The Yalta strategies
No two political leaders loom larger over the 20th century than U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill. With his “New Deal” policies, FDR got the United States through the worst of the Great Depression and then led it out of isolation into the Second World War following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941; while Churchill courageously guided Britain and the allies through the worst of the war and on to victory against Nazi Germany in 1945.
Yet, even the greatest of statesmen can be guilty of employing dubious strategy. Such was the case 70 years ago. From Feb. 4 to 11, 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill spent a week in discussions about the post-war world with their erstwhile ally Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at Yalta, a resort in Crimea on the Black Sea where Czar Nicholas II and his family once frolicked.
Ever since then, the Yalta conference has been remembered as an abject failure. According to this line of thinking, it was a moment in history when FDR and Churchill badly caved in to Stalin — almost as bad as the way Neville Chamberlain and other Western leaders were hoodwinked by Hitler at Munich in 1938 — and sold out Poland and other eastern European countries to nearly 50 years of Soviet communist domination. Indeed, in Polish, the word pronounced “Yowta,” or Yalta, is a term that is used to describe “betrayal” and “abandonment.”
Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt, who was ailing, wanted to travel to Yalta, though Stalin insisted. A few weeks before the conference, Churchill remarked to Harry Hopkins, FDR’s adviser, that “we could not have found a worse place for a meeting if we had spent 10 years looking for it.”
Stalin and his secret police were ready for their guests. Surveillance equipment was installed in the palaces in and around Yalta where the American and British delegations were staying. Stalin’s men also used microphones that could reach 50 to 100 metres to listen to private conversations between FDR and Churchill while they were chatting outside. And Soviet spies in Britain and the U.S. — this almost certainly included Alger Hiss, a high-ranking American state department official who attended the conference — had supplied Stalin with lots of information about FDR and Churchill’s strategies and positions.
Yalta was the last time the Big Three met to discuss the war; within two months FDR had died and less than a month after that the war in Europe would finally end. Roosevelt’s poor health did not cloud his ability, as was later insinuated, though he did come to Yalta highly idealistic and prepared to give Stalin the benefit of the doubt.
FDR thought he could control Stalin, which is questionable in retrospect. And he believed, wrongly as it turned out, that Stalin would actually follow through on his commitments to hold free elections in Poland and other eastern states within the agreed Soviet sphere of influence — as was outlined in the joint statement at the end of the conference.
FDR’s strategy was partly based on the fact that in February 1945 the war in Europe was not over and several more months of intense fighting would be needed. With the atomic bomb still not a sure thing (it would not be successfully tested until mid-- July) American military officials pressured Roosevelt to enlist Stalin and the Red Army’s assistance to defeat the Japanese. (Stalin only declared war on Japan on Aug. 8, two days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the day before the attack on Nagasaki). Meanwhile, the mighty Red Army was moving its way closer to Berlin.
Roosevelt thus concluded that he required Stalin’s cooperation to win the war against Japan as well as to ensure the success of the planned United Nations, another key issue discussed at Yalta. Stalin was happy to go along with the UN and negotiated for two additional seats for Ukraine and Belarus, claiming they were independ- ent states. Everyone knew, of course, that was untrue.
Churchill, for his part, was troubled about the decline of British power and influence and the future of the empire. History subsequently showed that his concerns were legitimate, and that he and Britain had to come to terms with a world controlled by two new superpowers. Though Churchill initially championed Polish independence, he had no choice but to acquiesce to Stalin’s demands. The Soviet dictator would not “agree to the existence in Poland of a government hostile to it,” as he later made clear in a letter to Churchill and FDR’s successor, Harry Truman. Following the Yalta conference, Churchill had convinced himself that he had done well. “Poor Neville believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong,” Churchill commented on his return to London. “But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.” He was deluding himself and soon conceded that.
According to research conducted in former Soviet archives by Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy, the author of Yalta: The Price of Peace (2010), Stalin and his officials were keen at Yalta to cement a peaceful co-existence with the West for at least two decades — though on their own terms. Part of that thinking was merely pragmatic; Stalin figured the Soviet Union required about 20 years to recover from the devastation of the war before continuing with the struggle for a world communist revolution. At the same time, Plokhy notes, “the new archival findings leave no doubt that the Soviets were determined to establish control over their western neighbours, with Poland as the keystone in the arch of their security structure.” This was guaranteed by further agreements made at the Potsdam conference a few months later.
The Declaration on the Liberation of Europe, with its promises of free elections issued at the end of the Yalta conference, was greeted with self-congratulatory back slapping and positive comments in the press. It is fair to say that seven decades ago FDR and Churchill did have the best of intentions, yet were juggling a lot of conflicting objectives.
Perhaps we judge their failure and submission to the Soviet wishes too harshly. In his biography of FDR, Conrad Black argues that at Yalta, “the United States and its leader achieved virtually everything they sought. If the agreement had been adhered to, it would have been a triumph of diplomacy.” For in the final analysis, it was Stalin, a ruthless despot, who truly betrayed the “lost peace” of Yalta and set in motion the Cold War tension and turmoil that followed.
Roosevelt thought he could control Stalin, and he was wrong. Churchill worried that Britain was fading, and he was right