not about to see Stalin take Hitler's place. Stalin, however, saw Poland as the corridor which had in the past been frequently used for attack upon his country and was planning for a Polish puppet-regime directed from Moscow. The Polish debate can be seen as a key indicator of slowly freezing relations - already in August 1944, Stalin had refused to aid the Warsaw uprising against German occupation, apparently only for the reason of later taking complete control. The final decision about Poland was thus postponed to a later conference; however, the USSR was entitled to be bordered by "friendly" governments after the war.
The understanding of the word "friendly" was to be quite diverse, yet at this point participants were glad to have bypassed a point that might have deteriorated east-west relations. Roosevelt was even enthusiastic that relations with the Soviet Union were improving. Some questions, such as the division of Germany into zones of occupation and the setting up of the U.N., even seemed to have been resolved successfully. At Yalta, the different parties were still very much in need of each other and did not want to risk a break in relations. That the facade was to be quite hard to keep up already showed at this point.
The last of the three big Allied conferences was held in Potsdam in the summer of 1945. With Germany defeated, everybody was now to focus on their (often opposing) postwar ambitions. Yet the Potsdam Conference did not turn out to symbolize a break between east and west. The Polish question seemed to be settled with a Polish border set and Stalin's promise for free elections. On the surface, issues were settled and more detailed agreements to be made by future conferences of the foreign ministers. In reality, however, the Allies were drifting apart. New US President Harry Truman, with the newly developed atomic bomb at his disposal, dictated the Potsdam meeting and stood for a dramatic change in US policy towards the Soviet Union. His direct demands and unwillingness to share the secret of the atomic bomb with the Russians did not help to foster relations with Stalin, whose view was that the American attitude towards the Soviet Union has perceptibly cooled once it became obvious that Germany was defeated and that it was as though the Americans were saying that the Russians were no longer needed.
This shows that the Grand Alliance was simply a ‘marriage of convenience’, as the two sides had not wanted to fight the war alone, but were at odds with each other over empire and had different postwar agendas. The two countries who had been allies during the war years were now heading for an entirely different war between themselves – the Cold War.
