cover image Caught Between Roosevelt & Stalin

Caught Between Roosevelt & Stalin

Dennis J. Dunn. University Press of Kentucky, $40 (368pp) ISBN 978-0-8131-2023-2

This revisionist, scholarly broadside focuses on President Franklin D. Roosevelt's policy toward the Soviet Union by examining the country's ambassadors to Moscow between 1933 and 1945. The descriptions of the ambassadors' personalities and ideologies are insightful portrayals of the upper-crust types who served as America's top diplomats in Moscow, and they personalize what can often be a dry topic. These descriptions are merely a backdrop for Dunn's main thesis, which he supports with documents from the recently opened Russian archives: FDR believed that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were converging--that is, both were moving away from the poles of capitalism and communism and toward a democratic socialism. This belief prevented him from seeing what an evil dictator Stalin was and crippled American policy vis-a-vis the U.S.S.R. The author's observation that Roosevelt was misguided about the Soviet Union holds water, but some of his claims about American-Soviet relations during the war--that the Soviets failed to appreciate the American presence, for example, or that ""the alliance with the Soviet Union undercut the Roosevelt administration's proclaimed goals in fighting the war""--are less persuasive. In his desire to criticize FDR's policies, the author underemphasizes the fact that ideological differences between the two countries had to be subsumed during the war in order to check the Nazi threat. 12 b&w photos. Foreign rights: Scott Meredith Agency; domestic rights: U.P. Kentucky. (Jan.)