EIGHT DAYS AT YALTA

HOW CHURCHILL, ROOSEVELT AND STALIN SHAPED THE POSTWAR WORLD

DIANA PRESTON

Picador, 368pp, £25

When Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met at Yalta in February 1945 Nazi Germany was still not vanquished and the Allies faced a fanatical opponent in the Far East. The purpose of the conference was to determine the post-war settlement.

‘“Yalta”, like “Munich”, has become a synonym for the cynical betrayal of the weak by the strong,’ Rodric Braithwaite wrote in the

Spectator. ‘It’s an oft-told, welldocumented and controversial story. Diana Preston retells it fluently, perceptively and with meticulous scholarship. Her judgements are admirably sensible.’

The conventional view has been that Britain and America ‘sold out’ Eastern Europe to the Communists, but Diana Preston’s ‘lively and nuanced account’, Victor Sebestyen wrote in the Sunday Times, offers ‘a stronger defence for Roosevelt and Churchill’. ‘As Preston explains, all three, broadly, got what they wanted,’ he continued. Poland was a casualty, but the Russians were already in occupation and ‘the question the critics have always failed to answer is how they could have got a better deal, short of war with the Russians’.

‘Preston’s book is shrewd on the main personalities,’ Sebestyen noted, ‘and goes beyond the horse-trading of three old men’ to describe other aspects of the conference. ‘And every bed had bed bugs, just as every room had Beria bugs,’ David Aaronovitch added in the Times.

Had Churchill and Roosevelt been naive, as their critics say? Rather the opposite, says Preston. In delaying D-day, Sebestyen wrote, they made ‘a simple calculation: more dead Russians meant fewer dead Americans and Britons’.

As for Britain’s perceived betrayal of Poland, ‘There is a wider lesson,’ Braithwaite concluded. ‘Great powers should not offer or imply guarantees unless they are sure they have both the will and the means to honour them.’