This is John Bachelor, conversation with Professor Sean McMekan, his new book,

Stalin's War, a New History of World War II, the Strange Allies of World War II,

Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. Here Sean gives us an insight

as to how Roosevelt's thinking evolved over the course of the 1930s towards

Stalin whom he knew to be an aggressive and ruthless man.

And yet, because of the exigencies of the Second War, there were changes of approach to Stalin the dictator and here Sean describes

how it moved in 40 and 41 towards what we know to be Uncle Joe and the trio that defeated the Hitlerites.

Sean McMeekin for Stalin's war. More of this later.

Well Roosevelt's position had changed at least temporarily during the Soviet Finnish war.

Previously, he had been, generally speaking, rather friendly to the Soviet Union.

He'd even sacked an ambassador, William Bouitt, who had been a little bit too critical of Stalin's regime and

the sent his famous kind of apologist Joseph Davies who helped to whitewash the great terror.

The Finnish war had jolted Roosevelt somewhat and he had actually denounced it as aggression and it even declared what he called a moral embargo on US strategic imports to the Soviet Union at the time.

And at the time we shouldn't forget the war in

Poland was effectively over if you had droll the gair or the the phony war as we

called in English with the six creek as a German is called in the west where not much was

happening and so at the time Roosevelt was focused on Finland and had at

least for that brief period had kind of become somewhat hostile to the Soviets. And he's still

in that position in late 1940. However in early 1941 things begin to shift. It's not

entirely clear what changes Rose about thinking but beginning in January and February of

1941 he quietly begins to lift that moral embargo in the

Soviet Union.

...