World War II Behind Closed Doors (55 page)

This was a long way from Roosevelt's vision. In fact, the Soviets were speaking the language of ‘spheres of influence’, the very concept that Byrnes and Roosevelt had just said was now defunct. Stalin had consistently favoured the idea of ‘spheres of influence’ for the major powers in Europe. It was because of his commitment to this idea that he had raised the question of postwar borders and a ‘secret protocol’ at his initial meeting with Eden in December 1941. This was also why the Soviets had reacted with such alacrity to Churchill's ‘percentage’ approach in October 1944. Stalin understood the meaning of such meetings and thought they had much more value than the ‘pompous and diffuse
language’ not only of Wilson's Fourteen Points but also, by clear implication, of Roosevelt's United Nations.

Stalin was now receiving distinctly mixed messages about whether or not the West went along with his approach. He believed he had kept to his side of the bargain and showed that the concept of ‘spheres of influence’ was a two-way street – hadn't he allowed Churchill a free hand in Greece, where British troops had helped deny the Communist partisans power in December 1944? So where was the quid pro quo? Why was there this sudden talk of the end of ‘spheres of influence’ and ‘balances of power’ when the British action in Greece had clearly demonstrated Churchill's commitment to this practical reality?

Yes, Stalin had signed up to an agreement about ‘free’ elections in Poland, but, like the concept of ‘democracy’, there were, in his eyes, many ways of interpreting the word ‘free’. As far as the Soviets were concerned, their ‘elections’ in occupied eastern Poland in the autumn of 1939 had been ‘free’. Then there was the fact that Roosevelt – no matter what he said in public – had suggested privately at Tehran that he was not too concerned about the fate of Poland, apart from the practical matter of the reaction of Poles in the United States. In the light of all this it was perfectly possible – probably likely – that Stalin would not have predicted the extent to which both Roosevelt and Churchill emphasized Soviet commitment to a ‘free’ Poland on their return.

But it is a mistake to think that Stalin, at this stage, intended that all the eastern European states occupied by the Red Army should immediately somehow become mini-Soviet Unions. What he wanted was what he had wanted all along: ‘friendly’ countries along his border within an agreed Soviet ‘sphere of influence’. Admittedly, he defined ‘friendly’ in a way that precluded what the Western Allies would have called ‘democracy’. He wanted these states to guarantee that they would be close allies of the Soviet Union. He would carefully monitor their progress – and restrict political and other freedoms accordingly. These countries would most certainly not be ‘free’ in the way Churchill and Roosevelt wanted. But Stalin felt they need not become, in the immediate
post-war years, Communist. In May 1946, Stalin expressed his views on all this in clear terms to Polish Communists. ‘Your democracy is special’, he said. ‘You have no class of big capitalists. You have nationalized industry in 100 days, whilst the English have been struggling to do that for the past 100 years. Don't copy western democracy. Let them copy you. The democracy that you have established in Poland, in Yugoslavia and partly in Czechoslovakia is a democracy that is drawing you closer to socialism without the necessity of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat or the Soviet system. Lenin never said there was no path to socialism other than the dictatorship of the proletariat, he admitted that it was possible to arrive at the path to socialism using the foundations of the bourgeois democratic system such as Parliament’.
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However, Churchill, more than the other two members of the Big Three, faced a particular problem about selling the Yalta agreement on Poland. And that problem took physical form on 20 February, when the British Prime Minister came face to face with General Anders. The Polish commander had been outraged by the Yalta agreement, which he saw as a ‘mockery of the Atlantic Charter’, and wanted to confront the man who just six months earlier had made such emotional promises to him in the wake of Monte Cassino.

‘You are not satisfied with the Yalta agreement’, said Churchill with what must have been an attempt at deliberate understatement.

‘It is not enough to say that I am dissatisfied’, replied Anders. ‘I consider that a great calamity has occurred’.

Anders made it clear to Churchill that his distress at the Yalta agreement was not merely idealistic – it had a deeply practical dimension too. ‘Our soldiers fought for Poland’, he said, ‘fought for the freedom of their country. What can we, their commanders, tell them now? Soviet Russia, until 1941 in close alliance with Germany, now takes half our territory, and in the rest of it she wants to establish her power’.

Churchill became annoyed with Anders, remarking: ‘It is your own fault’. He said that, if the Poles had settled the eastern border earlier, ‘the whole matter would now have been different’. He
then added a remarkably hurtful remark, given the sacrifice made by the Poles in the British armed forces. ‘We have enough troops today. We do not need your help. You can take away your divisions. We shall do without them’.
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It is possible to see in this brief exchange not only Churchill's continuing frustration with the Poles, but also the extent to which he felt politically vulnerable because of Yalta. His reputation now rested partly on the way Stalin chose to operate in Poland and the other eastern European countries. In order to preserve intact his own wartime record, he had to hope Stalin would keep to his ‘promises’. Unfortunately for the British prime minister, this hope would shortly be destroyed by Soviet action in the territory they now occupied.

Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, met Anders and felt ‘most awfully sorry for him, he is a grand fellow and takes this whole matter terribly hard’.
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Anders had told him that: ‘After having been a prisoner, and seeing how Russians could treat Poles, he considered that he was in a better position to judge what Russians were like than the President or PM…. When in a Russian prison he was in the depth of gloom but he did then always have hope. Now he could see no hope anywhere. Personally his wife and children were in Poland and he could never see them again, that was bad enough. But what was infinitely worse was the fact that all the men under his orders relied on him to find a solution to this insoluble problem!… and he, Anders, saw no solution and this kept him awake at night’.

It soon became clear that Anders's judgement of Soviet intentions was an accurate one, as Stalin's definition of ‘free’ and ‘election’ soon became clear for all to see. Elections were held in Soviet-occupied Romania in March 1945, but when the majority of people voted for non-Communists the results were ignored and King Michael made to appoint a Communist-dominated administration. Romania had already been devastated by the arrest and deportation of nearly two hundred thousand ‘fascists’ – a term used loosely by the Soviets to include anyone who had served the previous regime or who they believed still opposed them. It was
essentially the same method of occupation as had been practised in eastern Poland in the autumn of 1939. For the Soviets what mattered, above all else, was the elimination of any opposition.

Churchill was never to make much of an issue of Soviet action in Romania – he felt constrained by the discussions around his ‘naughty’ document, which placed Romania firmly in the Soviet zone of influence. The month before, in January, when he had been told that the Soviets were forcibly deporting ethnic Germans (who formed a minority within Romania) he said in a note to the Foreign Office: ‘Why are we making a fuss about the Russian deportations in Rumania of Saxons and others? It is understood that the Russians were to work their will in this sphere. Anyhow we cannot prevent them’.
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And the following day, when the Foreign Office brought to the Prime Minister's attention the fact that other Romanians were being deported as forced labourers, he replied: ‘I cannot see the Russians are wrong in making 100 or 150,000 of these people work their passage. Also we must bear in mind what we promised about leaving Romania's fate to a large extent in Russian hands’.
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Churchill was clearly speaking the language of ‘spheres of influence’.

But in February, and again in March, as regards Poland it was to be a different matter. In February 1945 the Soviet arrests of Poles continued, with trainloads of those judged recalcitrant sent east – including more than 240 truck loads of people from Bialystok.
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And in March, having tricked them into attending a meeting, the Soviets arrested and then imprisoned former members of the Polish underground council.

Both the American and British governments found it hard to reconcile the oppressive Soviet actions with the business-like leader they had seen at Yalta. So once more they fell back on what had by now become their standard excuse. Stalin was still trustworthy; it was other powerful but shadowy figures in the Kremlin who were preventing the agreement being honoured. Charles ‘Chip’ Bohlen, the prominent American diplomat and Soviet expert, recorded that by May 1945 the view of those in the State Department who had been at Yalta was that it was the ‘opposition’
that Stalin had encountered ‘inside the Soviet Government’ on his return from the conference that was responsible for the problems.
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And, as Harry Hopkins put it, ‘We felt sure we could count on him [Stalin] to be reasonable and sensible and understanding – but we never could be sure who or what might be in back of him there in the Kremlin’.
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Meantime, Averell Harriman, in Moscow, deduced that it was ‘Red Army Marshals’ who were somehow now trying to pull the strings.
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But although these views were also broadly echoed in London, there were some British diplomats who had served in Moscow, such as Thomas Brimelow,
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who questioned the evidence for sinister forces behind Stalin. And, of course, he was right. His more senior colleagues who represented the consensus in the Foreign Office, as well as the political leaders of America and Britain who subscribed to this theory themselves, were all wrong. There was no one behind Stalin pulling the strings. Moreover, from the first there had been an alternative explanation for the Soviet actions – one just as plausible if not more so. Stalin's occasional inconsistency of approach – like sending a conciliatory telegram almost at the same time as an accusatory one – could be read as a simple tactic to keep the West guessing. And now, at this crisis in the relationship, there was an even more likely explanation for Soviet behaviour: that Stalin was forcibly demonstrating that the American spin on Yalta was non sense. He had always wanted the states that neighboured the Soviet Union to be ‘friendly’ by his definition – which meant eliminating anyone the Soviets considered a threat.

But it was not possible that either Churchill or Roosevelt would recognize that Stalin was simply being consistent. To begin with, each of them had too much political capital wrapped up in the idea that they could deal with the Soviet leader. As we have seen, long before he met Stalin, Roosevelt had expressed the view that he could ‘handle’ him. And Churchill had felt an emotional connection with the Soviet leader ever since his boozy late-night dinner in Stalin's apartments in the summer of 1942.

Each of the two Western leaders came to believe they could form a ‘special’ bond with Stalin. Both were wrong. Stalin had no
‘special’ bond with anyone. But in their attempt to charm him they had missed the fact that he had, in his own individual way, charmed them instead.

It was Churchill who felt most upset at the perceived Soviet breaches of Yalta – something that must have rather bemused Stalin. After all, Churchill had let the Soviets have a free hand in Romania without any problems, just as the Soviets had let the British use force to quash revolution in Greece. Didn't that therefore demonstrate the reality that Churchill supported the concept of ‘spheres of influence’? Wasn't Churchill's protest on Poland – regardless of the precise wording of the Yalta agreement actually a case of double standards?

Churchill would have vehemently disagreed with this argument. For him Poland was special. He said in March, in a lengthy and emotional telegram to Roosevelt, that he saw Poland as the ‘test case between us and the Russians of the meaning which is attached to such terms as Democracy, Sovereignty, Independence, Representative Government and free and unfettered elections’.
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Moreover, ‘He [Molotov] clearly wants to make a farce of consultations with the non-Lublin Poles – which means that the new government in Poland would be merely the present one dressed up to look more respectable to the ignorant, and also wants to prevent us from seeing the liquidations and deportations that are going on, and all the rest of the game of setting up a totalitarian regime before elections are held, and even before a new government is set up. As to the upshot of all this, if we do not get things right now it will soon be seen by the world that you and I, by putting our signatures to the Crimea settlement, have underwritten a fraudulent prospectus’.

Roosevelt (whose ill health meant that his telegrams were now often drafted by his advisers, Byrnes or Leahy) replied to Churchill's message on 11 March, blandly saying that the ‘only difference’ between the British and Americans on this key issue was ‘one of tactics’; and that Roosevelt's ‘tactics’ were not to escalate this business to Stalin before matters had been exhausted by their ambassadors in Moscow. But this attempt to calm Churchill
down did not work. The Prime Minister wrote in even more emotional terms on 13 March: ‘Poland has lost her frontier. Is she now to lose her freedom? That is the question which will undoubtedly have to be fought out in Parliament and in public here. I do not wish to reveal a divergence between the British and the United States governments, but it would certainly be necessary for me to make it clear that we are in the presence of a great failure and an utter breakdown of what was settled at Yalta, but that we British have not the necessary strength to carry the matter further and the limits of our capacity to act have been reached’.
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