Anglo-Soviet Agreement

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 12th of July 1941, two men sat down in Moscow to sign a document that would reshape the war in Europe. Sir Stafford Cripps, Britain's Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs, put their names to the Anglo-Soviet Agreement. It was a declaration of alliance between two countries that had spent years watching each other with deep suspicion. The agreement contained just two clauses, but those two clauses carried enormous weight. The first pledged that both governments would give each other assistance and support of all kinds in the war against Germany. The second was equally binding: neither country would negotiate or conclude any armistice or peace without the other's agreement. How two nations with such fraught recent history came to this moment, and what followed from it, is a story that cuts to the heart of how the Second World War was actually fought.

• 2. The Pact That Came Before

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  On the 23rd of August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression agreement between what many considered ideological enemies. A secret portion of that pact carved up Eastern Europe into separate spheres of influence for each power. Less than two weeks later, on the 1st of September 1939, Germany invaded Poland from the west. On the 17th of September, the USSR invaded Poland from the east. Britain declared war on Germany on the 3rd of September, placing London and Moscow on opposing sides of an expanding conflict. The Soviet Union declared itself neutral in the war between Britain and Germany, a neutrality that suited both the Kremlin and Berlin. That careful arrangement held for nearly two years, until June 1941 changed everything.

• 3. Barbarossa Breaks the Balance

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  On the 22nd of June 1941, Germany launched an attack along the entire length of its border with the Soviet Union, from the Baltic states down to Ukraine. Soviet forces were caught unprepared. The assault paralysed the Soviet command system, and German forces advanced rapidly into Soviet territory. The strategic logic that had underpinned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact collapsed overnight. Three weeks of difficult negotiations followed, shaped throughout by mutual suspicion between Britain and the Soviet Union. Before concluding any agreement, Britain consulted with the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. That diplomatic groundwork mattered, because this would not be a quick or easy partnership. Winston Churchill summed up the new reality plainly after the signing: "It is of course an alliance and the Russian people are now our allies."

• 4. What the Agreement Set in Motion

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  The Arctic convoys from Britain to the Soviet Union began the month after the agreement was signed, opening a vital supply line across treacherous northern waters. A joint Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran followed that same month, creating an additional supply route into the USSR through the south. In Iran, Reza Shah was removed from power. His successor, Crown Prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, signed a Tripartite Treaty Alliance with Britain and the Soviet Union in January 1942. That treaty committed Iran to aiding the Allied war effort in a non-military capacity. The Anglo-Soviet Agreement was itself broadened the following year by the Anglo-Soviet Treaty of 1942, which extended the political alliance to a planned duration of twenty years.

• 5. Allied Architecture

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  The two core principles of the Anglo-Soviet Agreement echoed commitments that were taking shape across the wider Allied coalition. Both the mutual assistance pledge and the renunciation of a separate peace mirrored the first two resolutions of the Declaration of St James's Palace, which Britain had signed with other Allied governments. Those same principles then flowed into the Declaration by United Nations, signed in January 1942. According to the historian Lynn Davis, the United States interpreted the Anglo-Soviet Agreement as signalling that the Soviet Union intended to support the postwar restoration of independence for Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. That reading would shape American diplomatic calculations as the war continued and its eventual settlement came into view.