Roosevelt was certainly a sick man. I still remember those truly pathetic newsreels of Yalta showing a terribly emaciated Roosevelt in his wheel-chair. I also remember Fenya, the kindly elderly Russian maid at the Metropole Hotel in Moscow, who was appointed
to Yalta as Roosevelt's personal chambermaid and who commented on her return, almost with tears in her eyes: "Such a sweet and kind man, but so terribly, terribly ill." When Roosevelt suddenly died soon afterwards, not only Fenya, but thousands of other Russian women wept.
On the other hand, Stettinius has argued in his book that the Russians made more
concessions at Yalta than they obtained from the Western Allies.
[ Roosevelt and The Russians (London, 1950).]
His list of "Soviet concessions" includes the following:
The Soviet Union accepted the US formula for voting on the Security Council, thus
putting an end to the Dumbarton Oaks impasse.
The Soviet Union abandoned her request for all the sixteen Soviet Republics being
represented at the UN Assembly, and contented herself with votes for the USSR, the
Ukraine and Belorussia only.
The Soviet Union agreed to the Associated Nations, who declared war on Germany by
March 1, participating at San Francisco as original members.
The Soviet Union agreed to closer military co-ordination.
She agreed, despite earlier objections, to the French not only having an occupation zone in Germany, but also to their being represented on the Control Commission.
She accepted that the western border of Poland be left for the Peace Conference to settle.
She agreed to a compromise formula on the constitution of the future Polish Government and to "free elections" in Poland.
She bowed to the US view that the figure of twenty billion dollars should be treated by the Reparations Commission in its initial studies merely as a basis of discussion.
In the case of the Declaration on Liberated Europe the Russians withdrew their two
amendments, including that giving a special status to people who had "actively opposed the Nazis".
On the other hand, while appealing to Stalin's "generosity" to Poland, the Western Powers had not felt able to insist on Lwow and the oil areas of Galicia being given to Poland. They had also given way on one or two questions concerning the strict allied supervision of the Polish election but, as Stettinius said in an italicised passage: As a result of the military situation [in February 1945] it was not a question of what Great Britain and the United States would permit Russia to do in Poland, but what the two countries could persuade the Soviet Union to accept...
[Our troops] had just recovered ground lost by the Battle of the Bulge and had not yet bridged the Rhine. In Italy our advance was bogged down in the Appennines.
The Soviet troops, on the other hand, had swept through almost all Poland and East Prussia and had reached at some points the river Oder... Poland and most of eastern Europe, except for most of Czechoslovakia, was in the hands of the Red Army.
[Stettinius, op. cit., p. 266. ]
For all that, Stettinius claims that "the Yalta Agreements were, on the whole, a diplomatic triumph for the United States and Great Britain. The real difficulties with the Soviet Union came after Yalta when the agreements were not respected."
[Ibid., p. 261.]
It is clear that Britain and the United States were not negotiating with the Soviet Union from "positions of strength". No doubt both Roosevelt and, especially, Churchill felt very strongly about a number of questions; in the first place Poland. "Poland," Churchill said,
"is the most important question before the Conference, and I don't want to leave without its being settled." Eden argued that "the presence of Mikolajczyk in the Polish Government would do more than anything else to add to its authority and convince the British people of its representative nature". Churchill declared himself horrified by the reports that "the Lublin Government had announced its intention of trying members of the Home Army and underground forces as traitors";
[This is precisely what the Soviet authorities were going to do only a few months later.]
he also argued against "stuffing the Polish goose so full of German food that it would get indigestion", and particularly against the Western (and not the Eastern) Neisse being taken as part of the western frontier of Poland. Against this, Molotov argued in favour of giving Poland back her ancient frontiers in East Prussia and on the Oder. "How long ago were these lands Polish?" Roosevelt asked. "Very long ago," said Molotov. Roosevelt merely made a wisecrack in reply: "This might lead the British to ask for a return of the United States to Great Britain."
But the Russians felt, in their own way, even more strongly about Poland than Churchill did. In reply to one of Churchill's harangues about Poland having to remain "captain of her soul", Stalin remarked: "To Britain, Poland is a question of honour; to the Soviet Union it is a question of both honour and security," and, time and again, he returned to the question of the Armija Krajowa constituting a threat to the Red Army in Poland.
The record of Yalta shows that, while agreeing to give the Western Allies something of a face-saver in the shape of the Harriman-Molotov-Clark Kerr committee, which would
help to "reorganise" the Polish Government, and thus "prepare" a free Polish election, Stalin made no secret whatsoever of what he considered to be Russia's fundamental
interests in Poland. A "free and unfettered" Polish election—even though he reluctantly subscribed to it—was not one of them.
The same, broadly speaking, applied to other countries in eastern Europe, notably
Rumania and Bulgaria. It is perhaps significant that, according to Stettinius, Stalin should have remarked several times at Yalta that he did not give a hang about Greece, and had every confidence in British policy there. This meant that there was, in fact, a tacit agreement about "spheres of influence", roughly on the lines of those already agreed upon in Moscow in October 1944,
[See pp. 912-3. This is hotly denied in the post-war Soviet History, which says, in particular, that Churchill's story about the "50-50" agreement on Yugoslavia is "pure fiction". (IVOVSS, V. p. 134.)]
except that, in the case of Poland, Churchill (and, to a lesser extent, Roosevelt) continued to have serious qualms. But neither could overlook the fact that Poland was in the rear of the Red Army. It is significant that when, soon after Yalta, the Russians ordered King Michael of Rumania to dismiss General Radescu and replace him by the pro-Soviet Petru Groza, Roosevelt thought it inappropriate to protest because the Red Army's
communication and supply lines ran through Rumania. The same, in a sense, was also
true of Poland.
[Some ten days after Yalta, at the Red Army Day reception that Molotov gave in Moscow on February 23, Vyshinsky, trying to sound rather drunk (which he wasn't) proposed a toast to some of the big shots of the Soviet armaments industries present: " I drink to you," he said, "who are the best and most indispensable auxiliaries of us diplomats.
Without you, we should be completely helpless." And he then announced that he was going to leave for Bucharest the next morning, "just to show them where they got off." It was not quite clear who "they" were, but it was soon learned that he had had a "very serious" talk with King Michael; that he had banged the royal desk with his fist and that, as a result, the pro-Western General Radescu had been replaced at the head of the
Rumanian Government by Mr Peter Groza. Radescu took refuge in the British Legation.]
The Yalta Conference devoted less time than one might have expected to the problem of Germany. "Closer co-ordination of the three Allies than ever before" was decided upon.
The published Report on the Conference said that Nazi Germany was doomed, and that
the German people "will only make the cost of their defeat heavier to themselves by attempting to continue a hopeless resistance." The terms of the unconditional surrender were not published:
These terms will not be made known until the final defeat of Germany... The forces of the Three Powers will each occupy a separate zone of Germany... [There will be]
a central Control Commission consisting of the Supreme Commanders of the Three
Powers with headquarters in Berlin.
[Berlin, not part of the Soviet zone, was to be a distinct zone divided in four.]
France, the Report continued, would be invited to take over a zone of occupation and to participate as a fourth member of the Control Commission, if she so desired.
Then followed a passage on the Allies' "inflexible purpose to destroy German militarism and Nazism... to disarm and disband all German armed forces, to break up for all time the German General Staff... to remove or destroy all German military equipment ... to bring all war criminals to just and swift punishment and exact reparation in kind... wipe out the Nazi Party, Nazi laws, organisations and institutions, remove all Nazi and militarist influence from public offices and from the cultural and economic life of the German
people... It is not our purpose to destroy the people of Germany, but only when Nazism and militarism have been extirpated will there be hope for a decent life for Germans, and a place for them in the comity of nations."
In the Protocol of the Yalta Conference (not published at the time) the Surrender Terms for Germany included a provision under which the Big Three would take "any such steps as they deem requisite for future peace and security, including the complete disarmament, demilitarisation and the dismemberment of Germany." The study for the procedure of dismemberment was referred to a committee consisting of Mr Eden, Mr Winant and Mr
Gusev (the Foreign Secretary and the US and Soviet Ambassadors in London).
[The post-war History claims that at Yalta, the Russians were against dismemberment and looked with suspicion at any Western dismemberment plans. (IVOVSS, V, pp. 130-5). If at Teheran Stalin still favoured the dismemberment of Germany, he appears to have changed his mind by the time the Yalta Conference met. The "dismemberment" question was discussed at a number of meetings, particularly between the November 1944 meeting of the European Advisory Commission and Potsdam in July 1945. At the EAC meeting in
March 1945 the Russians had clearly changed their minds about the desirability of
"dismemberment". In claiming that they had already changed their minds at Yalta, i.e. a month before, the Russians are now stretching a point only slightly.]
A Reparations Committee was set up in Moscow under the chairmanship of Mr Maisky
which would take "in its initial studies as a basis of discussion " the twenty billion dollars (half of it for the Soviet Union) proposed by the Russians.
The Russians were not particularly pleased with this deliberately non-committal protocol of Reparations, and were later to claim that Roosevelt had agreed to their getting ten billion dollars (from equipment, current production and labour), despite very strong opposition from Churchill, who had kept recalling the fearful reparations muddle after World War I. But there is little doubt that, apart from this Reparations question, the Russians were well satisfied with the Protocol on the de-nazification and the
demilitarisation of Germany. It is also certain that Stalin took the World Organisation, based on the unity of the Big Three, very seriously—though not quite seriously enough to run any grave risks with Poland, Rumania and the rest of his east-European sphere of influence.
The atom bomb had not yet been exploded, and American military men feared that,
unless Russia joined in, the war against Japan might well last till 1947, and cost the United States at least another million casualties. Britain and the USA were therefore anxious, at the time of Yalta, to get Russia to join in the Japanese war. After all the loss of life in the war against Germany, the Russians were not at all keen on another war, and Stalin argued that he would "have to show something for it" before they would readily accept war against Japan. He therefore demanded first, the maintenance of the status quo in outer Mongolia; second, the restoration of Russia's former rights violated by Japan in 1904—the return of southern Sakhalin; the restoration (subject to an early agreement with Chiang Kai-shek) of Russian interests in respect of Dairen, Port Arthur and the Chinese Eastern and South-Manchurian railways, to be operated jointly by a Soviet-Chinese
Company, with China retaining full sovereignty in Manchuria; and third, the handing
over of the Kurile Islands to the Soviet Union (even though these had in effect belonged to Japan for a long time). This was a satisfactory pourboire for Russia to receive in the Far East. Stettinius quoted a significant remark of Molotov's, which suggests that the Russians were perfectly content to pursue a Big-Three policy even in China, i.e. to coexist peacefully with Chiang Kai-shek:
Molotov told General Patrick Hurley that the Soviet Union was not interested in the Chinese Communists; these weren't really Communists anyway.
[ Stettinius, op. cit., p. 28. One can only wonder whether today Khrushchev agrees with his old friend Molotov! See also p. 1030 for Stalin's remarks on the Chinese Communists to Hopkins in May 1945.]
On the whole, Stalin left the British and, even more so, the Americans at Yalta with a rather favourable impression. Byrnes thought him "a very likeable person"; Churchill thought he had "greatly mellowed since the hard days of the war"; while he struck Stettinius as a man "with a fine sense of humour"—
At the same time one received an impression of power and ruthless-ness along with his humour... The other members of the Soviet delegation would change their minds perfectly unashamedly whenever Marshal Stalin changed his.
[Ibid., p. 107. This remark is all the more curious in the light of both Stettinius's and Harriman's "theory" that if Stalin "went back on the Yalta decisions" soon afterwards, it was under the pressure of the other members of the Politburo, who were supposed to have criticised him for having been too soft in his dealings with Churchill and Roosevelt.]
He appeared as a calm and skilful negotiator, who only showed any strong emotion when he spoke of German reparations and of the fearful devastation caused by the Germans in Russia. On the whole, he was reasonably accommodating, and did not press on his
partners demands they thought wholly unreasonable—such as the one that all the sixteen Soviet Republics be represented at UN.
[Stalin and Molotov started this gambit by explaining that, in 1944, the Soviet
Constitution had been amended so as to give all the sixteen Soviet republics the right to conduct their own foreign relations. This was an obvious device to get extra seats at UN.
I remember visiting the improvised "Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Georgian SSR" at Tbilisi in 1946. None of its officials took it in the least seriously. It consisted of only three or four rooms.]
Western observers were impressed by the fact that, throughout the Yalta Conference,
Stalin remained in the closest touch with the conduct of the war and did his work as Commander-in-Chief between midnight and 5 a.m.
As one looks closely at the Yalta records, several points stand out clearly. Stalin was all in favour of a United Nations, based on the unity of the Big Three. He was very reluctant to admit France to Germany as a fourth partner, but gave way at Churchill's insistence.
He made no secret of his contempt for France's military record or of his personal dislike of de Gaulle, whom, according to Harriman, he described as "an awkward and stubborn man." Kindness, he argued, was the only possible reason for giving France a zone in Germany. According to Stettinius, Stalin called de Gaulle "not a complicated man".
Nor did Stalin make any secret of his mental reservations about Poland. He kept on
talking about "agents of the London Government shooting Russian soldiers," and no doubt felt that, so long as Russia was needed as an Ally against Japan, he had little to fear from any Anglo-American protests about Russian policy in either Poland or the Balkans.
In the Balkans, moreover, there was a tacit understanding ab
out splitting them into
"spheres of influence": just as Stalin "didn't give a hang about Greece", so Churchill had told King Peter of Yugoslavia that he wouldn't sacrifice a single man or a single penny to put any king back on his throne.
The protocol on Germany, and its demilitarisation and denazification, satisfied Stalin, though he thought the agreement on reparations was much too vague. Maisky had spoken of the "astronomical figures" of the damage caused by the Germans to the Soviet Union, and there was one extremely important—and closely-related —point which was raised at Yalta, but apparently dropped almost immediately: the question of a big American
reconstruction loan to the Soviet Union.
According to Stettinius's record, this question came up only incidentally when Molotov said to him that Russia expected to receive reparations in kind from Germany, and "also expressed the hope that the Soviet Union would receive long-term credits from the
United States."
[ Op. cit., p. 115.]
Stettinius recalls that Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau had sent a letter to the President shortly before Yalta advocating "a concrete plan to aid the Russians in the reconstruction period", and suggesting that "this would iron out many of the difficulties we have been having with respect to their problems and policies." But, as Stettinius says:
"The Soviet Union did not receive a loan at the close of the war. Whether such a loan would have made her a more reasonable and co-operative nation will be one of the great
'if questions of history."
There is every reason to believe that, at Yalta, Stalin was still hoping that such a loan might materiaUse; it would have meant the relatively "easy" way of reconstruction for the Russian people, instead of the "hard" way that Stalin had to choose for them despite certain "ideological" objections to the former solution.
Russia at war Page 109
