Joseph Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt: Cold War Figures
Joseph Stalin
After establishing his brutal dictatorship, **Joseph Stalin** launched the USSR into industrialization, regardless of any social costs. Stalin practiced an erratic foreign policy. Since 1928, he prompted a leftist policy called “class against class,” which provoked a pitched battle with European social democracy, greatly facilitating Hitler’s rise to power. Some leaders of the Comintern even celebrated Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship, believing it proved that capitalism had reached its final stage and was ripe for collapse.
The error of this belief grew so great that Stalin finally swung toward a new foreign policy, realized in the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935. He now tried to approach the Western democracies to try to stem Nazi expansionism. **Litvinov** was the best representative of this new policy direction, which had its greatest example in the popular fronts in France and Spain.
The policy of appeasement, and its consequence, the Munich Pact, precipitated a radical shift in Soviet policy. Stalin had been thinking for quite a while about finding a compromise with Hitler. The dismissal of Litvinov and **Molotov’s** rise in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs marked the new direction that resulted in the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. The immediate consequence was that in September 1939, Hitler, having shared the influences in Eastern Europe with Stalin, launched the invasion of Poland. However, the clash between National Socialism and Soviet communism was merely postponed.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Although the International Economic Conference in London in 1933 refused U.S. support for an international monetary stabilization policy, opting for clear solutions to economic nationalism, **Franklin D. Roosevelt** was a man clearly concerned about international issues. In addition to launching the “good neighbor” policy with regard to Latin America, he reached stabilization agreements with Britain and France in 1936 and recognized the Soviet government, something all previous administrations had refused.
Isolationists in Congress led to the Neutrality Act of 1935. Although Roosevelt agreed, in 1937, he proposed that peace-loving nations should establish a “quarantine” of aggressor powers. Although apparently he only thought about the severance of diplomatic relations, the reaction at home was so great and fast that the president had to recant and return to a policy of strict neutrality.
From the outbreak of the conflict, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to take measures to increasingly support democracies, especially the United Kingdom when it stood alone against Hitler after the French defeat. The Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, with Churchill, and the signing of the Atlantic Charter in August 1941, are good examples of this attitude.
Finally, the bombing of Pearl Harbor precipitated the entry into the war of the major North American power and led Roosevelt to become the leader of the Allies. In January 1943, he pushed the idea of “unconditional surrender” of Germany as the only possible solution to the conflict.
Roosevelt, with the help of his Secretary of State **Cordell Hull**, personally led U.S. foreign policy. He reinforced the “special relationship” with Britain and sought to extend the Grand Alliance with the United Kingdom and the USSR after the victory, creating a collective security system based on the principles of the Atlantic Charter.
Ill and near death, he participated, among others, in the Yalta Conference in February 1945, which critics say was too sympathetic to the ambitions of Stalin.