Temps Passés: Yalta, the conference that gave Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union
Stalin showed once again that the brutal strong man willing to roll over all opposition can get his way. Ukraine negotiators need to read history.
Eighty years ago today, Feb. 18, 1945, FDR was aboard the Navy cruiser USS Quincy as it steamed from Port Said toward home. He was emaciated and lethargic, a sick man only two months away from the stroke that would kill him, but he put a brave face on the outcome of the critical three-way conference.
He and Churchill thought, or at least said publicly, that they had reached several significant agreements with Stalin:
Germany would be partitioned into four sections, as would Berlin. Each would be governed by one of the countries represented at Yalta, with a fourth reserved for France.
The Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan within three months of Germany’s defeat. (The Trinity test took place in July; until they knew the nuclear bomb would work, the military feared a half-million Allied soldiers might die in an invasion of the Home Islands. Until Trinity, the Soviet Army was believed essential to end the war.)
The UN would be established, succeeding the moribund League of Nations, and the five great powers would have veto power in the Security Council.
The Allies would hold war crimes trials for the worst of the worst Nazis.
The nations of Eastern Europe, especially Poland, would hold free elections to choose the form of government they wanted.
They did not know, or chose not to mention they knew, that Stalin was already installing a puppet government in Poland and, by the time of the Potsdam Conference five months later Eastern Europe would be in Soviet hands. During the Cold War those puppets became the “captive nations” celebrated once a year in the United States, and lamented endlessly in Rotary Club speeches.
Contemporary historians’ judgments were less sanguine, especially after FDR’s death. A year later Churchill traveled to Fulton, Missouri, to deliver one of the most portentous speeches of his life, putting the Cold War fully in gear and substantially worsening the already-bad relations with the Soviet Union.
He declared, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” The traces are still there. Szczecin lies on the Polish border with Germany; Trieste, almost due south, is one of the easternmost points of Italy.
The Iron Curtain would not lift until 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. Gorbachev’s reforms failed and in December 1991 the Soviet flag came down, to be replaced by the Russian tricolor.
Yalta remains a Russian resort, but its postwar history has been rocky. Crimea, of which Yalta is a part, was transferred to Ukraine in 1954. The move had little practical effect at the time because both Ukraine and Russia were part of the Soviet Union. But in 2014 Russian seized it and it has been Russian since.
Sources
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalta_Conference See other links within the article.
The Daughters of Yalta https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/books/review/the-daughters-of-yalta-catherine-grace-katz.html?searchResultPosition=3. Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Daughters-Yalta-Churchills-Roosevelts-Harrimans-ebook/dp/B081TVDT9D
National Churchill Museum https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/arts/missouri-museum-churchill.html?searchResultPosition=15
Did FDR know he was dying? https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/books/review/franklin-roosevelt-his-final-battle-josephy-lelyveld.html?searchResultPosition=33
State Department Historian https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/yalta-conf
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