Great myths grow up after every world war to explain to the peoples why they were defeated or why their victories were not as fruitful as they had expected. After World War I the Nazi-minded Germans invented the stab-in-the-back theory, to prove that Germany would not have been defeated had it not been for the weakness, amounting to treachery, of the socialists, democrats and Jews in Germany, behind the heroic fighting fronts. This myth was one of the chief vehicles upon which Hitler rode to power, intent upon undoing German defeat altogether and leading Germany to world mastery.

After World War II an American myth grew up around the Yalta Conference of February 1945, to the effect that a dying and deluded Roosevelt gave away Eastern Europe and China to Stalin. Aided by the temptations of partisan politics, this myth grew to such proportions that a large majority of the American people became convinced that this was the first great reason for the contemporary growth of communist power, the second being the weakness and treachery of some Americans in failing to give more aid to Chiang Kai-shek at one time or another.

Any people is loathe to believe that in any decisive moment of history it encountered forces too great for it to manage. This is especially true of the Americans, who up to 1945 had never failed to achieve full success in any undertaking to which they had set their hands. They were therefore wide open to the myths which explained the great post-war expansion of communism as the result of the weakness and treachery of individual Americans. From the acceptance of this principle it was only a short step to the all-devouring witch hunt which sought to track down the purveyors of the false and fatal ideas in our midst, and which horrified all of our democratic allies after the Cold War began to spiral.

In the atmosphere of the Yalta Myth it was difficult to recall the mounting pressure at the time for another meeting of the leaders of the Grand Coalition. The war was then in full cry on both sides of Germany and events were moving fast, especially in the East. Late in August 1944 the Bulgarians sought to surrender to the Allies, but were forestalled by a sudden declaration of war by Russia, on September 5, 1944, and the rapid occupation of Bulgaria, bringing the Red armies to the borders of Greece and Turkey. By October Russian troops were in Hungary and Yugoslavia, and British troops had landed in Greece, where a large majority of the people under communist leadership opposed the return of their king in the baggage of the British Army.

Churchill-Stalin Balkan Bargain

It was at this point that Churchill felt compelled to make a bargain with the Russians which would give him a free hand in Greece, where it would be difficult for him to move against the powerful EAM if Russia supported it. It was then that Churchill went to Moscow and put into force the plan he had been maturing for six months.

Shortly before D-Day the British Government had begun a diplomatic campaign to divide the Balkans into British and Russian spheres of influence. On May 30, 1944, Ambassador Halifax suddenly inquired of Secretary Hull how our Government would feel about an arrangement giving the Russians a controlling influence in Rumania and the British in Greece. Hull opposed this course and the next day Churchill appealed to the President, arguing that the arrangement would only apply to war conditions. He stated that the British Government had suggested the agreement to Russian Ambassador Guosev in London. The Russians had replied on May 18 that they were agreeable, but before concluding the arrangement they would like to know whether the United States had been consulted and was in agreement.

Having been compelled to broach the subject in Washington, Churchill sent another message to Halifax on June 8, arguing that no spheres of influence were involved, but that the Russians should deal with the Rumanians and Bulgarians while Britain dealt with the Greeks and Yugoslavs. The American reply of June 10, 1944, combated the proposal and proposed instead that consultative machinery be set up for the Balkans, in which we would have a part. Churchill replied the next day in “a long, forceful telegram,” arguing that action would be paralyzed by such an arrangement and proposing a three months trial of the plan proposed to Russia. In Hull’s absence Roosevelt agreed. On June 22 he told Churchill that we were disturbed that the British had taken the matter up with us only after the Russians had compelled them to do so.

To make sure that its position with us was correct the Soviet Government then made a direct approach to us. On July 1, 1944, Ambassador Gromyko sent an aide-memoire to Hull outlining the negotiations to date, from the initial British approach on May 5. Hull’s reply on July 15, approved by F.D.R., stressed that we had accepted the project on a purely temporary basis and made every effort to reserve the future, but without avail. In October 1944, Churchill and Eden went to Moscow and extended the arrangement still further, even reducing to percentages the degree of influence which the two powers would have in the various Balkan countries. The Russians assumed thereafter that they had been granted predominance in most of the Balkans.¹ Our Government protested in numerous diplomatic cables during October 1944 about the extent to which terms of peace were being included by the Russians and British in the armistice conventions for Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary, but without much effect. The Russian and British leaders assembled at Moscow proceeded with their spheres of influence agreement.

Churchill’s account of the Moscow agreement states that he proposed a “ninety per cent predominance in Rumania” for Russia, the same for Britain in Greece, and fifty-fifty in Yugoslavia. While this was being translated Churchill set down on a half-sheet of paper a proposed split in the five Balkan countries which added Hungary 50–50 and Bulgaria 75 per cent control to Russia, 25 per cent to others.

Stalin scrutinized the paper, made a large blue tick on it and passed it back. “It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set it down.” “After this there was a long silence,” the pencilled paper lying in the center of the table. Finally Churchill suggested that since it might seem to some that they had disposed of these great issues, “so fateful to millions of people,” in an off-hand manner they should “burn the paper.” “No, you keep it,” said Stalin.²

If there was any one moment when the Balkan countries, except Greece, were “given away,” this was it. Nevertheless, Churchill was not giving away anything. He was simply recognizing the current position of the Russian armies. Two days later Churchill wrote a long letter to Stalin about the Balkans in which he reduced their understanding to writing, ruled out fascism, granted that both the Russian system and ours offered securities to the toiling masses, suggested that governments should be established by free elections, and hoped that thereafter neither Great Britain nor Russia would “worry about them or interfere with them.” However, after reflection he decided not to give the letter to Stalin and to depend entirely on the meeting of minds represented by Stalin’s “tick” upon the sheet of paper bearing the percentages.³

This meeting of minds was the prelude to Yalta, and it was not superseded by Yalta. In his undelivered letter to Stalin, Churchill had tried to set down the formulas for keeping the Balkans under what he called “the free enterprise system controlled by universal suffrage,” and at Yalta these formulas were spelled out quite clearly, but there is no evidence that either Stalin or Churchill thought that the basic agreement made at Moscow on November 9 was repealed. On the contrary, Churchill had already cashed his side of the bargain, in nearly two months of hard fighting in Athens, when the Yalta conference met, and Stalin was already engaged in executing the conservatives in Bulgaria.

It is true that Washington intended the agreements Churchill made to be provisional, and on October 11 Churchill cabled to Roosevelt from Moscow that “nothing will be settled except preliminary agreements between Britain and Russia, subject to further discussion and melting down with you. On this basis I am sure you will not mind our trying to have a full meeting of minds with the Russians.”

The full meeting of minds was had, for the reason stated by Churchill in the same cable: “It is absolutely necessary we should try to get a common mind about the Balkans, so that we may prevent civil war breaking out in several countries, when probably you and I would be in sympathy with one side and U. J. (Uncle Joe) with the other.”⁴

This was the issue—civil war between anti-communists and communists—which on October 11, 1944, was just ahead in Greece and would quickly have to be decided in the other Balkan countries conceded to Russia at Moscow.

Bulgarian Rightists Crushed. Alarmed by the swift overthrow of the mighty communist-led EAM-ELAS in Greece, which began on December 3, 1944, the Russians proceeded to make sure that the Bulgarian army officers, who had massacred 12,000 leftist peasants in 1923, were crushed.⁵

For this purpose “Peoples Courts” to try alleged “war crimes” were set up on December 25, which cut down the officer caste “as with a scythe” and condemned scores of high officials in repeated mass trials. A single decree ousted 4000 office holders. This “fast and raw purge” was in full swing when the Yalta conference met and the trials continued until May 14, 1945. At that time the United Press correspondent in Istanbul estimated that 2007 Rightists had been executed and 3064 imprisoned on terms from one year to life.⁶

The Yalta Conference

Fourth Inaugural. By Christmas the advancing Russians were not far from Vienna. The need for a Big Three meeting was increasing, but Roosevelt could not go until after his Fourth Inauguration on January 20, 1945.

In his Inaugural address he compressed some of his deepest beliefs into brief compass. We have learned, he said, that “the only way to have a friend is to be one,” a principle which was the key to his Russian policy.

The place of the Yalta meeting had also caused controversy and delay. From the first, Hopkins had assured the President that there was not a ghost of a chance of getting Stalin to leave Russia with his armies advancing for the kill in Germany. Roosevelt accepted the Crimea as the meeting-place, but did not feel able to do so officially and publicly until after the election, knowing what an outcry there would be at his going so far to see Stalin again. Then the President’s close advisers, who in Hopkins’ opinion did not like or trust the Russians anyway, descended on him and forced further wavering and delay.⁷

Roosevelt’s Competence. On January 23, 1944, the President left Norfolk on the heavy cruiser Quincy. He had stood for his brief Inaugural address, hatless and coatless. He had a cold and his sinus trouble bothered him severely. Byrnes was worried about him on the way, but found that he had improved greatly by the time they reached Malta. He was a good sailor and sea trips always benefited him. It may well be that the trip to Yalta shortened Roosevelt’s life, but the legend that he was so far gone at Yalta that he hardly knew what he was agreeing to is not borne out by any of the records. Byrnes quotes long excerpts from the discussions at Yalta verbatim. They show the President making his contribution as clearly as anyone else. Sherwood’s full account of the conference reveals the President carrying his end throughout. Sherwood relates that at one point Roosevelt made a long speech in which he used his familiar tactics for dodging an issue—extra votes in the UN for Russia.⁸

Sherwood does believe that the President did make the most questionable concession of the Yalta Conference—his agreement in writing that the claims of Russia in Manchuria “shall be unquestionably fulfilled after Japan has been defeated”—at the very end of the Conference when he was tired and anxious to avoid further argument.⁹ Secretary of State Stettinius says also that toward the end of the Conference “the President naturally showed fatigue. However, he continued to explain the American position skilfully and distinctly, and he also served as a moderating influence when the discussions became heated.”¹⁰

Stettinius says emphatically “that at all times from Malta through the Crimean Conference and the Alexandria meeting I always found him to be mentally alert and fully capable of dealing with each situation as it developed. . . . The President’s ability to participate on fully equal terms day after day in the gruelling give-and-take of the conference table with such powerful associates as Churchill and Stalin is the best answer to these stories. . . . At Yalta the President was extremely steady and patient. At no time did he flare up. He was kind and sympathetic, but determined.”¹¹

This is saying a good deal about a man who during the long period of his leadership was unable to stand on his feet without great effort and considerable pain. No other world leader ever carried great responsibilities so successfully, and cheerfully, without being able to walk, or under any comparable physical handicap. The wonder is not that Roosevelt’s body gave out when it did, but that it sustained him so long.¹²

The Yalta Agreements

The principal subjects dealt with at Yalta were as follows:

1. Russian gains in the Far East

Of all the decisions made at Yalta, this settlement has occasioned the most controversy. How much justice was there in these settlements?

(a) Recognition of the autonomy of Outer Mongolia, that is of its separation from Chinese sovereignty, could hardly be avoided, since it had been an accomplished fact for twenty years.

(b) The return of the southern half of the long island of Sakhalin, lost to Japan after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, could not easily be questioned, if Russia was to recover any of her 1905 losses.

(c) The Kurile Islands, stretching from the tip of the great Russian peninsula Kamchatka and down to the northern end of Japan, are of great strategic value to Russia. Like southern Sakhalin they control the northern approaches to Russia’s maritime provinces. If Russia was to play the part in the war against Japan which we expected of her, she was entitled to them. No one at Yalta questioned or argued this point. Roosevelt saw “no difficulty whatsoever” about them.¹³ This was long before we came to feel that we should control all of the islands on the far side of the Pacific—up into China’s harbors. In 1945 no one dreamed of endangering Russia’s entry into the Japanese war over these islands.

(d) The recovery of a warm water outlet on the Yellow Sea, through Manchuria, was as strongly indicated. Roosevelt had apparently discussed this question with Chiang Kai-shek at Cairo and he broached it at Teheran. The internationalization of the Port of Dairen, with adequate facilities for Russia there, was a fair arrangement, and one which it was difficult to contest when Russia’s landlocked, ice-bound status is remembered.

(e) The restoration to Russia of a share in the Chinese Eastern and South Manchurian Railroads, together with the lease of Port Arthur as a naval base, was more questionable, especially since China was not represented at the Conference. This concession could well mean Russian domination of Manchuria. Joint control of the Chinese Eastern Railway by Soviet Russia and China had not meant that during the decade preceding Japan’s conquest of Manchuria, but the addition of the South Manchurian could mean Russian control of the entire area, unless China emerged as a strong, unified State. Her sovereignty over Manchuria was formally acknowledged. On the other hand, if some of Russia’s losses during the Russo-Japanese war were to be recovered, it was difficult to deny the others, and access to the Yellow Sea might not mean much unless implemented by a share in the control of the railroads leading to it.

When this is said, it is clear that heavy concessions were required of China, which her leaders later accepted in treaty form only because of the great weakness and division which afflicted China. What justification was there for this disposal of Chinese resources?

The overriding consideration was our desire for Russia’s aid in the war against Japan. Yalta was first and foremost a military conference. Our Joint Chiefs of Staff were strongly represented there and the thing they wanted above all else was an early and definite pledge of Russian action against Japan. We thought the best part of the Japanese Army was in Manchuria, backed by strong industries on the spot, and we wanted the Red Army to perform for us another vast campaign of annihilation, comparable to its operations in East Europe. If it would do so, huge American casualties would be avoided and the war greatly shortened.¹⁴

If the war against Japan went on to the final mopping-up which everybody supposed would be required, it would be an immense undertaking to land enough forces to clean out Manchuria, in addition to conquering Japan, island by island. Our Chiefs of Staff had told the President that the conquest of Honshu would cost 500,000 American casualties, and it would be of great value to us to have Russia prevent the transfer of crack divisions from Manchuria to Japan. We discovered later that the Japanese did not have as large forces in Manchuria as our intelligence services believed, but at Yalta our leaders had to proceed upon the assumption that the Red Army would be needed to contain and engage the best part of the Japanese forces, as in the case of Germany. The atomic bomb was a strong hope, but there were only verbal assurances of its coming success. None had been exploded and our military chiefs could not depend on it to close the war quickly. The chief reality of the moment was the belief that Russia’s army could greatly shorten the war and relieve us of one of the worst military undertakings imaginable. The very entry of Russia into the war against Japan might force Japan to make peace and enable us to avoid invading the Japanese home islands. It must be remembered also that Russia would have the military power to take what she wanted in the Far East. It was of real importance to China that Russia’s gains be limited by agreement.

Up to the Yalta Conference, Stalin had not made any demands in the Far East. On October 30, 1943, he had surprised and delighted Hull at the Moscow Conference by voluntarily pledging entry into the war against Japan after the defeat of Germany. At Teheran he repeated the same assurance, again without making conditions, though the main rewards for Russia’s participation in the war were discussed there. At Yalta he argued that he could not ask the Soviet peoples, after their unprecedented exertions, to undertake a new war unless he could assure them of tangible gains to compensate for further painful efforts. Though we may doubt the need of a dictatorship for such help with public opinion, our own deep reluctance to ask our troops for a second great effort on the other side of the world, the projected invasion of Japan, made it difficult to deny Stalin’s desire to know what Russia was to get out of it. Up to this point we had successfully rebuffed all of his efforts to validate Russia’s 1941 boundaries in Europe. Now we needed his aid in the Far East and it was difficult to refuse his terms, partly at China’s expense.

At this point it is necessary to reject the claim of the Chinese Nationalists that their later debacle was due to the Yalta concessions to Russia. The Kuomintang had lost China long before, by its failure to defend North China or even to organize guerrilla warfare there against Japan, by its abysmal corruption and inefficiency, by its stubborn and futile attempt to maintain a feudal agrarian system. The American Army shipped and flew Chiang’s troops into Manchuria and North China, after the defeat of Japan. It was the decisive lack of support from the Chinese people which made it impossible to remain there.

The critics of Yalta falsify the picture almost completely by talking from hindsight and failing to record the circumstances under which the military partners at Yalta negotiated. One of these factors was the knowledge that if Russia waited to attack Japan until we had invaded and with painful efforts subdued the Japanese islands, she could come in at the end, get a cheap victory and take whatever she wanted from China.¹⁵ It was to China’s interest to have Russia’s gains limited and recorded. At Yalta what Russia wanted was distinctly cut down. Stalin desired full control of both Dairen and Port Arthur, but compromised by making Dairen a free port. The Russians asked for ownership of the Manchurian Railways, but accepted joint control with the Chinese. The waning Chinese Government was lucky to have someone to negotiate for it.¹⁶

It was also very satisfied with the Yalta concessions to Russia. The Sino-Russian treaty of August 1945, embodying the Yalta terms, obligated the Soviets to recognize the authority of the Nationalist Government and to aid its recovery of Manchuria. It was under this treaty that Chiang reoccupied the great centers of North China.¹⁷

Secretary Acheson testified that “the grave danger was that they (the Russians) would really wait until the war was over . . . and they would come in and do what they wished.”¹⁸ Nor was Russia’s entry into the Japanese war merely an official concern. The American people wanted it. On July 25, 1945, long after Yalta, Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin made a speech in which he said: “In millions of American homes, mothers, fathers and sweethearts are waiting anxiously for news of Russia’s intentions. . . . They know that if Russia declared war, if her bombing fleets roared out of Vladivostok over to Japan these acts might be the final ones to force a quick surrender of the Japs. Thus countless American lives are at stake in Russia’s decision. . . . Let no one say that we are meddling in Russia’s business when we want them to carry their load in the Far East. . . . I would be remiss in my obligations as a United States Senator if I did not voice, in all humility but with all the force at my command, the feeling of millions of Americans that Russia do her part in the Pacific.”¹⁹

The fact that the Yalta arrangements affecting China were embodied in a secret protocol, which was only produced from the White House safe after Roosevelt’s death, added greatly to the criticism of the Yalta accords, and to the rumors that Yalta had been the source of many secret deals. Secrecy was essential, since Chiang Kai-shek could not be told without revealing the fact of Russia’s approaching entry into the war against Japan, and nobody believed that this secret could be kept in Chungking. In February 1945 the invasion of Germany was just beginning, from both sides, and no one wanted Japan to strike first from Manchuria, while Russia was still fully engaged in Germany and very vulnerable in Siberia. That might well make Russia’s aid abortive and greatly prolong the war. Roosevelt was keenly aware at Yalta that anything said to the Chinese “was known to the whole world in twenty-four hours.” Because of this danger he decided that when the time came to inform Chiang Kai-shek he would send an army officer as a courier through Moscow to Chungking.²⁰ There was too much at stake to have any slips.

Stalin had first estimated that it would take six months to move some thirty divisions the six thousand miles from Germany to Manchuria, doubling his forces there. At Yalta, after reflection, he shortened that period to three months and made it a pledge. As soon as possible he would begin the movement to the Far East and he asked for the strongest assurances of secrecy. This was the reason for the secret protocol. Apparently Roosevelt expected to iron out the deal with Chiang at the proper time, when Russia was ready to strike. When that time came he was dead.

As events did develop, Russia actually fought against Japan only a few days before the atomic bomb gave Tokyo a perfect excuse for surrendering. Then it appeared to many, especially to Russia’s critics, that she had made an excessively good bargain, that she had rushed in at the very end of the war and made great gains, without contributing much effort. When compared with our own years of vast expenditure, hard toil and bitter fighting in the Pacific, Russia’s winnings seemed very disproportionate.

Yet this was all hindsight. Russia kept her part of the bargain. She was ready to strike Japan and did so at the time agreed upon and her part in the Japanese war would have been as valuable to us as we had hoped had not the circumstances greatly changed. Then it was easy to say that Russia had won too much too easily. Those who made this complaint most bitterly overlooked two things: that Russia had contained a large part of Japan’s best troops in Manchuria during our entire war with Japan; and that it was a global war which we fought together. In estimating sacrifices Russia’s immense contribution in the war against Germany has to be added in. It seemed grasping to many of us that Russia demanded increased geographic security in the Far East and later in Europe, but it did not look that way to the Russians, who had suffered a Japanese occupation of Siberia from 1918 to 1922 and a German occupation of most of European Russia during a similar eternity after 1941.

It cannot be too strongly emphasized that in February 1945, our military prospects were still grim in both Europe and Asia. We had hardly recovered from the shock of Hitler’s counter-offensive in the Ardennes in Europe and in the Pacific no one could see the end. Much had been accomplished. The Japanese Navy was practically eliminated, but the stubborn island fighting of the Japanese had convinced nearly everyone that they were not subject to rational considerations and would fight to the last man. The bloody battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were still ahead of us and the Japanese cities had not yet been burned.

Time and manpower were becoming crucial factors. We had reached the end of our manpower resources at the time of Yalta, with two wars of incalculable duration still to win. Thirty battle hardened Russian divisions transferred to the Japanese theater therefore looked very good to us. Not only that, the American people were naturally war weary. After the defeat of Hitler it would be asking a great deal of them to ship their sons around the world to fight again. People were already wanting their boys back home.²¹ Stettinius says that early in 1945 “there was already a groundswell of public opinion demanding that our forces be returned home as soon as the war was over.”²²

General Douglas MacArthur shared the view of nearly all of his military colleagues in Washington. James T. Forrestal states, after a meeting at Mac Arthur’s headquarters, on February 28, 1945—after Yalta—that Mac Arthur felt

we should secure the commitment of the Russians to active and vigorous prosecution of a campaign against the Japanese in Manchukuo of such proportions as to pin down a very large part of the Japanese army; that once this campaign was engaged we should then launch an attack on the home islands . . . and that this could not be done without the assurance that the Japanese would be heavily engaged by the Russians in Manchuria.

MacArthur doubted that anything less than sixty Russian divisions would be sufficient. Since the Russians had not asked for material for such a force he feared that they might try to persuade us into a China mainland campaign which would be more costly than an invasion of the Japanese islands.²³

General Albert Wedemeyer, our Commander in China, and a supporter of MacArthur, also told General Marshall in February 1945, the Yalta month, that Russia should be brought in against Japan in order to prevent her from holing in “in the Shantung industrial crescent and up in Manchuria.” He was “afraid the war would go on for a long time, and we would lose a lot of allied lives; whereas if the Soviet would come in it would precipitate our final victory.”²⁴

Nor did this deep desire for heavy Russian participation in the Japanese war disappear until after the explosion of the test A-bomb on July 16, 1945, had opened up the prospect of ending the war without Russian aid. Secretary of War Stimson recorded that “As we understood it in July, there was a very strong possibility that the Japanese Government might determine upon resistance to the end, in all the areas of the Far East under its control.” He was informed that it might cost a million American casualties, aside from those of our allies, to crush Japanese resistance.²⁵

By any rational standards Japan was defeated in July 1945. By that time her air force was knocked from the skies and she was helpless under our bombers and naval guns. But our belief in the irrationality of Japanese fighting and dying for the Emperor still persisted strongly—to the extent that we let the Japanese keep the Emperor, in order that he might order them to surrender. In February 1945 all this was still in the future. Then the time factor was urgent. It would take the Russians several months to get ready to deal Japan the big blow we desired. It is a huge undertaking to transport thirty divisions 6000 miles overland, with all their weapons and equipment, and we needed firm assurance that the Russians would do so as promptly as possible.

Since our interest in Russian participation against Japan was believed to be great, there is little basis for the charge that Yalta was simply another case of appeasement. There is a superficial resemblance in the fact that at both Munich and Yalta the assets of a friendly power were given away, but there is an enormous difference in the circumstances. At Munich, the Western leaders gave a maniacal adventurer the indispensable ramparts and resources he needed for a drive toward world mastery. At Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill yielded some Japanese and Chinese assets to their mighty ally in the gigantic war which had resulted, in order to be sure of her greatly desired aid in bringing the war to a close. Moreover, China had not controlled these assets for forty years.

Nor was China sacrificed as Czechoslovakia had been. It was Roosevelt who had insisted all through the war that China must be recognized as a great power after the war and made a member of the Big Four. Both Churchill and Stalin were skeptical that China would really be such a power, but they went along, even to the extent of allotting China a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. Meanwhile, Roosevelt was struggling with might and main to keep Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in the war, by the Burma campaign, the gruelling airline over the hump of the world and by sending all the military aid he could spare. He also obtained from Stalin a pledge that he would make a treaty of friendship with Chiang, which Stalin did, believing, as will be developed in another chapter, that Chiang would be the ruler of China.

Chiang Kai-shek, who was impotent in North China and Manchuria, did not protest the Yalta bargain at China’s expense. It was the Chinese Communists, who were strong in this area, who protested. After a visit to Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia, following Tito’s break with Russia, Joseph Alsop stated that Stalin tried to force Mao Tse-tung into a highly unfavorable coalition with the Chinese Nationalists, on the terms laid down by General Patrick Hurley, but Mao flatly refused. Tito also stated that Stalin had attempted to force him to bring King Peter back to Yugoslavia, and that Stalin tried to carry out the 50–50 division of influence on Yugoslavia which he had arranged with Churchill at Moscow.²⁷

Vladimir Dedijer confirmed these statements, adding that in 1948 Stalin tried to persuade the Yugoslavs to stop helping the Greek rebels and that when he came to organize the Cominform in 1947 he carefully left out the Greek Communist party.²⁸

2. Three Votes for Russia in the United Nations

At Yalta, Stalin asked for separate membership in the UN for the three Soviet states facing Europe: Lithuania, Byelorussia and the Ukraine, though he soon dropped his claim for Lithuania. The unsurpassed suffering of the other two during the war, still fresh in everyone’s mind, made it difficult to deny their claims on grounds of contribution to the creation of the new world of the United Nations.

The Russian claim had two objectives: to secure representation for the U.S.S.R. in the General Assembly a little more in proportion to the huge size and weight of the Soviet Union, and to give it additional voices for debate, not only in the UN but in other post-war conferences. Moscow did not want to find itself isolated and alone in the UN later, with only one spokesman among nearly sixty.

Knowing that the proposal would be strongly attacked in the United States, Roosevelt sought to shelve it, but the British, thinking of India and the British Dominions, supported Russia and the three votes for Russia were approved with the proviso, urged by Byrnes, that the United States should also have three votes. Stalin agreed cordially but the President later dropped this idea.²⁹

The announcement of the agreement was botched badly. Roosevelt did not like it and he said nothing about it in his Yalta report to Congress. The shadow of Woodrow Wilson was ever with him. He was determined to succeed where Wilson had “failed.” Wilson’s opponents had raised a violent, sustained and effective clamor about the six votes of the British countries in the League of Nations Assembly. Would not Roosevelt’s enemies do the same about three votes for Russia?

Actually the American people had learned enough to avoid being stampeded again by the same specious outcry. It was a mistake not to publish the agreement. When, to buttress himself in the Congress, Roosevelt appointed Representatives Bloom and Eaton, Senators Connally and Vandenberg to the San Francisco Conference delegation he had to tell them about the three votes for Russia, on March 23, 1945. On the 29th the story was “leaked” to the New York Herald Tribune, and the press descended on the White House with the flinty sternness that it did not have to simulate where Russia was concerned. Here was the President making soft and secret deals with the Russians! In Roosevelt’s absence Secretary of State Stettinius had to take the rap and the uproar helped greatly to spread the legend of the ailing President’s terrible and sinister failures at Yalta.

Unfortunately the small breach made by the concession of three votes to the U.S.S.R. in the principle of one vote to each member of the United Nations has not resulted in a more equitable voting arrangement. The vote of Panama is still equal to that of the United States.

3. The veto power in the United Nations

In the opinion of Byrnes, who attended the Yalta Conference, our chief objective there was to secure final agreement for the creation of the United Nations. This was a crucial objective, since the outlook for the world would indeed be grim unless another league of nations, could be created with the Soviet Union a participating member. Otherwise, the world would face the prospect of a rush to fill vacuums and a new arms race between an immensely more powerful Russia and the Western Allies.

Before the United Nations could be created the deadlock over the veto question had to be settled. At the Dumbarton Oaks Conference the Soviets had maintained that the veto must be absolute, while we had contended that it must not cover the discussion of charges of aggression. A Great Power holding the right of veto would have the full right to prevent any action against itself, or any vote labelling it as an aggressor but not the right to prevent another State from stating its case when the Great Power was involved in a dispute. At Yalta, Stalin still continued to argue that the stating of a case against a Great Power implied a demand for decision. The matter was “much more serious than merely expressing an opinion.” He insisted that all questions are decided by votes and “we are interested in the decisions and not in the discussions.” He assured Churchill that if China demanded the return of Hong Kong she would not be alone. Others would vote with her. When Churchill said that Britain could then use her veto Stalin replied that there was another danger. His colleagues in Moscow could not forget the case which occurred in 1939 during the Russian-Finnish War, when at the instigation of Britain and France the League of Nations expelled the Soviet Union from the League and mobilized world opinion” against her.³⁰

After further exposition of the American formula for restricting the veto Stalin accepted it, and before Roosevelt had made any concessions on other subjects.³¹

4. The control of Germany

In the early part of the Conference there was general agreement that Germany should be dismembered into several states, but later this idea fell into the background. Both the British and the Americans were reluctant to attempt to collect reparations from Germany, remembering their dismal experiences after the First World War and fearing that they might have to support an impoverished Germany. The Russians, fired by the knowledge of their immeasurable losses at Germany’s hand, insisted that heavy reparations in kind must be exacted. They felt that eighty per cent of Germany’s heavy industry could be removed without impoverishing the Germans and insisted that reparations should total $20,000,000,000 in value, of which half should go to the Soviet Union.

The President agreed that the Reparations Commission “should take, in its initial studies as a basis for discussion, the suggestion of the Soviet Government, that the total sum of reparations should be twenty billions and that fifty per cent of it should go to the Soviet Union.” The President meant no more than this statement said, that they would start exploring the reparations question on the basis of the Soviet suggestion, but the Russians ever afterward maintained, with apparent sincerity, that they had been assured of ten billions reparations at Yalta.

The Three agreed heartily and cordially upon a program for the control of Germany. They said:

“It is our inflexible purpose to destroy German militarism and nazism and to insure that Germany will never again be able to disturb the peace of the world. We are determined to disarm and disband all German armed forces: break up for all time the German General Staff that has repeatedly contrived the resurgence of German militarism; remove or destroy all German military equipment; eliminate or control all German industry that could be used for military production; bring all war criminals to just and swift punishment and exact reparation in kind for the destruction wrought by the Germans; wipe out the Nazi party, Nazi laws, organizations and institutions; remove all Nazi and militarist influences from public office and from the cultural and economic life of the German people; and take in harmony such other measures in Germany as may be necessary to the future peace and safety of the world. 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.”³²

Doubtless it was inevitable that differences of opinion should arise about the methods for applying these policies. It was nevertheless almost incredible that four years after Yalta there should be a complete split over Germany, with hot heads on both sides planning to use the Germans against their former allies, and with Nazi-minded Germans expecting to recover their power by fighting on one side or the other.

5. Poland

Frontiers. When the Yalta Conference opened, the American policy of postponing all discussion of Russia’s western boundaries until the peace conference had broken down. Starting in great force late in December, from a line stretching from East Prussia to Budapest, the Red armies had swept two hundred miles across Poland to the Oder, thirty miles from Berlin, and the Upper Danube region was being rapidly overrun, while the Western Allies had not yet occupied all of the left bank of the Rhine. The long delay in opening the Second Front was now working to Russia’s advantage.

The West was now glad to propose the 1919 Curzon Line, which was substantially Russia’s 1941 border, as the boundary between Russia and Poland. When this proposal was made, Stalin spoke with stronger emotion than at any other time during the Conference. He stood up to emphasize his strong feeling on the subject. The bitter memory of Russia’s exclusion from the Paris Peace Conference and of the West’s effort to stamp out Bolshevism at its birth boiled up within him. “You would drive us into shame,” he declared. The White Russians and the Ukrainians would say that Stalin and Molotov were far less reliable defenders of Russia than Curzon and Clemenceau.³³

Yet after long and earnest discussion Stalin accepted the Curzon Line and even agreed voluntarily that there should be digressions from that line of five to eight kilometers in favor of Poland in some regions. He did not mind the Line itself, which Churchill declared in the House of Commons, on February 27, 1945, he had always believed to be “just and right,” but he did not want it called by a hated name. The West had long since forgotten the events of 1919, but it was not so easy for the Red leaders, who felt that they had suffered great injustice in that period.

In the Dunn-Atherton memorandum of February 4, 1942, the State Department had expected to be able to hold Russia in check by withholding agreement to her 1941 boundaries. Now Stalin made it clear that he meant to move Poland’s western borders deep into Germany, back to the western Neisse-Oder River lines, taking not only East Prussia and all of Silesia but Pomerania and the tip of Brandenburg, back to and including Stettin. From six to nine million additional Germans would be evicted, though most would have fled, and Poland would receive far more from Germany than the poor territories, including the great Pripet Marshes, which she lost to Russia. Stalin declared that he preferred to continue the war a little longer, “although it costs us blood,” in order to give Poland compensation in the West at the expense of the Germans.³⁴

By this time Churchill was not so cordial toward moving Poland westward as he had been at Teheran, where he and Eden had both heartily approved the idea. After “a prolonged study of the Oder line on a map,” at Teheran, Churchill “liked the picture.” He would tell the Poles, he said, that they had been “given a fine place to live in, more than three hundred miles each way.”³⁵

At Yalta he thought more about the six million Germans who would have to leave, trying to find work in Germany, and Roosevelt objected to the Western Neisse River being chosen in the south, instead of the Eastern Neisse, both of which flow into the Oder.³⁶

The issue was left in abeyance, presumably for the peace conference. However, there was no real question of the justice of creating a strong Poland, both industrially and agriculturally, and one unplagued by large minorities of Germans or Russians. The moving of millions of the German master-race, from the very heart of Junkerdom, to make room for the Polish Slavs whom they had enslaved and openly planned to exterminate was a drastic operation, but there was little doubt that it was historically justified.

Government. Of more importance to the West than Poland’s boundaries was, the character of her government. At Yalta the West still believed that Eastern Europe could be kept in its orbit, in spite of the onrushing Soviet armies. Though little democracy had ever been practised in this region, and much of it was still ruled by feudalistic means, it was taken for granted that at least the forms of Western democracy would be established in this area and Western capitalism preserved within it. Believing devoutly as they did in Anglo-Saxon institutions, it was important to both Roosevelt and Churchill that the Poles should have them.

The issue was acute because the exiled Polish Government in London, supported in the main by Britain, was still competing with the new Lublin Government formed behind the Red Army. More time was spent in trying to marry these incompatibles than over any subject discussed at Yalta. The result was an agreement that the Lublin Government should be “reorganized on a broader democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from the Poles abroad,” and pledged to hold “free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot.” All “democratic and anti-Nazi parties” were to have the right to campaign.

Roosevelt acted as moderator of the long debate on this issue. It was a matter of principle with Churchill, since Britain had declared war in behalf of Poland. To Stalin it was a matter of life and death. He made this completely clear. Speaking with “great earnestness,” he said: “For the Russian people, the question of Poland is not only a question of honor but also a question of security. Throughout history, Poland has been the corridor through which the enemy has passed into Russia. Twice in the last thirty years our enemies, the Germans, have passed through this corridor. It is in Russia’s interest that Poland should be strong and powerful, in a position to shut the door of this corridor by her own force. . . . It is necessary that Poland should be free, independent in power. Therefore, it is not only a question of honor but of life and death for the Soviet state.”³⁷

In other words, the Soviet Union was determined to create a Poland so strong as to be a powerful bulwark against Germany and so closely tied to Russia that there would never be any question of her serving as a cordon sanitaire against the Soviets or posing as an independent, balancing power in between Russia and Germany. Byrnes says that invariably thereafter the Soviets used the same security argument to justify their course in Poland. This reasoning was also as inevitable as anything could be. Any free elections that were to be held in Poland would have to produce a government in which Moscow had complete confidence, and all pressure from the West for free voting by anti-Soviet elements in Poland would be met by restrictions on voting by these elements.

6. Liberated Europe

In even greater degree the same rule applied to the remainder of Eastern Europe, where the upper classes had generally collaborated with the Nazis, even to the extent of sending millions of their peasants into Russia as a part of Hitler’s armies. But at Yalta the conflicting expectations of East and West were merged into an agreement by the Big Three to assist all liberated countries in Europe “to create democratic institutions of their own choice.”

In any case “where in their judgment conditions require” [italics added] they would “form interim governmental authorities 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.” Other similar affirmations in the Declaration on Liberated Europe seemed to assure democratic institutions on the Western model. Later it developed that the Soviets had a very different interpretation of democracy, which will be discussed later, and their judgment never told them that the Big Three should unite in establishing democratic conditions, as we understand them, within their zone of influence.

Professor McNeill thinks that at Yalta, Stalin did not fully realize the dilemma which faced him, that he thought the exclusion of the anti-Soviet voters from East European elections would not be greatly resented by his allies, while neither Roosevelt nor Churchill frankly faced “the fact that, in Poland at least, genuinely free democratic elections would return governments unfriendly to Russia,” by any definition of international friendliness. Also war-time propaganda and cooperation had “obscured the differences between Russian and Western ideas of democracy,” and it seemed better to have them covered by verbal formulae than to imperil the military victories over Germany and Japan.³⁸

The application of these formulae could not please both sides, for they really attempted to marry the impossible to the inevitable. While obliged to concede governments in East Europe allied with the Soviet Union instead of opposed to it, we thought we had preserved our social and economic system in East Europe.

This illusion was described in a far-sighted editorial in the New York Herald Tribune, on March 5, 1947, in connection with the submission of the satellite peace treaties to the Senate. In doing so Marshall and Byrnes were “asking for the ratification of a grim lesson in the facts of international life.” We had entertained exaggerated ideas about our victory automatically establishing our system throughout the world. “We were troubled about the fate of the Baltic States. Yalta left us with comforting illusions of a Western capitalist-democratic political economy reigning supreme up to the Curzon line and the borders of Bessarabia.” [Italics added.]

This is a penetrating description of our post-war illusion, which applied to other areas than East Europe. The same editorial continued that “We expected to democratize Japan and Korea and to see a new China pattern itself easily on our institutions. We expected, in short, that most of the world would make itself over in our image and that it would be relatively simple, from such a position, to deal with the localized aberrations of the Soviet Union.” Yet actually “the image corresponded in no way to the actualities of the post-war world. Neither our military, our economic nor our ideological power reached far enough” to determine the fate of East Europe. Then the editorial added prophetically: “how far they may reach in Asia is yet undetermined, but they fall far short of our dreams of the war conferences.”

Here is the best short explanation of the origins of the Cold War that has been written. Failing to heed the lesson so clearly contained in the satellite treaties, President Truman re-declared the Cold War on March 12, 1947, in the Truman Doctrine, exactly one week after the Herald Tribune editorial was written, and a year after the Cold War had been announced by Churchill at Fulton, Missouri, in Truman’s presence. Then China promptly went Communist, and Mr. Truman had to fight the interminable Korean war for the democratization of Korea before we learned how far our writ did “reach in Asia.”

Years of war, strain, and hatred; of heavy arms expenditures and constant danger of another world war had to ensue before the United States could bring itself to accept the two chief results of World War II—Communist control of East Europe and China.

A New Balance of Power. While the Cold War raged it was easy to blame it all on Yalta. Yet, in summarizing a series of careful essays on the Yalta Conference, Forrest Pogue could find no basis for Yalta becoming “a symbol for betrayal and a shibboleth for the opponents of Roosevelt and of international cooperation.” When the Yalta Papers were finally published with great fanfare they had revealed no betrayal by anyone. The United States could not be made strong “by irrational denunciation of its leaders and cries of treason which grow out of frustration and fear.” The country, said Pogue, which constantly tears at its vitals and heedlessly destroys the reputation of its loyal public servants cannot give the sane and courageous guidance so desperately needed to calm the fears and solve the problems of a troubled world.”³⁹

The truth was, Pogue concluded, that the concessions made by the West at Yalta “reflected the powerful position of the Soviet Union in Europe and its potential power in the Far East.” This was “the overriding fact about the conference; without its comprehension, the meaning of Yalta is sure to be missed.”⁴⁰

Allied Unity. There remains the question: “Was the powerful impression of unity created by the Yalta Conference purely illusory?”

The long official report of the Conference, with its nine different subjects and signed by the three world leaders was perhaps the most impressive document of the war period. It had a splendid reception, except in isolationist circles. Herbert Hoover and Arthur H. Vandenberg praised it.⁴¹ It seemed that the Conference had grappled with all the urgent issues of the time and, better still, had laid down continuing procedures for the handling of future problems and controversies, both in Europe and in the world itself. Certainly no more could have been asked of any conference. Were all of these hopeful and forward-looking agreements entered into by the Soviet leaders with the intention of cynically violating them?

It is certain that the leaders of the Conference all felt the weight of the responsibility upon them and that they believed that they had done a good job. The final paragraphs of the report reaffirmed their common determination to maintain and strengthen in the peace the unity which had won the war. This was a sacred obligation to their own peoples and to all the peoples. They looked forward to “the greatest opportunity in all history” to create the essential conditions for a secure peace.

The Americans left the Conference with a feeling of exultation that so much had been accomplished. Harry Hopkins said later: “We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had all been praying for and talking about for so many years. We were absolutely certain that we had won the first great victory of the peace—and, by ‘we,’ I mean all of us, the whole civilized human race. The Russians had proved that they could be reasonable and farseeing and there wasn’t any doubt in the minds of the President or any of us that we could live with them and get along with them peacefully for as far into the future as any of us could imagine.”⁴² Hopkins added one reservation, that they would not feel so confident if Stalin should die.

After refuting the rumors that he himself had been ill during the Yalta period, Roosevelt told a joint session of Congress, on March 1, 1945: “I come from the Crimean Conference with a firm belief that we have made a good start on the road to a world of peace.” He had never for an instant wavered in his “belief that an agreement to insure world peace and security can be reached.” Commenting on the occasion, Ernest K. Lindley, one of the best Washington correspondents, wrote that the President obviously felt well physically and was confident of the success of his mission.⁴³

Byrnes’ stenographic report of the Conference contains evidence that Stalin felt deeply the necessity for unity among the great allies after the war. Said Stalin: “It is not so difficult to keep unity in time of war since there is a joint aim to defeat the common enemy, which is clear to everyone. The difficult task will come after the war when diverse interests tend to divide the Allies. It is our duty to see that our relations in peace-time are as strong as they have been in war.” The importance of unity was strongly in Stalin’s mind, for on another occasion, in discussing the United Nations, he said: “I think that the task is to secure our unity in the future, and, for this purpose, we must agree upon such a covenant as would best serve that purpose. The danger in the future is the possibility of conflicts among ourselves. If there be unity, then the danger from Germany will not be great. Now we have to think how we can create a situation” favoring such unity, he continued, and added, “We will keep a united front.”

They all knew, said Stalin, “that as long as the three of them lived none of them would involve their countries in aggressive actions,” but after all ten years later none of them might be present. A new generation not knowing the horrors of war would arise. It was therefore their obligation to create “such an organization as would secure the peace for at least fifty years.”⁴⁴

It is difficult to believe that Stalin, who had won the respect and confidence of everyone at the Conference, would have made these statements if he expected to violate all of the agreements made at Yalta and split the world disastrously in two. The statements quoted reflect an awareness that this could occur, but also a desire that it should not happen. Stalin did not conduct himself at Yalta like a man who intended to violate all his commitments. His military position was also so strong, and growing stronger hourly, that he could have avoided making so many agreements looking toward post-war cooperation.

In his report to the House of Commons, on February 27, 1945, Churchill stated clearly his interpretation of the inner meaning of Yalta, saying: “The impression I brought back from the Crimea, and from all my other contacts, is that Marshal Stalin and the Soviet leaders wish to live in honorable friendship and equity with the Western democracies. I feel also that their word is their bond. I know of no government which stands to its obligations, even in its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government. I decline absolutely to embark here on a discussion about Russian good faith. It is quite evident that these matters touch the whole future of the world. Somber indeed would be the fortunes of mankind if some awful schism arose between the Western democracies and the Russian Soviet Union, if all the future world organizations were rent asunder, and if new cataclysms of inconceivable violence destroyed all that is left of the treasures and liberties of mankind.”⁴⁵

Here, also, was the keen realization that the world could be disastrously split, with fatal consequences, but there was the most positive affirmation of belief in the desire of the Soviet leaders to live in peace with the West.

It can be said that the Soviet leaders were dominated inexorably by some Marxian dialectic and that just as soon as Germany was conquered they would push on toward the conquest of the world for communism. Conceivably, but to explain everything which has happened since Yalta as the inevitable and infallible working of such a categorical imperative stretches credulity. There were too many opportunities for normal human disagreement in the application of the Yalta agreements, too much probability that two very different ways of life could not easily be reconciled in the power vacuum of a ruined and devastated Europe.⁴⁶

At the time the Yalta Conference adjourned there can hardly be any serious doubt that both sides wanted to cooperate, not only to win the two wars which still raged, but to live together in the post-war world. But this did not extinguish the intention of each side to restore or establish in the areas coming under its control its own kind of government. Churchill had already made that wholly clear in Italy and Greece. Stalin had already done the same in Bulgaria and he now moved to coordinate Rumania.

Rumania Forced to the Left

As soon as the Yalta decisions became known the Leftist forces in Rumania moved to seize control, before the Yalta formulas could be put into effect. A government headed by seventy-year-old General Radescu had taken office on December 5, 1944. His government was Rightist in sympathies. Naturally it did not purge the army of pro-fascist elements or move very fast toward splitting up the landed estates. Marshal Malinovsky also complained that it did not preserve order. He alleged that so-called Maniu gangs attacked people of Hungarian nationality.

On their side the Communists had organized a National Democratic Front in October, composed of the Communists and several small groups brought in for appearances, and obtained forty per cent of the seats in the Cabinet. On February 12 the Front filled a hall and prevented the Prime Minister from making a speech. On February 22 a Tass dispatch from Moscow alleged that the Rumanian army had arrested a local Front council at Craiova after a large Front rally. Demonstrations multiplied and the Moscow radio charged that on February 24 many citizens had been killed and wounded by the Rumanian army at a demonstration in Bucharest. Radescu was accused of provoking the situation to justify him in taking “Greek” measures.47 The nine Front ministers, headed by Deputy Premier Peter Groza, resigned.

Groza Imposed. On February 24 the American and British members of the Allied Control Council for Rumania were denied a meeting by the Soviet chairman, and on the 27th Andrei Vishinsky went to Bucharest from Moscow and demanded the dismissal of the Radescu Government. The demand was repeated to King Michael the next day. The King was given two hours to comply and, to emphasize the warning, the royal door was slammed with such force that the plaster cracked around it. Michael attempted to appoint Prince Stirby, but was forced to accept Groza, and Groza’s Cabinet list, on March 6. Molotov bluntly rejected a request of Roosevelt, through Harriman, that an Allied commission be set up in Bucharest to safeguard the Yalta agreements.⁴⁸

Contemporary newspaper comment did not greatly regret the advent of the Groza Government. Writing from London, John MacCormac thought that thus far Russia had shown forbearance. With the Germans still in force in neighboring Yugoslavia she could not afford to have an unreliable government in Rumania. He thought the solution not a revolutionary one, but it was symptomatic of the social conflicts generated by the war and unresolved by liberation. Pertinax, the noted French correspondent, observed that no one should wonder that Vishinsky had promptly settled Radescu’s fate. The leadership of the Rumanian liberals and peasants was hopelessly out of tune with the times. The new Cabinet was servile to the Reds and it was rapidly transforming the social structure of Rumania.⁴⁹

Such a transformation was badly needed. A keen analyst has observed that “the social crime of Rumania’s interwar rulers was greater than that of other eastern European governments,” because they preserved “inordinate rural squalor” in the midst of great natural wealth. With “the most fertile soil on earth” Rumanian production per hectare, one-third of Denmark’s, stood at the bottom in Europe. Her rulers contained “the greatest percentage of plain unreconstructed home-grown Fascists” outside of Germany. They had been “unmitigatedly brutal in stamping out not only Reds but also pinks,” Jews and peasants who engaged in politics.⁵⁰

Later it was clear to everyone that Russia had moved swiftly and roughly to establish a communist government in Rumania which would break the economic and social power of the conservatives, take a large share of the business profits in Rumania and bind that country firmly to the Soviet Union as a satellite state. In other words, the Soviets were doing in Rumania what Churchill had already done in Greece, with more justification and with little bloodshed. The old regime in Rumania had fought Russia during the war and had done its best to destroy the Soviet Union, while the Greek people had fought as Britain’s allies and expected that liberation would also free them from the dominance of their fascist and royalist rulers. However, Churchill’s determination to hold control of the Mediterranean combined with his social conservatism and love of monarchy to frustrate social change in Greece. He maneuvered steadily to prevent the Left from gaining power in Greece and at length prevented it from doing so in a bloody war which lasted two months. Then Rightist reaction and terror held full sway in Greece for years to come, in the interest of the Right. In Rumania communist terror permanently suppressed the Rightist elements and ruled the country, for the benefit of the Left.

“Democracy” and “Free Elections.” At Yalta, Roosevelt hoped he had prevented from happening the very thing which did happen swiftly in Rumania. It had been agreed that the liberated peoples should “create democratic institutions of their own choice” by “free and unfettered elections” in which “all democratic and anti-Nazi parties” should have a part. Then it transpired that democracy and free elections meant very different things to the two sides.

The diplomatic correspondent of the London Times, who had recently been in Russia, gave a glimpse of the chasm which these words were expected to cover, as early as April 12, 1945. In answer to the question “What is democratic reconstruction?” he wrote: “Where the Western Governments lay stress on the political liberty for all ranks (except for the proven collaborators) and on the need for orderly or gradual progress by ballot, Soviet writers dwell on economic inequalities, on the war records of some of the propertied classes, and on the urgent programmes of the organized workers’ and peasants’ parties. Democracy to them is democracy of the Left.”

To the question “What is a government friendly to the Soviet Union?” he replied: “In the Soviet view it is a question not simply of policy but of proof, and proof comes only when all parties and economic groups which played a dubious part either before or during the war have been excluded from power, when influential landlords have given place to smaller holders and when the economic and political basis of the country provides the guarantee of stability in policy.”

The American view, which was fully expressed through Roosevelt at Yalta, was that after some proven collaborators with the enemy had been punished the three Allies would assure absolutely free elections in Eastern Europe to determine the future of those countries. We sought to preserve the power of the top social strata which had long ruled these countries. To the Soviets this was incomprehensible. They assumed that practically all of the upper classes had been collaborators. To them, all capitalists, all large landowners, all aristocrats and royalists were enemies of the people. They had been crushed and destroyed in Russia and it would be wicked in their sight to leave them in control of the Rumanian or Polish peoples. When all these elements had been swept from power—and the social, economic and political power of the Church broken—then you could have “free elections.” That is, the great masses of the people could be allowed to vote for the leaders and programs proposed for their benefit. No other kind of election could be “democratic” in their view because “the enemies of the people” would influence or determine the result.

The Russian conception of democracy, says Crankshaw, “is not, as we think, a humbug. It means government for the people with the consent of the people.” He adds that temperamentally “the Russians are indisputably anticompromisers,” from which we get the strange situation that the consent of the people may be largely forced, certainly in the early stages, and that no dissent is tolerated.⁵¹

This is certainly not democracy as we understand it, or as the Greeks defined it. The Russians should get another word for their conception of government in the interest of the great masses of the people. They have, nevertheless, fastened upon the word and have convinced themselves that their definition of democracy is as valid as ours. It would also be impossible for them to apply our conception of democracy in lands conquered by them. If they did, they would stultify their belief in their own system, which they hold with the passionate fervor of a religion. This was the decisive fact which the West forgot, or perhaps did not understand, in composing the Yalta agreements. Having total confidence in the rightness and righteousness of our way of life, we assumed that the Russians would apply it in Eastern Europe. We took it for granted that they knew that they had a bad, inferior and wicked way of life and that they would confess it by accepting ours in all the liberated territories.

As events speedily proved, we expected the impossible. It was as impossible for the Russians to conduct free elections, Western style, in Rumania, as it was that General MacArthur should go into Japan and conclude that out of deference to our great Russian ally he ought to install communism in some of the Japanese islands, or semi-communism in all of them. The very thought is incredible, inconceivable. We know that communism is wholly wrong and could not think of giving it the slightest aid or recognition. Yet we expected the Russian Communists, who are fanatically convinced that they have the one true and right system of government, to accept our way of life in Poland and the Balkans.

Roosevelt’s Last Days

As soon as Rumania had been “coordinated” by the U.S.S.R., disagreement arose over the composition of the new Polish Government which had been agreed upon at Yalta. The Yalta agreement said that the Allied Commission for Poland would consult in the first instance with members of the existing “Provisional Government and with other Polish Democratic leaders from within Poland and from abroad,” with a view to the reorganization of the government. The Western leaders thought this should lead to a completely new government in which all of the conflicting Polish groups would be merged, but on March 2 Ambassador Harriman reported that Molotov was insisting that only Poles acceptable to the Lublin Government should be consulted. This was Molotov’s interpretation of the phrase “in the first instance,” an interpretation against which Roosevelt protested in a message to Stalin on April 1, expressing his concern with the development of events since Yalta. In reply, on April 7, Stalin insisted that only Polish leaders should be invited who would accept the Curzon Line and who were “really striving to establish friendly relations between Poland and the Soviet Union.” Stalin also continued his refusal to send Molotov to the San Francisco Conference.⁵²

The Berne Incident. Russian suspicion that the Western powers would end the war in Europe to Russia’s disadvantage also caused a very disturbing incident. In North Italy one of Himmler’s men, General Karl Wolff, told our OSS agents that he wanted to go to Switzerland to discuss the surrender of the German forces in Italy. The British Chiefs of Staff thought the Russians should be notified, and they were, on March 11, 1945, it being made clear that the proposed meeting in Berne was only to arrange a meeting to discuss surrender in the field. Molotov had no objections but wanted to send three Russian officers to take part in the conversations. Major General John R. Deane, chief of our military mission in Moscow, urged that the request be rejected, because its acceptance would be “an act of appeasement” which would “react against us in future negotiations.” This was apparently the first invocation of the appeasement analogy in the relations between the war-time allies.

The American reply to Molotov, on March 15, welcomed Soviet representatives at General Alexander’s headquarters, but did not suggest that they could go to Berne, saying that since the proposed surrender was on an Anglo-American front Alexander would be responsible for the negotiations. On the 16th, Molotov replied that our refusal to let his men go to Berne was “utterly unexpected and incomprehensible.” He insisted that the Berne negotiations be broken off.

To our Ambassador, Averell Harriman, in Moscow, this “arrogant language” brought “out into the open a domineering attitude toward the United States which we have before only suspected.” He urged firm but friendly rejection. On the 21st he was authorized to reply to Molotov that no negotiation with the Germans had taken place.⁵³

In the meantime, General Kesselring had been called from Italy to Germany on March 15, and placed in command of the German armies on the Western front. Thereafter the Germans surrendered to the Americans and British, “army by army wherever they could,” but did not surrender to the Russians.⁵⁴ This development brought Russian suspicions to the boiling-point. Anyone could have predicted in advance, and the Russians doubtless had, that the Germans would seek to escape capture by the Russians, but Moscow now thought they were doing so in collusion with the Allies. Molotov replied to Harriman, on March 23, that during the past two weeks the Americans and British had been carrying on negotiations with the enemy “behind the backs of the Soviet Union” and that this was “absolutely inadmissible.” To Admiral Leahy this note was “insulting.”

Roosevelt replied to Stalin, on March 24, saying that he was sure that, through misunderstanding, the facts had not been presented to Stalin. The President insisted that we “must give every assistance to all officers in the field who believe there is “a possibility of forcing the surrender of enemy troops.” No political implications were involved. Then for the first time Stalin made a sharp answer to the President, asserting that the Nazis had moved some divisions from Italy to the eastern front and that “this circumstance is irritating to the Soviet Command and creates ground for distrust.”⁵⁵

This message thoroughly alarmed the Anglo-American Joint Chiefs of Staff, who saw that only an open break between the Allies could prevent the speedy disintegration of the German armies. To prevent such a calamity, Roosevelt asked Leahy and Marshall to prepare a reply to Stalin. It categorically assured Stalin that no negotiations for surrender had taken place and that there was absolutely no question of any which would release German troops for the Russian front.

Stalin brushed this argument aside, saying that his military colleagues did not have any doubts that the negotiations had taken place, that they had ended in agreement, and that Kesselring had agreed to open the front to the Anglo-Americans in return for a promise of easier peace terms. Stalin thought his military men were “close to the truth,” since “the Germans on the Western Front in fact have ceased the war against England and the United States,” while continuing the war with Russia.⁵⁶

Admiral Leahy felt that this reply also was insulting to us, because it questioned our motives and promises. He and Marshall again collaborated on a reply which “approached as closely to a rebuke as is permitted in diplomatic exchanges between friendly states.” In “firm tones” it repeated, on April 4, the previous assurances, expressed astonishment that Stalin could see us in a deal with the Germans, and stated sharply that Eisenhower’s rapid advance was due to military victory, not to any secret agreements with Kesselring. Stalin’s information must have come from German sources and, said the President’s dispatch, “Frankly, I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment toward your informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.”

The next day, April 5, the denunciation of Russia’s neutrality pact with Japan cleared the atmosphere of Allied relations noticeably, and on April 7 Stalin assured Roosevelt that he never doubted his honesty and dependability. On April 11, Roosevelt thanked the Marshal and said: “There must not, in any event, be mutual mistrust, and minor misunderstandings of this character should not arise in the future.”

On April 12, Roosevelt sent two cables. One to Ambassador Harriman stated that “It is my desire to consider the Berne misunderstanding a minor matter.” The other message, to Churchill, said: “I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible because these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day and most of them straighten out as in the case of the Berne meeting. We must be firm, however, and our course thus far is correct.”⁵⁷

In his excellent account of this incident Herbert Feis thought it revealed what a ruffian Stalin was at heart. On the other hand, the Russians could have thought that some understanding about the details of surrender might be discussed in Switzerland and there appeared to be some doubt in London about the advisability of excluding them from this early stage of the dealings with Wolff, which never came to anything in the end. Feis recorded “the spectacular progress of various allied forces in the West during these days,” and Stalin’s insistence that his own intelligence agents had been proved right in their previous reports. He noted that Roosevelt had overruled Harriman in closing the incident as a “minor” one.⁵⁸

This is the incident which is often cited as proof that the Russians are impossible people to deal with and that even Roosevelt himself could not have preserved friendly relations with them much longer. It was a disturbing incident, between Allies who had reached accord on so many questions only a month before at Yalta. The Russians were clearly in the wrong in refusing the offer of representation at Alexander’s headquarters. The Italian front was a strictly Anglo-American affair. On the other hand, the Soviets did have a deep interest in the surrender of the German armies. Everyone knew that they were likely to hold against the Russians longer than the Western Allies. Stalin was wrong to doubt our word, even when the circumstances seemed to point toward Allied collusion with the Germans, but it was not unnatural that he should believe his own informants, rather than ours, until compelled to see that his suspicions were unfounded. Yet actually they were not without basis, since Churchill was simultaneously fighting a sustained engagement with Eisenhower and the American Chiefs of Staff, from March 29 to April 7, with the object of throwing General Montgomery forward in a dash to capture Berlin before the nearby Russians could do so. Churchill was in fact trying to do essentially what the Russians feared, seize the fruits of victory, against weak German resistance, while the Germans held the Russians.⁵⁹

Could Roosevelt Have Avoided the Cold War? As to whether Berne incident indicated sure trouble ahead with the Russians, even in Roosevelt’s mind, the evidence is all the other way. His cables to Harriman and Churchill are his very last legacy to us, and they both reduce the incident to its true proportions, an unpleasant incident arising in the final rush of Germany’s conquest.⁶⁰

From this it is clear that Roosevelt died believing that he would be able to build a structure of cooperation with the Soviet Union on the foundations which he had labored so hard to lay. There had been disquieting developments after Yalta, leading to sharp words on both sides, but Roosevelt did not believe that they indicated the opening of any basic rift. Most of the problems straightened out, “and our course thus far is correct.”

Cordell Hull has also recorded his conviction that Roosevelt did not believe any rift was imminent when he died, saying: “On the occasions when the President came to see me at the hospital after my resignation, including his last visit only a few days before his death, he said nothing about any fears he might have that Russia would abandon our cooperative movement for peace or would block or destroy it.”⁶¹

It is frequently said that Roosevelt knew during his last weeks that his strategy had failed. If so, he could fail to mention it to Hull. But he also talked with Edgar Snow about Russia, on March 3, 1945, and said positively that at his last meeting with Stalin they “had got close to speaking the same language.” Many points had been disputed between Stalin and Churchill, “but Stalin,” said Roosevelt, “agreed to every single suggestion I made.” “I am convinced that we are going to get along,” the President said emphatically.

“His optimism was so contagious,” Snow wrote, that “it dispelled most of my fears. He spoke with absolute conviction of his ability to get along with the Russians. Some have said his dispute with Stalin over the Polish question disillusioned him, but it is incredible to me that Roosevelt could have permitted one incident to cause him to abandon overnight a purpose for which he had worked so ardently throughout the war.”

Snow’s judgment is well based. It would indeed have been incredible if Roosevelt had allowed one incident or a series of them in the hectic atmosphere of ending a world war, to deflect him from the urgent necessity of working with Russia in the post-war world. This was a need so desperately evident that any layman could grasp it. To Roosevelt, great world politician that he was, there could be no other rational policy. When Edgar Snow saw him in May 1944, Snow had just read the series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post by Forrest Davis, “The Great Design,” in which Roosevelt’s purpose “to remove Russia’s historic fear of encirclement and exclusion from Europe” was discussed. Roosevelt agreed that Davis correctly interpreted his views, but demurred at the phrase “The Great Gamble,” used to describe our policy of working with Russia. “Gamble” was not the word, the President, said, when there was no real alternative to working with Russia except to begin preparations right then for World War III. “I am all for trying to make a durable peace after this war, a world we can live in together,” he added.

It has been said times without number that even Roosevelt could not have worked with the Russians and averted the Cold War. This is an article of faith for cold warriors. “Surely he could not have stood for the way they broke their Yalta promises to him!” Yet it is altogether probable that if Roosevelt had been able to finish his fourth term in the White House there would have been no Cold War.

“But what about Eastern Europe? Wouldn’t he have broken with the Russians about that?” Of course this is the key question, but there is no evidence that Roosevelt would have plunged the world into decades of futile and sterile Cold War on this score. In his March 1945 interview with Snow he said: “Obviously the Russians are going to do things their own way in areas they occupy. But they won’t set up a separate administration (independent of the Allied Control Commission) to rival any arrangement made for all Germany.”⁶²

Aside from the accuracy of his prediction about Germany, this understanding of what the Russians would, and from their standpoint, must do in the areas they occupied was indispensable to peace in the post-war world, and without that understanding in the White House there could and would be no peace. The fate of nations is always in the hands of a few men at the top, and everything too often depends upon their point of view. Roosevelt was clear about the overriding necessity of making the peace in cooperation with the Soviets. It was his purpose to be firm with them but to minimize the inevitable post-war disagreements. As we shall soon see, his successor was quick to maximize the difficulties and to be tough with the Russians. He was soon engaged in doing what would have been inconceivable to Roosevelt—an attempt to “contain” and encircle the Soviet Union with arms, alliances and bases around her frontiers.

Russian Tributes. When the news of President Roosevelt’s death reached Moscow, in the middle of the night of April 12–13, Molotov at once went to the American Embassy to pay his respects. Stalin wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt about her husband “as the leader in the cause of ensuring the security of the whole world.” In a separate message to President Truman, Stalin said:

“The American people and the United Nations have lost in Franklin Roosevelt a great politician of world significance and a pioneer in the organization of the peace and security after the war.

“The Government of the Soviet Union expresses sincere sympathy to the American people in their great loss and their conviction that the policy of friendship between the great powers who are shouldering the main burden of the war against the common enemy will continue in the future.”

The Associated Press reported from Moscow also that the Russians were firmly convinced by Mr. Roosevelt’s election to a fourth term that the American people desired close relations with Russia in building peace and security after the war. They would look for every sign that his program would be continued without interruption.

The New York Times’ correspondent in Moscow reported that the sorrow for Roosevelt was unprecedented. People felt it both in a political way and in a personal sense, from the highest official to the lowest man in the street. Since early morning the President’s death had been the single topic of conversation everywhere. Condolences were delivered to Americans all day as if a close personal relative had been lost. Not even Pearl Harbor or the Second Front had made the first page in the Russian press, and pictures seldom appeared there. On that day all newspapers were late, having been made over to carry black-bordered pictures of Mr. Roosevelt on the front page of every newspaper.

The next day the official, black-fringed red banner of national mourning was raised over Marshal Stalin’s residence, the Kremlin, all government and many private buildings. No foreigner had ever received such an honor in the history of the Soviet Union. People in the subway were still talking about what Roosevelt had meant. Many were still weeping. Attendance at the cinemas and theatres fell off noticeably. Many Russians cancelled private parties. Extra telephone operators had to be put on at the American Embassy and hundreds of Russians begged for the privilege of an invitation to the memorial service in Harriman’s residence. The Government was using all possible means to encourage the people to honor the memory of their friend.⁶³

On the day of Roosevelt’s funeral workmen stood weeping at their benches in all parts of the Soviet Union. Indeed, mourning for him was more universal in the U.S.S.R. than in his own country, where so many influential people hated him.

The London Times representative in Moscow summarized the newspaper tributes as emphasizing Mr. Roosevelt’s preeminent part in establishing good relations between the two nations “and his long and resolute struggle against the forces of reaction, in the domestic and international fields, in his country.”

But, more than anything else, the President’s work for the post-war organization of peace was emphasized, and determination was expressed that the cause to which he gave so much of his strength must prevail. The same note was struck in an unprecedented tribute to Roosevelt by the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. on April 24. Before the Assembly rose in tribute to him a declaration was read saying that the Soviet people would always honor him. It closed with the sentence “let us insure that in future the friendship between our peoples will stand as a memorial.”⁶⁴

Friendship or Enmity? It does not follow that if Roosevelt had lived and retained his vigor during the next three years there would have been no serious problems between the Soviet Union and the West. There were serious problems and at the best they would have caused severe strain. The shock of the President’s death caused the Soviet leaders to feel their need of his friendship, and of the United Nations Organization, more keenly. Nevertheless, the presumption must remain that the knowledge of his proved friendship would have been a powerful influence in Moscow during the critical years which immediately followed.

It was Roosevelt who had fused the war-time coalition together. Roosevelt; and Hull had convinced Russia that they meant to give her a square deal. They had prevented the formation of an Anglo-American front against Russia. When they were gone there was no one left to hold the scales even, no one who could mediate between Churchill and Stalin and strive to find common goals for the two worlds.

Of course Roosevelt’s effort to make peace in cooperation with his allies, one of which had been at odds with the West and rejected by it for twenty years prior to the Grand Alliance, had all history against it. Victorious coalitions had traditionally fallen apart soon after the victory, rapidly becoming rivals and enemies. That is inherent in the egocentric nature of national governments, all trying to exercise their sovereign wills. Yet in history the business of great power struggles ending in world wars had come to a dead end. No more could be endured. In 1945 and thereafter no man who did not understand this, in the very marrow of his bones, was qualified to control the destinies of any Great Power.

Roosevelt was everlastingly right in his gallant, sustained effort to break out of the ancient cycle of national rivalries—arms race—and war. He saw that there were no objective reasons for the United States and the Soviet Union to fall out immediately and to fight for world mastery. He gave even his last days and hours to preventing that, and he had succeeded up to the moment of his passing. It was not Roosevelt who failed; it was his successors who were unable to make peace.

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