This article presents and examines new evidence from the Russian archives on the Truman-Molotov talks of April 1945. This new evidence undercuts the conventional story that this was a rough and tough meeting that led to a significant deterioration of Sovier-American relations. The turn to Cold War came much later, and it was only in that context that the Molotov-Truman encounter came to be looked upon as a particularly negative event. That retrospective view fed into postwar memoirs and then into the historiography, thereby creating one of the mythical, emblematic events of the early Cold War.