The Diplomatic Front of the Great Patriotic War: the Contours of Post-war Europe in 1944

The paper analyzes three projects of the European post-war order. Two of them appeared during the work of the commission engaged in the preparation of the peace treaties and the post-war order, the head of which was M. Litvinov one of the most experienced Soviet diplomats and the ex-head of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs of the USSR. The author provides a systemic analysis of the Soviet diplomats' and foreign policy experts' suggestions. It was less important to assess how realistic these suggestions were. Much more important was to determine the basic ideas underlying Soviet diplomacy in 1944. These basic ideas represented the modus vivendi and the modus operendi, which essentially refutes the thesis about the simple return of the Soviet Union to the foreign policy of the Russian Empire, which is very popular in historiography. The USSR was re-designing its foreign policy as a superpower. Thus, it is much more interesting from a scientific point of view to explore the implementation of new commitments in the USSR foreign policy.