THE YALTA CONFERENCE
Roosevelt and Churchill had been trying to get Stalin to the conference table since mid-1944. The Soviet leader gave various reasons for dithering and, even as late as December 15, mentioned that he would like to meet the president alone.47 Roosevelt shared that preference, but a week later tripartite meetings were set for Yalta in the Crimea. The Big Three were to confer from February 4 to 11, 1945, in what would be their final gathering.
What did they hope to accomplish? Anyone reading the leaders’ correspondence is bound to be struck by the friendly banter. They seemed to agree on most things. Only by digging deeper can we find what these leaders were really thinking.
Churchill was perhaps the least optimistic of the three. “Make no mistake” about what would happen, he said to his private secretary on January 23: “All the Balkans, except Greece, are going to be Bolshevized; and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. There is nothing I can do for poor Poland either.”48 What made his position worse was that Roosevelt was disinclined to support him. The president was at pains to avoid any appearance of being a united front with Britain, and so nothing was accomplished at preconference talks with Churchill in Malta. FDR even refused to meet him alone during their first days at Yalta, and while their concord was real enough on essentials, there were more differences than we might expect.49
Roosevelt poured his dwindling energies into holding the wartime alliance together and defeating Germany and Japan. When Ambassador Harriman returned from Moscow after the elections in November 1944, he found it nearly impossible to interest the president in the fate of Eastern Europe.50 In the view of the new secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, as recorded in his diary on January 2, “to many observers it appeared that Roosevelt was pursuing a rudderless foreign policy.” The president talked about the future of the Far East and China, the possibility of Pacific and African bases, and the Near East and Palestine. But he said little about postwar Europe, which was on the immediate agenda. Stettinius urged him to use the State of the Union message to make a strong foreign policy statement, but instead he offered only generalities, in a speech criticized by the press as evasive.51
The inaugural address was similar, and the shortest in American history. The theme was the dream of a future international order no longer filled with suspicion and mistrust. FDR did not sound at all like the image of him in revisionist literature: a cold warrior out to make the world safe for capitalism. His concern instead was his legacy, and he mistakenly concluded that he could secure it by forging a link with Stalin.
The Soviet Boss was an utterly different creature. Having experienced decades of vicious political infighting, he knew what buttons to push at meetings. He had an acute grasp of the political and military details in every European country, had worked out a long-term strategy, and was flexible in his tactics. His modus operandi at the Big Three conferences was to speak of his country’s sacrifices in the war without overdoing it. His mischievousness and (mostly) pleasant manner stood in stark contrast to his fierce and bloody reputation, to the point that Roosevelt and Churchill convinced themselves it was fine to call him “Uncle Joe.” They took to using that nickname behind his back and at Yalta even to his face. But he had them on a string. Stalin knew very well that Communism in theory and practice aroused their darkest foreboding, so he routinely told the story that, in everything he did, national security was the only real aim.
What was the Soviet dictator really thinking on the eve of Yalta? The contrast with Churchill and especially Roosevelt could not have been more stark. By chance we have a recently discovered record of remarks Stalin made to Communist visitors from Yugoslavia on January 28, 1945, just a week before the conference. As he saw things, the Great Depression that had gripped the West since 1929 had “manifested itself in the division of the capitalists into two factions—one fascist, the other democratic. Our alliance with the democratic faction of the capitalists came about because they also had a stake in preventing Hitler’s domination; that brutal state would have driven the working class to extremes and to the overthrow of capitalism itself. At the present time we are allied with one faction against the other, but in the future we will be against the first faction of capitalists, too.”52
This was an astonishing statement; it revealed that the ultimate war, in Stalin’s view, was against his allies. His ideological convictions had not wavered from what they had been in the 1930s. In the meantime, before the final showdown, he was keeping up appearances, disciplined and above all patient. His allies, moreover, were accommodating. Churchill and FDR yielded without making much of a fuss, and even when they did, Stalin seemed to enjoy the skirmishes.
It was an article of faith among the Soviet leaders that after the war the United States would be in deep economic trouble and thus desperate for markets. This assumption played out in various ways, one of which led Molotov on January 3 to ask Ambassador Harriman for the U.S. to grant $6 billion in credits on favorable terms so that the USSR could buy American goods.53 Molotov put the same request to Secretary Stettinius at Yalta. He brazenly made it seem as though his country would be doing the U.S. a favor: helping the capitalists solve the “inevitable” unemployment they would face after the war.54
When the Big Three met in early February, the Red Army was well on the way to destroying German domination of Eastern and Central Europe; it stood at the River Oder and had entered Germany itself. By contrast, the Western Allies were still struggling to overcome the Battle of the Bulge, fought into early 1945. They had not yet crossed the Rhine, which they would do only in early March.
This military situation gave the USSR an enormous psychological advantage. Everyone knew that it had carried the weight of the war and suffered infinitely more casualties than any other country.55 On that account alone, the two Western leaders were inclined to yield to Stalin. But for good measure, the Kremlin was already busily arranging the postwar political map of the lands they had liberated.
Soviet intelligence services bugged all the facilities in advance at Yalta. They already knew that the Americans and British had no program for the postwar settlement, so the spies’ mission was to develop psychological portraits of the delegates, “which were more important to Stalin than intelligence information.”56 During the conference the Soviet leader spoke with each member of his delegation, eliciting their impressions and inquiring about the positions being discussed. He was more multidimensional than often supposed and listened intently. Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko thought that at Yalta Stalin was at the top of his game. The diplomat wrote later that his boss had “a memory like a computer and missed nothing. During the meetings I realized more clearly than ever what exceptional abilities that man possessed.”57
There was no agenda at Yalta, and the meetings tended to ramble. During a short conversation with Stalin on February 4, just before the main session, Roosevelt remarked that while on the way, he had been shocked by the destruction he had seen in the Crimea. Both of them admitted to having grown “more bloodthirsty” with regard to the Germans.58
The president led the first plenary session, though not with a strong performance. The Soviets looked bored, while the more polite British stared off into the distance. Controversial matters arose the second day as to the future occupation zones of Germany. Roosevelt still thought that Germany could be split into five or even seven parts. Churchill had wanted it separated into a north and south but now pleaded for time to think things through.