Стр. 33 - V

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Author : S. Tikhvinsky
Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences
THE CORRESPONDENCE between the leaders of the
anti-Nazi coalition during the Great Patriotic War, which was
first published in our country upon the Foreign Ministry's
initiative almost 60 years ago, holds a special place in the
study of the diplomatic history of the war. It is a major
source recognized throughout the world as an authentic and
reliable collection of messages exchanged among Joseph
Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt (then Harry Truman) and Winston
Churchill on key issues of the joint conduct of the war and
the postwar settlement. Even at the height of the Cold War, the pickiest critics in the West could
find no fault with this work. I remember very well what a big event this publication was, as this
happened a long time before the relevant Anglo-American documents were declassified, and it
became a real breakthrough in world historiography. However, many years have passed since
then. The main archival wartime documents have become available to researchers; a huge amount
of memoirs and specialist literature have appeared, and the historical science has made great
progress in studying the political and diplomatic history of the war. All of this has laid the
groundwork for revisiting the famous correspondence for an in-depth re-reading thereof through
the prism of new historical knowledge. It is encouraging that this research was initiated by V.O.
Pechatnov, a Russian scholar, a prominent historian, an expert on the Americas, and head of a
department at the Moscow State Institute (University) of International Relations, who was sub-
sequently joined by his young co-author I.E. Magadeyev. The result was a two-volume work,
which is of considerable scholarly and practical interest, "Stalin's Correspondence with Roosevelt
and Churchill During the Great Patriotic War."
Its concept and structure are quite original. The already well-known texts of the messages are
harmoniously built into the authors' analytical commentary, which bears the principal research
load and in terms of volume far exceeds the texts of the messages as such. This makes it dras-
tically different from the previous editions of this correspondence, which were provided only
with brief, purely factual notes.
The work contains an extensive and substantial preface, which lays out not only its purposes and
goals but also its conceptual principles. Furthermore, the book is divided into issue-related
chronological chapters covering the main stages of Allied relations during the war years; each
of them opens with a wide-ranging overview of a given stage and its reflection in the corre-
spondence.
We believe that its biggest research value is that the authors have thoroughly reconstructed the
process of the writing of messages, which in all of the three capitals were the product of col-
lective efforts despite their personal form. This required a close textual analysis of thousands
Rereading Wartime Correspondence