World War II Behind Closed Doors (54 page)

Stalin, in what must surely have been, for him, a speech laced through with irony, retorted: ‘The Poles for many years have not liked Russia because Russia took part in three partitions of Poland. But the advance of the Soviet Army and the liberation of Poland from Hitler has completely changed that. The old resentment has completely disappeared…my impression is that the Polish people consider this a great historic holiday’. The idea that the former members of the Home Army, for example, were currently being
treated to a ‘great historic holiday’ can only have been a black joke. Churchill, who, as we have seen, had admitted to Anders a few months before that he knew just how little current Soviet actions in Poland resembled a ‘historic holiday’, made no attempt to correct Stalin's calumny.

Stalin did, however, say that he agreed that the ‘Polish government must be democratically elected. It is much better to have a government based on free elections’. But the final ‘compromise’ the three leaders came to on Poland so heavily weighted events in Soviet favour as to make this unlikely in the extreme. All that was agreed was that the ‘ambassadors of the three powers in Warsaw’ be charged with the ‘responsibility of observing and reporting to their respective governments on the carrying out of the pledge in regard to free and unfettered elections’.

As regards the immediate composition of the Lublin government, again the Soviets won the day. The Western Allies now only requested that this group be ‘reorganized’ to include ‘democratic’ Polish leaders from abroad and within Poland. But it was the Soviets who would convene meetings with the foreign ministers of the three powers in Moscow to coordinate this.

Only the most inveterate optimist could have imagined that this weak formula could produce the desired result – a free and democratic Poland. ‘Those of us who worked and lived in Moscow’, says Hugh Lunghi, ‘were astounded that a stronger declaration shouldn't have been made, because we knew that there was not a chance in hell that Stalin would allow free elections in those countries when he didn't allow them in the Soviet Union’. Lunghi's depressing judgement was shared at the time by Lord Moran, who believed at Yalta that the Americans were ‘profoundly ignorant’ of ‘the Polish problem’
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and he couldn't understand why Roosevelt thought he could ‘live at peace with them [the Soviets]’. Moran believed that ‘it was plain at Moscow, last October, that Stalin means to make Poland a Cossack outpost of Russia, and I am sure he has not altered his intention here’.
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But Moran was mistaken. The American President was not ‘profoundly ignorant’ about Poland – he just didn't care as much
about the Polish question as he did about some other key issues. Roosevelt, of course, paid lip service to the idea that the elections in Poland had to be be free and open. ‘I want this election in Poland to be the first one beyond question’, he said to Stalin at Yalta. ‘It should be like Caesar's wife. I did not know her but they say she was pure’.
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Stalin, with characteristic caustic wit, replied: ‘They said that about her, but in fact she had her sins’.

However, Roosevelt privately acknowledged that the deal reached on Poland was far from perfect. When Admiral Leahy told him that ‘this is so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without even technically breaking it’, Roosevelt replied: ‘I know, Bill, but it is the best I can do for Poland at this time’.
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Which was a classic Roosevelt remark – true only so far as it went. The agreement was only ‘the best’ he ‘could do’ because of the low level of priority he gave to the issue.

What was important for Roosevelt was that a workable accommodation was reached with Stalin that augured well for the general post-war future of the world. And although his fellow American, the merchant marine officer Jim Risk, who had spent nearly nine months in the north of the Soviet Union, had formed the opinion that Stalin was as bad as Hitler, this was a view Roosevelt did not share. Indeed, just days before the Yalta Conference he even remarked to Richard Law, a British diplomat: ‘There were many varieties of Communism, and not all of them were necessarily harmful’.
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As Lord Moran put it, ‘I don't think he [Roosevelt] has ever grasped that Russia is a Police State…’.
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For the hard-headed Admiral Leahy, however, the consequences of Yalta were clear the day the conference ended, 11 February 1945. The decisions taken there would ‘make Russia the dominant power in Europe, which in itself carries a certainty of future international disagreements and the prospects of another war’.
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But by the end of the conference, the leaders of the Western Allies and many of their key advisers were clearly putting their faith ever more in the individual character of Stalin. ‘I have never known the Russians so easy and accomodating’, wrote Cadogan on 11 February, ‘In particular, Joe has been extremely good. He
is
[Cadogan's own emphasis] a great man, and shows up very impressively against the background of the other two ageing statesmen’.
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For the most part the Western Allies were pleased with what had been accomplished at the Yalta Conference. As well as agreement on Poland's new borders (albeit without the consent of the Polish people themselves or the Polish government in exile) and a promise from Stalin that there would be ‘democratic’ elections shortly in Poland, the demarcation zones for occupied Germany had been fixed – with the French being granted an area of occupation alongside the British, Americans and Soviets. In addition, Stalin had once again voiced his commitment to the United Nations and agreed to come into the war against Japan once Germany was defeated. And in the immediate aftermath of Yalta there was an increased belief amongst many in power in the West that Stalin could be relied upon to fulfil his promises. In large part, as we have seen, that was to do with his behaviour during the conference. Churchill remarked that what had impressed him was that Stalin listened carefully to counter-arguments and was then prepared to change his mind. And there was other evidence of a more practical nature that could be used to demonstrate Stalin's desire to reach an accommodation with the West – his obvious intention not to interfere in the British action in Greece, for example. But above all it was the impact of his personality that was crucial in the optimism that prevailed straight after Yalta.

There was, at least in public, a sense that the ideological gap between the West and the Soviet Union was closing, with new apparent respect on both sides. On the first day of the conference Churchill had said he felt that ‘the three nations represented here were moving toward the same goal [democratic government] by different methods’. And just as Churchill, for example, in spirited form at the banquet on the first night of the talks, proposed a toast to the ‘Proletarian masses of the world’, so Stalin at the last feast of the conference remarked that Churchill was the ‘bravest governmental figure in the world. Due in large measure to Mr Churchill's courage and staunchness, England, when she stood alone, had divided the might of Hitlerite Germany at a time when
the rest of Europe was falling flat on its face before Hitler’. Stalin then added that ‘he knew of few examples in history where the courage of one man had been so important to the future history of the world. He drank a toast to Mr Churchill, his fighting friend and a brave man’.

Could the Western powers have bargained differently – perhaps, as it turned out, more effectively – at Yalta? The answer, with hindsight, is yes, almost certainly
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It is notable, for example, that the Americans never used their considerable economic power to try to pressurize the Soviets to be more accommodating. The Soviets wanted a $6 billion line of credit in order to buy American equipment after the war, as well as an agreement on the amount of reparation they could take from Germany to pay for the conflict. Neither of these issues was discussed at Yalta, not least because most people involved thought that there would be a formal peace conference at the end of the war to resolve all the key issues once and for all. But such a conference would never take place. And a little over two months after Yalta, Roosevelt was dead.

6
THE IRON
CURTAIN

THE COLLAPSE OF YALTA

The flawed agreement at Yalta was spun enthusiastically. In February, in the immediate aftermath of the conference, both the British and the Americans talked up what had been achieved in the Crimea.

Churchill informed the War Cabinet that he was quite sure Stalin ‘meant well to the world and to Poland’, and that ‘Premier Stalin had been sincere’.
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And on 23 February he told ministers that ‘Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don't think I'm wrong about Stalin’.
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Hugh Dalton, present at the meeting, also recorded in his diary: ‘The PM spoke very warmly of Stalin. He was sure – and Sir Charles Portal had said the same thing to me at the De La Rue dinner last Wednesday – that, as long as Stalin lasted, Anglo-Russian friendship could be maintained. Who would succeed him one didn't know. (Portal had said, “Perhaps Molotov He's pretty wooden and he stammers and a stammer in Russian is not a pretty sound”.)’ In the House of Commons on 27 February Churchill continued to put the best gloss he could on the conference, and said he believed that ‘Marshal Stalin and the Soviet leaders wish to live in honourable friendship and equality with the Western democracies. I feel also that their word is their bond’.
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Roosevelt's administration went further – much further. In Washington, the President was preceded home by James Byrnes, head of the war mobilization board, who announced not only that agreement had been reached at Yalta about the United Nations,
but that as a result of the conference ‘spheres of influence’ had been eliminated in Europe, and ‘the three great powers are going to preserve order [in Poland] until the provisional government is established and elections held’.
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Roosevelt, who explicitly congratulated Byrnes on this misleading press conference, clearly wanted the American public to focus on what he believed was the big achievement of Yalta – the agreement over the foundation and organization of the United Nations. The President, well aware that he was a sick man, wanted the UN to be central to his legacy. He would show the world that he had taken the internationalist ideals of Woodrow Wilson, as expressed in the failed League of Nations in the wake of the First World War, and – this time – had made them work.

The message, first proselytized by Byrnes, a close associate of Roosevelt, that the Big Three had effectively agreed on a new world order at Yalta was reinforced by Roosevelt himself when he talked to a joint session of Congress in Washington on 1 March. The decisions reached at Yalta about the United Nations, said Roosevelt, ‘ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries – and have always failed’.
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The American press enthusiastically embraced this selective version of Yalta. Their response was scarcely surprising, since Roosevelt had omitted to mention those bits of the Yalta agreement that didn't fit the romantic ideal he was selling (like the fact that he had agreed that the Soviet Union would have more than one vote in the General Assembly, and that the Soviets could hold the promised ‘elections’ in Poland unhindered by effective Western supervision). This was Roosevelt's final attempt to square the circle of his problematic relationship with Stalin with the principles of the Atlantic Charter. Yes, the Americans may have had to give way on the question of Poland's border in the East, but, he implied, freedom was on the way for the rest of Europe.

Of course, Roosevelt could point to the letter of the agreement in support of this conclusion. Had not Stalin, for example,
signed up to ‘free’ elections in Poland? But Roosevelt must have known from the behaviour of Stalin and Molotov at Yalta – from their supposed inability to get hold of the Lublin Poles on the telephone to their refusal to let any future elections be properly monitored – that it was unlikely that Poland would be ‘free’. Indeed, since Roosevelt had explicitly agreed that the post-war government of Poland would be ‘friendly’ to the Soviets, any future Polish administration was already circumscribed. Yet despite all this, Roosevelt hyped up an agreement that he himself had admitted privately was only ‘the best he could get’.

Roosevelt's gloss on the Yalta agreement was bound to antagonize Stalin. The Soviet leader was the least ‘Wilsonian’ figure imaginable. He didn't believe in fine words; he believed in hard, practical reality. What mattered to him was where Soviet borders were and the extent to which neighbouring countries were amenable. A study of Soviet comment on Yalta confirms this analysis. Straight after the conference the front page of
Voina i rabochii klass
(War and the Working Class) carried an article asserting that ‘the stern and emphatic language of the Crimean decision is as far from the pompous and diffuse language of Wilson's fourteen points… as heaven is from earth’.
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And the response of
Pravda
to Byrnes's spin on Yalta was an article on 17 February that emphasized that the word ‘democracy’ meant different things to different people, and each country could now exercise ‘choice’ over which version it preferred.
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