In the spring of 2005, speaking in Riga, President George W. Bush said that Yalta ranked with the Munich agreement of 1938 and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 as a betrayal of freedom and of the rights of Eastern Europe. This was an outrageous misstatement. More than sixty years after the fact, it is time to drive a silver stake through the heart of the Yalta Myth.

With the start of the Cold War and the accompanying Red Scare in the United States, in 1946 and 1947, British imperialists, who had gone out of office with Winston Churchill in 1945, claimed that Roosevelt had been duped by Stalin into approving a Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe at Tehran in November 1943, and at Yalta in February, 1945. Mr. Churchill himself was more circumspect, wanly lamenting that these matters unfolded in a vortex that combined with a decline in Roosevelt's health that implicitly made him vulnerable to Stalin's blandishments, and Truman's steep learning curve in required knowledge of Soviet relations--which he needed to overcome to join Churchill in an adequately robust resistance to Stalin's ambitions. (If Churchill had gone to Roosevelt's funeral on April 15, 1945, and he got to the airport before he decided against it, he could have concerted plans with Truman at once. They did not meet for another three months.)

Some of Churchill's entourage were a good deal less restrained. Arthur Bryant, the initial editor of the war diaries of the chief of the imperial General Staff, Lord Alanbrooke, presented Roosevelt as a witless dupe of Stalin, even confecting this unsubstantiated imputation to Roosevelt: "Of one thing I am certain; Stalin is not an imperialist."1 There is not a scrap of evidence that Roosevelt ever said anything of the kind. Bryant--who at the start of the war produced, and then tried to suppress, a volume about Hitler called Unfinished Victory, in which he praised the Führer's "Cromwellian virtues"--is not a natural source for such criticism.

Another contributing factor in the growth of the Yalta Myth was the European view, led by the Gaullists and some of the German Social Democrats, that the United States in particular, and the Anglo-Americans generally, were not reliable defenders of the European interest. In his memoirs, de Gaulle masqueraded as the excluded advocate of Europe at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam; depicted France as one of the main agents of its own liberation; and maintained that France never left the war in 1940. He wrote that only the United States of the Big Three opposed France's presence at those conferences, where "an enormous chunk of Europe . . . had [been] abandoned in advance to the Soviets." De Gaulle maintained that "the political oppression" of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were "the consequences" of those conferences, which entailed: "handing them over to the discretion of the Soviets."2 In fact, Stalin had objected more strenuously to any consultation with France than Roosevelt did, because he felt France had made "no contribution to victory." Nor, contrary to the implications of de Gaulle's elegantly written but self-serving account, was Stalin, as he told Churchill and Roosevelt two months later, much impressed with de Gaulle.

The real development of Big Three discussions of the fate of Eastern Europe are somewhat complicated, but easily recounted. The Moscow foreign ministers' meeting in October 1943 set up the European Advisory Commission (EAC) to determine, among other things, the zones of occupation of a subdued Germany. On the way to the Tehran Conference, five weeks later, on board the battleship USS Iowa, Roosevelt tore a map of Germany out of a copy of National Geographic magazine and drew three approximately equal zones on the map, for each of the three principal powers. He said that he expected the Germans would fight with super-human tenacity against the Russians in the east, but that when average Germans, soldiers and civilians saw that the war was lost, there would be a relatively swift advance by the Western Allies. He realized the importance of the Western Allies taking Berlin.3 (Once they were across the Rhine, they did move very quickly.)

At the Tehran Conference, the principal achievements, and the only ones with any relevance to Eastern Europe, were the selection of the place for the launch of the full Second Front in Europe, Italy being considered a diversion that only involved about thirty Western divisions; and the agreement of the postwar borders of Poland. Though they subsequently denied it, the British leaders, including Churchill and Brooke (later Lord Alanbrooke), were opposed to an early cross-Channel landing. They had their memories of horribly sanguinary encounters with the German Army in northeast France and Flanders in World War I. And the debacles of Dunkirk and Dieppe (1940 and 1942) when they had taken to the boats with unforeseen haste, were fresh in their minds.

Roosevelt was concerned that if the Western Allies did not make what Stalin considered a serious effort in the west, Stalin and Hitler would make a separate peace and solidify their joint domination of Europe. As long as Stalin believed that the defeat of Germany was possible and that the USSR could effectively expand to the west, he would stay in the war. But if he became convinced of an Anglo-American desire to keep the Russo-German war going, he would divide the spoils with Hitler. Stalin volunteered at Tehran that he had received peace-feelers from Hitler, and there had been two informal sub-ministerial meetings in Stockholm.

Roosevelt was also concerned that if the Western Allies did not attack across the Channel and then into Germany, the Russians would occupy all Germany and Scandinavia, and possibly ignite Communist rule in France. The British wanted to invade up the Adriatic, land near Trieste, and advance through what they called the Ljubljana Gap (more or less of a geographic invention) to Vienna, and snatch some of the Balkans from the Russians, relying on the Germans to defend their eastern borders from the Red Army. The American high command and most informed posterity has considered that plan impractical and, in any case, to be hardly a substitute for the Normandy landings as an effective assault on German-occupied Europe.

Because the American legation at Tehran was well away from the British and Soviet embassies, it was determined that for security reasons, Roosevelt should stay with one or other of his two fellow summiteers. On the recommendation of his security unit, he chose the Soviet embassy, because it had larger quarters. He assumed (correctly) that everything he said would be recorded and translated by his host. When he and Churchill had important matters to discuss, they did so in the British embassy across the street. But the most important part of the conference occurred before it began, when Stalin visited Roosevelt in his room, their first meeting. Roosevelt asked him where he would prefer the Anglo-Americans to make their main Western European thrust, France or the Adriatic. Stalin emphatically favored France.

At the first session of the conference, November 28, Stalin stated the case for landings in France, a position Churchill knew Roosevelt agreed with, and said he was unenthused about activities in the Adriatic and Balkans. He also disputed Churchill's claim to be able to induce Turkey to enter the war against Germany at any useful time. Brooke believed that Stalin only favored the cross-Channel option because it would mire the Anglo-Americans in a futile bloodbath, or even a shambles like Dunkirk, weakening the Germans and facilitating Russian advances, without actually clearing the Germans out of France.4 In this, though it will never be known, Brooke may have been correct. If so, it was a piquant irony: Stalin was enlisted by Roosevelt to provide the casting vote in favor of the Normandy landings, thinking they would fail, as Churchill feared. But Normandy was an overwhelming success, and secured France and most of Germany for the West. Indeed, if Stalin had supported Churchill's Adriatic plan, and Roosevelt had agreed to it, Stalin would have ended up with much more of Europe than he did. (When then-Vice President Richard Nixon asked Churchill in 1954 what he then thought of his Adriatic plan, Churchill only said that it would have been "handy" to have Vienna. No doubt it would have, but not as handy as Paris.)5

There was a good deal of inconclusive discussion at Tehran about fragmenting Germany into many smaller states, as in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, but none of the suggestions gained acceptance. The only other decision important to Eastern Europe was the secret delineation of a new Polish border with the USSR 200 miles to the west of the pre-war border, and quite close to what Eden pointedly called the "Ribbentrop-Molotov" line, of the 1939 Pact. "Call it whatever you want", said Stalin.6 Poland would then be given 200 miles of German territory on its western border, compensating it for what had been lost to Russia. It was agreed to keep these plans entirely secret, so as not to arouse the large populations involved; appear cynical; and, in the West, legitimize any part of the Hitler-Stalin arrangements or disturb six million Polish-Americans in the run-up to a presidential election.

It was established that Stalin would simply seize Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania back from the Germans. Roosevelt suggested a referendum in those countries, but Stalin pointed out that the West hadn't asked any of his Romanov predecessors, from Peter the Great to Nicholas II, to hold a referendum in them, and that he wouldn't either.

Roosevelt's claim, based on his own account to his labor secretary, Frances Perkins, that he had teased Churchill (in Stalin's presence) to assure Stalin that he was not colluding with Churchill, receives no support whatsoever in the official records of the proceedings of any of the countries, or the memoirs of any of the participants. It is unlikely that Miss Perkins just made it up, though she may have exaggerated it. But it is not unlikely that Roosevelt largely made it up, as he did many stories about himself, to show the lengths he had gone to, in his efforts to break the ice with Stalin--for whom, in fact, he had less personal regard than did Churchill or de Gaulle.

This was how matters rested until the EAC determined in February 1944 that the Big Three should have approximately equal occupation zones in Germany. The United States, at Roosevelt's direction, did not want to demarcate the zones, because he thought the Western Allies, although they were still four months away from the Normandy landings, would be able to take almost all of Germany. The EAC met in London under the chairmanship of the third-ranking member of the British Foreign Office, Sir William Strang (a veteran of the Munich delegation and the even less successful British-Soviet talks of the summer of 1939); and the other members were the Soviet and U.S. ambassadors in London, Adam Maisky and John Gilbert Winant.

The British--fearing that, even counting the Canadian contingent, they would have less than a quarter of the number of American divisions in or near Germany, and barely an eighth of the number of Soviet soldiers in or near Germany--wanted to take advantage of this possibility of a large zone, relative to the size of their ground forces. The USSR fearing they might not secure much of Germany if the Western operations in France were successful, settled for about 40 percent of Germany as their zone.

Since Roosevelt did not believe in confiding in any of his associates, and the secrecy of the Polish borders agreement at Tehran was observed, the EAC imposed its zones of occupation surprisingly close to those Roosevelt had drawn on the National Geographic map on USS Iowa on Germany's pre-war borders. So half of the Soviet zone of Germany would in fact be in Poland. The EAC decision was approved by Churchill and Roosevelt (with little attention but some reluctance) at the second Quebec Conference in September 1944.

The Allied landings were famously successful, in both northern and southern France, and the Germans were backed up fairly close to the Rhine by late autumn, 1944. Winston Churchill went to Moscow in October, 1944, and, contrary to Roosevelt's wishes, made the famous spheres of influence agreement with Stalin on the "naughty piece of paper." Churchill conceded 90 percent Soviet influence to 10 percent Western influence in Romania; 75 percent Soviet influence to 25 percent Western influence in Bulgaria and Hungary; equal Soviet-Western influence in Yugoslavia; and 90 percent Western influence to 10 percent Soviet influence in Greece.

This accurately reflected military realities, with over 300 Soviet divisions in Eastern Europe, and was not an impractical arrangement, except that Stalin stamped out any external influence where he could and tried to take over Greece, before Churchill and then Truman stopped him. Churchill tried, completely implausibly, to claim in his memoirs that these arrangements, which he conceded were "fateful to millions", were merely "temporary." He knew Stalin too well for that, especially eight days after the extermination by the Germans--with Soviet complicity--of the heroic Warsaw uprisings.7

By Yalta, in February, 1945, the Eastern and Western Allies were all on the German borders. Roosevelt needed the United Nations Organization to involve the United States in the world and convince the isolationists that the world was no longer as sinister a place to be involved in. Until the effectiveness of atomic weapons were proved (five months later), the United States (both the president and the service chiefs), wanted the USSR to take its share of the anticipated one million casualties that would be sustained in subduing the home islands of Japan. The small islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa alone were on the way to costing the United States over 50,000 casualties.

Learning from the mistakes of Woodrow Wilson, in whose administration he had been a junior participant, Roosevelt moved to establish the United Nations before the war was over (unlike the League of Nations), and packed his administration and the founding UN delegation with Republicans and congressional representatives of both parties in equal numbers, despite his party's majority. At Yalta he won Stalin's support for the UN and his agreement to enter the war against Japan three months after the end of the European War, in exchange for minor territorial concessions that Stalin would have taken from Japan and China anyway.

The Yalta Agreement proclaimed the imminence of Allied victory, confirmed the occupation of Germany, invited France to be an occupying power in Germany (taking some of the British zone) and co-founder of the United Nations, which was also proclaimed. Yalta dodged the issue of reparations, which had been such a failure after Versailles. Roosevelt and Churchill managed, after some argument, to get approval in the Yalta Agreement of the Declaration on Liberated Europe, and the Declaration on Poland. The first promised national sovereignty, democratic government, direct emergency relief, provisional governments "broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population and pledged to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people." Poland would be "strong, free, independent and democratic . . . on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot . . . [open to] all democratic and anti-Nazi parties."

These Declarations, which Stalin flagrantly violated with the first opportunity to do so, provided a great deal of the moral underpinning for the West's successful conduct of the forty-year Cold War that followed.

In Yugoslavia, a compromise government between the communist leader, Tito, and the regent (Subasic), was endorsed. The Big Three foreign ministers would meet three or four times per year, and unity in peace was "a sacred obligation." There were protocols governing war criminals, displaced persons, access of Soviet shipping to the Mediterranean; as well as the secret agreement over Japan, and the right of the United States to have three votes at the United Nations, as the USSR did. Czechoslovakia was the one country in Eastern Europe that seems never to have been mentioned and there has never been a satisfactory explanation for why the West did not occupy at least part of it.

There was nothing in the Yalta Agreement, nor in any of the official accounts of the conference deliberations, nor in any of the remembered versions of memoirists (Churchill, Eden, Cadogan, Brooke, Stettinius, Harriman, Leahy, Bohlen, or Marshall's recollections to his biographer, or Russian accounts) to justify the opprobrium that has come down on Yalta. What has happened, in Napoleon's phrase, is "lies agreed upon."

In the aftermath of the Cold War, the Yalta Myth has been exposed, and Churchill's role has been set in perspective. Winston Churchill's contributions to the salvation of Western civilization are beyond estimation, but he was not the heroic English "donkey" between "the Russian bear and the American eagle." (He won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his fine but somewhat bowdlerized account of the Second World War.)

The final salvo of the Churchill-as-heroic-minority-against-Roosevelt-and-Stalin school was a very late effort by the able and authoritative official biographer of Churchill, Sir Martin Gilbert, to produce evidence of Roosevelt's duplicity in the Soviet rape of Poland. Many years after his (and Randolph Churchill's) mighty eight-volume life of Churchill--in his otherwise admirable Churchill and America (2005)--Sir Martin claims that Roosevelt, at a private meeting with Stalin, (on February 8, 1945 at Yalta) had offered the Soviet leader a dilution of the democracy pledge to Poland.8 There is absolutely no evidence of this whatever, neither from Eden, whom Gilbert cites as a source; nor from Bohlen, who was Roosevelt's interpreter and translated every word that ever passed in person between Stalin and Roosevelt; nor from the Soviet account. Sir Martin Gilbert is a fine and rigorous historian (he appears to be extrapolating from a Foreign Office note), but such an allegation, in the face of so much countervailing evidence, should not be made without more support. And the timing of it, as the Churchill part of the Yalta Myth unravels, is suspect.

The companion myths, of Roosevelt's illness, or of the influence of Alger Hiss, a former communist and apparent Soviet spy, who was present in the American Yalta delegation, also hold no water. Roosevelt was declining physically, but all agree that his mental powers were undimmed. Hiss's only contribution was to oppose (unsuccessfully) the grant to the USSR of three votes in the General Assembly of the United Nations.

In all of the circumstances, the Western leaders did well at Yalta. Germany, which had always been ambivalent about whether it was an eastern or western facing country, joined the West, where it was generously and hospitably received. The war-end arrangements were hard on the Poles, certainly, who were guaranteed a difficult time by geography and the nature of their neighbors. But when one examines with perspective, the Yalta arrangements ended up being a mighty geopolitical bonanza for the West. As historian Ted Morgan has written: "Yalta was a defeat for the Soviets and they so regarded it. What they won at the negotiating table, their armies already possessed. If Yalta was a sell-out, why did [Stalin] go to such lengths to violate the agreement?"9 No president of the United States should ever again compare Yalta to the Nazi diplomatic successes of Munich and Moscow.

Considering how the poor world was gasping in 1940, with Germany, France, Italy and Japan all under dictatorships hostile to the Anglo-American powers, the West finished up the war in an astonishingly good position. British historian A. J. P. Taylor exaggerated when he wrote: "Of the great men at the top, Roosevelt was the only one who knew what he was doing. He made the United States the greatest power in the world at virtually no cost."10 The power of America was ready to emerge, and there was a cost. But Roosevelt and Churchill did well; they were the indispensable men. Neither should be raided by the partisans of the other for the everlasting credit due to both. The West should stop apologizing for Roosevelt's and Churchill's diplomatic successes, which were worthy of the great organizational, moral and military successes which are traditionally conceded to them.

 

1 Arthur Bryant, Triumph in the West, pp. 400.

2 Charles de Gaulle, War Memoirs, pp. 759, 897, 915, 989.

3 Michael Beschloss, The Conquerors, pp. 22-3; Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall, Vol. III, Organizer of Victory, pp. 250.

4 Sir Alan Brooke, Diaries, pp. 484.

5 Richard M. Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 156.

6 Winston S. Churchill, History of the Second World War, Vol. V, Closing the Ring, pp. 348.

7 Ibid., Vol. VI, Triumph and Tragedy, pp. 227-8.

8 Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill and America, pp. 331.

9 Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography, pp. 735.

10 A. J. P. Taylor, Oxford History of England: English History, 1914-1945, pp. 577.

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