At first Russia scarcely seemed to notice Winston Churchill's historic challenge to Soviet expansion. Then suddenly, eight days later, the Moscow radio blared forth. Joseph Stalin, in an interview with Pravda, made one of the bitterest peace time attacks by one statesman upon another.
Though Churchill was the target, the words hit all the West. Stalin knew that the Churchill speech, even though it was far too strong for many, would crystallize confused public opinion in the democracies.
In his counterattack Stalin had two purposes: 1) to play upon every nation's dread of war; and 2) to promote the Soviet hierarchy's current theme song to the Russians: that they must work all the harder to meet the renewed threat of capitalistic encirclement. He said that Churchill had sounded "a call to war with the Soviet Union," and bitterly pointed out that this "firebrand" had "raised the alarm and organized" the 1918-20 Allied invasion of the fledgling Soviet state, "with the aim of turning back the wheel of history." But "history turned out to be stronger than Churchill's intervention," and his "quixotic antics" had resulted in "complete defeat." If he tried it again, said Stalin, he would be beaten again.
"New Slavery." As an undoubted authority, Stalin linked Churchill with dictatorship. The war, he rumbled, had not been fought "for the sake of exchanging the lordship of Hitler for the lordship of Churchill. He conjured up a dire future for those who (like himself) could not speak English: Churchill, with his "racial theory" that "only nations speaking the English language are . . . called upon to decide the destinies of the entire world" (a very free Russian interpretation of Churchill), was as bad as Hitler with his theories of German supremacy. ". . . Nations not speaking English," Stalin discovered, "make up an enormous majority of the world's population [and] will not consent to go into a new slavery."
In the best backhanded Soviet fashion, Stalin gave Russians their first news of the offer Ernie Bevin announced Feb. 21: to turn the 20-year Anglo-Russian friendship pact into a 50-year treaty. Stalin said that Churchill's warmongering speech made the present pact "an empty scrap of paper." He implied that he no longer considered it valid himself: "Problems of the duration of a treaty have no sense if one of the parties violates the treaty. . . ."
"Shameless Libel." To Churchill's charge that Russia dominated her neighbors, Stalin had the unreassuring answer that Soviet security required neighboring governments to be "loyal." In any case, said Stalin, Churchill "rudely and shamelessly libels not only Moscow" but her neighbors, in making such a statement. Germany had been able to overrun all these countries while they were "inimical to the Soviet Union." Russia wanted to protect them and herself by bringing them into her own safe sphere, and "how can one, without having lost one's reason, qualify these peaceful aspirations . . . as 'expansionist tendencies?'"