Richard Overy
A Curious Correspondence
My Dear Mr Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D Roosevelt and Joseph V Stalin
By Susan Butler (ed), Foreward by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Yale University Press 361pp £17.50 order from our bookshop
Neither Stalin nor Roosevelt could have had any idea early in 1941 that they would become distant pen pals by the year’s end. Eventually they wrote more than three hundred messages between them, the fruit of a collaboration forged from the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor almost six months later which made the two leaders into involuntary allies.
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