Joking at the Summit

Lighthearted and even bawdy moments accompanied some of the most controversial decisions in the dubious peacemaking toward the end of World War II. Top-secret wartime papers made public this month by the British Foreign Office throw a new light on how Great Britain's Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin divided Europe during private talks in Moscow in October 1944.

Churchill was worried that the U.S. might be tempted to return Britain's crown colony of Hong Kong to China as a reward to the Chinese for their part in the struggle against Japan. Thus he wanted Stalin's support for the continuation of the British Empire. In return, as Churchill has written in his memoirs, he agreed to recognize the Soviet Union's sphere of dominant influence in Eastern Europe. What Churchill did not disclose in his memoirs was the earthy dialogue between him and Stalin while they decided the fate of tens of millions of people.

While dismissing Poland as "the most tiresome question," Churchill told Stalin: "At present each [Great Britain and the Soviet Union] had a game cock in his hand." When the translator explained the double meaning of Churchill's remark, Stalin retorted with a coarse Georgian sense of humor: "It is difficult to do without cocks."

Then they cracked Polish jokes. Churchill said: "The difficulty about the Poles was that they had unwise political leaders. When there were two Poles there was one quarrel." Stalin replied: "Where there was one Pole, he would begin to quarrel with himself through sheer boredom."

Conversations of the recent Soviet-American summit meetings will not be available to the public for years, if ever. Until then, one can only speculate about the kind of humor punctuating the conversations between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev.

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