FDR Wasn't Naive About Stalin

Roosevelt and Stalin met only twice – in Tehran in November 1943 and in Yalta in February 1945. They met each time with the third of the Big Three, Winston Churchill. By the time they met at Yalta, all three were old and tired. Churchill, who had spent the 1930s in constant frustration, was seventy-one. Stalin at sixty-six had governed his country for seventeen draining years. Roosevelt, who had turned sixty-three the week before the Yalta meeting, had led his country through the worst economic depression and the worst foreign war in its history. Now they were together to lay the foundation for the peace to come. Roosevelt and Stalin had been corresponding since Hitler’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, an exchange that ran to more than 300 letters. It is a curiosity of scholarship that the full correspondence was never published during the Cold War.