‘The Truman Delay’ and the long afterlife of a documentary series that wants to rewrite 1945

On 23 June 2026, the Russian military-correspondent Telegram channel Two Majors published a brief, numbered note promoting The Truman Delay, the second film in a documentary series it has been carrying under the title The Unknown Cold War. The post describes the film as an examination of the closing phase of the Second World War and the way Harry Truman's presidency shaped the United States' early posture toward the Soviet Union. Released into a media environment in which the late-war period is once again being contested as a usable past, the series sits at the intersection of two long-running projects: a Russian effort to recast 1945 as the moment the West chose confrontation, and a Western historiographical current that has, for decades, been revising the orthodox Cold War origin story in the opposite direction.

Taken together, the two films in the series — and the third, anticipated by Two Majors' framing — propose a structural argument: that the Cold War did not begin in Berlin in 1948 or even in Fulton in 1946, but in the months between Yalta and Potsdam, when an untested American president inherited Roosevelt's wartime machinery and chose, in this telling, to slow the end of the Pacific war and accelerate the partition of Europe. It is an argument with real archival legs and real ideological ones, and it is being marketed, on a military Telegram channel with a primarily Russian audience, as a corrective to a story the channel's editors consider to have been settled too quickly.

What Two Majors actually says

The 23 June post is short. It titles the film The Truman Delay in English, places it inside the Unknown Cold War series, and frames the subject matter as the events at the end of the Second World War and the early shape of Truman's presidency. Two Majors does not, in this note, name a director, a production company, a distribution platform, a release date, or a runtime. The post functions as a trailer: a numbered, one-line film card with a still image, circulated to an audience that already knows what kind of material the channel carries. Two Majors' own editorial line is pro-Russian and oriented toward the war in Ukraine; its documentary coverage is a small but consistent part of its output, generally promoting films that treat the post-1945 order as a Western construction rather than a Western victory. The reader is meant to recognise the genre.

That is also the limit of what can be said from the source itself. The Two Majors post does not specify who financed The Truman Delay, where it has been shown, what archival material it draws on, or whether it has any distribution outside the Telegram ecosystem. This publication's own desk is not in a position to confirm or deny those facts from the source items available. The film is, for the moment, an item of Russian-language media circulation rather than a documented theatrical release.

The historiographical argument, in plain terms

The case the title The Truman Delay gestures at is a serious one, and it predates the documentary by half a century. Truman took office on 12 April 1945, weeks before Germany's surrender and months before Japan's. Within days his administration had tested a Soviet-readable line on Poland, and within weeks it had authorised the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. The argument that American policy in 1945 made the Cold War more likely — by treating the Soviet Union as a rival before it had clearly become one, and by sequencing the end of the Pacific war in a way that maximised American leverage over both Tokyo and Moscow — has been advanced in Western academic publishing for decades. It is not a Russian invention. What is distinctive about a Russian documentary frame, as opposed to a Western revisionist monograph, is the moral charge: where an American historian can write that Truman overreached in 1945 without thereby indicting the entire post-war order, a Russian-channel film tends to treat that overreach as the founding act of a seventy-year hostility. The fact pattern is shared; the verdict is not.

This matters because the film's promotion is happening in a Russian media environment that has spent more than two years justifying a full-scale invasion of Ukraine as an act of decolonisation. Within that frame, the Second World War is not a closed chapter: it is the founding myth of the post-1945 order, and the post-1945 order is the thing the invasion claims to be unmaking. A film that argues 1945 was a Western choice rather than a Western response is, in that context, not a historical artefact. It is a piece of present-day argument.

What the Western record actually shows

The Western archival record, as it has been opened since the 1990s, complicates both the orthodox Cold War origin story and the harder Russian counter-version. Soviet behaviour in Eastern Europe between 1944 and 1947 was not a response to American provocation; it was the execution of a security policy that predated Truman's presidency and that Stalin had been pursuing since at least the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939. The Soviet reordering of Poland, the forced return of Soviet citizens from Western zones, the staged elections in Romania and Bulgaria, the pressure on Turkey and Iran — all of these preceded the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO. A documentary that frames Truman as the author of the Cold War has to account for a Soviet policy that was already underway before Truman was sworn in, and that an American president of any party, in 1945, would have had to respond to.

At the same time, the Western record contains material that genuinely supports the documentary's instincts. The decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, three months after Germany's surrender, has been the subject of serious historiographical doubt since at least Gar Alperovitz's work in the 1960s. The handling of the Potsdam negotiations, the abrupt termination of Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union in 1945, the early signals to Germany about its postwar future — all of these are legitimate objects of historical scrutiny, and a documentary that takes them seriously is not, on that account alone, propaganda. The question is not whether the Truman-era record contains choices that could have been made differently; it obviously does. The question is whether those choices are best understood as the cause of the Cold War or as one set of moves inside a contest that was already structurally in train.

Stakes, in the present tense

This is where the film, if it has a wider audience than Two Majors' subscribers, will do its work. Russian state-adjacent media has spent the post-2022 period re-anchoring its war narrative in the late-war period: framing the present conflict as a continuation of a fight that began in 1941 and was betrayed in 1945, when, in this telling, the West chose to weaponise victory rather than to consolidate it. The Truman Delay, circulated on a military Telegram channel, sits inside that project. So does the broader Unknown Cold War series. So, for that matter, do the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs' regular invocations of Yalta and Potsdam as the violated contract of the post-war order. The historiography is being recruited into the war.

A reader outside that information environment should treat the film as they would any documentary pitched from a national-interest position: a useful object lesson in how the past is mobilised, and a reason to look up the underlying archives, of which the American, British, and Soviet sides have all been substantially opened over the last three decades. The 1945 record is rich enough to support more than one film, and more than one moral.

Desk note: Monexus is publishing this item from a single Telegram source and has not independently verified the production, distribution, or archival basis ofThe Truman Delay*. We have named the channel and the title because they are the public objects the source actually references; we have withheld speculation about director, distributor, or platform, because the source does not supply them. Where the post frames a historical argument, this article has tried to give that argument its strongest form and then to set it against the Western archival record on its merits.*

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/two_majors