3-02-05, 9:42 am
As the bloodiest war in human history was winding down, the three great allied powers of World War II, the U.S., Britain and the USSR, met at the Soviet resort of Yalta to prepare for the postwar peace. At the time, Soviet troops have already liberated most of Eastern Europe and were deep within German territory. U.S. and British forces had liberated France and most of Italy and U.S. forces had defeated the last Nazi blitzkrieg in Belgium in the battle of the Bulge. During the war several conferences of the leaders of these countries were organized to discuss what the post-war world might be like. The most significant of these summits may have been the Yalta Conference in 1945. At this Soviet resort town, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin agreed in reality to a 'spheres of influence' concept that saw the Soviets retain influence over Eastern Europe and the US would control the destinies of Western European countries.
While Roosevelt would have preferred the principles of the Atlantic Charter, which would have given the U.S. in the name of freedom and self-determination and open markets access to the economies and trade of all of Europe, he understood both what the Soviets had suffered during the war, what they had achieved and also the necessity of maintaining decent relations with them in order to develop the United Nations and consolidate the political and economic gains that the U.S., which saw its GNP more than double during the war, to be consolidated. When Roosevelt died in April, 1945, he was still advising Churchill not to push the Soviets and still confident that cordial relations, if not the wartime alliance could be maintained in the postwar reconstruction.
The postwar rightwing Republican use of the issue of the Yalta Conference was for domestic political consumption. Attacks on Roosevelt’s policies ranged from the conservative view that Roosevelt 'gave Eastern Europe' to Stalin and the Soviets because he was 'soft on Communism' and didn’t 'understand' the 'evil nature' of the Soviets and Communism. Others on the far right even claimed that his foreign policies reflected the socialist nature of his administration, which was essentially different in degree but not in kind from the Soviets.
Once you examined these contentions logically and asked for alternatives to Roosevelt’s policies, they pretty much collapsed. The rightwing arguments were that the U.S. should have marched to Berlin and taken the city (something that Churchill was interested in). When the points were made that attacking Berlin would have cost tens of thousands more U.S. casualties at least and that the U.S. would then have had to break the occupation zone agreements with the Soviets to 'push them out' of East Germany anyway, the right’s fall back argument was to denounce Roosevelt. The same right-wing sources made a similar argument just a few years later when they attacked the Roosevelt and Truman administrations for either 'losing' or 'giving' China to the Chinese Communist Party. When these arguments were countered with the contention that the U.S. would have had to launch a full-scale invasion of China to 'save' the Chiang Kai-shek regime, the right-wing’s response was further denunciations.
Spy charges, which some Republicans had been bandying about since the 1930s, became the battle cry that the extreme right Republicans, represented most powerfully by Joe McCarthy, raised against the Truman and Roosevelt administrations. The 1948 HUAC hearings on Communist 'infiltration' of the Roosevelt administration, which, with its Hiss-Chambers testimony (the star attraction of the hearings) were aimed at countering Truman’s attacks on the Republican-dominated 80th Congress. These charges of spying dovetailed with the 'moderate' right-wing Republicans views and fostered the myth that a socialist-leaning government with Soviet agents in the State Department was responsible for the Yalta settlement, joining the United Nations (since Hiss had been at the UN’s founding conference in San Francisco), and the Marshall Mission to China in 1946 to try to settle the Chinese Civil War.
McCarthy in a famous moment in the 1952 campaign in Wisconsin called General Marshall, who was largely responsible for Eisenhower wartime career, a Communist agent in Eisenhower’s presence and the General’s failure to say anything is still remembered as perhaps his darkest hour morally. 'One Communist at Yalta was one Communist too many,' McCarthy shouted to a cheering crowd at the 1952 Republican Convention that nominated Eisenhower for the presidency, raising the 'twenty years of treason' slogan against the Democrats that was a major GOP theme in the presidential campaign. Eisenhower placed Richard Nixon, whom the Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson later called a 'white collar McCarthy,' on the 1952 ticket largely as an attempt to exploit this constituency. Former Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey had suggested Nixon as someone who would bring to the ticket McCarthy’s 'strengths' without McCarthy’s liabilities: making false and nearly hysterical charges in a presidential campaign might not fly as well as they did from the Senate floor.
More than a lot 'hot air,' right-wing Republican charges were a material force in stimulating purges in the State Department, particularly of those involved in the China policy, blocking the Peoples Republic of China from gaining its UN seat for 22 years and its full recognition for nearly 30 years. Additionally, the Republican attacks played a role in preventing high level 'summit conferences' between the U.S. and the Soviets for a decade. After Yalta and the Postdam conference in July of 1945 there were no such conferences until the Geneva Conference of 1955.
As for the conference itself, Truman significantly reversed much of what was positive at Yalta in the Potsdam Conference, which followed VE Day, and at the subsequent Foreign Ministers Council Meetings, which began in September 1945 very shortly after the Japanese surrender. He did so because he believed that he could force the Soviets out of Eastern Europe and restore what after World War I had been called the 'cordon sanitaire' (quarantine) against the Soviets and their spread of their system. He sought to use U.S. economic power and control of the atomic bomb to achieve these ends. The Soviets replied by digging in their heels, reconstructing their devastated economy with forced appropriations from the territories they occupied (and where they instituted their model of socialism from above) and building their own atomic bombs. Germany was not re-unified for more than 40 years. The former Japanese colony of Korea was not re-unified and became the scene of a bloody war in the early 1950s, which ended in military terms in a stalemate. The nuclear arms race threatened human existence by the 1960s – a threat that is hardly over and in some ways may, with proliferation, be worse in the 'post cold war era.'
Wyatt Reader’s comments that terms like justice, and for that matter liberty and democracy are both relative and contextual are very well taken. As I tell my classes, in May of 1945, when Germany surrendered, there were 10,000 Communist party members in Hungary and 1,500,000 Communist party members in France. Yet, the former became a Soviet model Communist country and the latter saw the capitalist system restored and became a founding member of NATO. With a few exceptions, a powerful and as history was to show independent Communist left in Yugoslavia and a powerful Communist left in Czechoslovakia, the cold war division of Europe that Europeans identify with the Yalta settlement but which I see much more in terms of the Truman policies and the Soviet responses to them, was determined by the U.S. and Britain, on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other. Left to their own devices, I don’t believe that Hungary and Rumania, two minor Axis states whose general population was fiercely anti-Russian, would have moved in anything except a conservative nationalist direction after the war. Poland, which had suffered horribly(over 6 million, dead, including nearly 3 million Jewish Poles, nearly half of all the Jewish Europeans murdered by the Nazis) was also fiercely anti-Russian, nationalist, religious and conservative with no serious chance for left forces or center-left forces to come to power on their own. On the other hand, French and Italian Communists and in Italy Socialists, Belgian Communists and left allies, other West Europeans left forces, had enormous influence and mass membership because of their leading role in the anti-Nazi occupation resistance movements and also because socialism as a system had greater appeal than ever before, since people throughout Europe had seen their capitalist elites, including prominent industrialists like Rennault in France, openly collaborate with either local fascist regimes or the Nazis. Also, of course, the kind of rabid anti-Communism associated with McCarthyites in the United States was associated directly with the Nazis throughout occupied Europe. When the German press, and its collaborators throughout Europe ran headlines on June 7th 1944 that the D Day invasion had been carried out on the orders of Moscow, you didn’t have to be a genius to understand what the Nazi propaganda line was. That the much more developed areas of Western Europe, allied to the vastly richer and more developed U.S.(which in 1945 controlled 80% of the world’s investment capital) ultimately prevailed in long-term economic reconstruction than the much poorer, more backward East, now called 'new Europe' is neither remarkable nor in any way proof that Europeans anywhere chose their own destiny or that capitalism out-competed and defeated socialism or even the Soviet model of socialism on any 'level playing field' and thus deserves to be considered the wave of humanities future, as capitalist propaganda now proclaims.
As for the Yalta conference itself, it is important to remember that Roosevelt was in the middle between Churchill on the right and Stalin on the left. Churchill’s primary interest was to save the British Empire and after the Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk, he pursued contradictory policies of both trying to cut spheres of influence deals with the Soviets (which had been the basis of Stalin’s foreign policy really since the 1920s) and advocating dubious military schemes--invading the Balkans, the 'soft underbelly of Europe' rather than the cross-channel invasion, to limit the advance of Soviet forces (who in my opinion might very well have advanced further had these options been undertaken).
Stalin, whose views on foreign policy were that building the strength of the Soviet Union and advancing global socialism were essentially one and the same, had long opposed policies of directly aiding revolutionary Communist movements and certainly using Soviet military power to intervene on behalf of such movements in favor of a policy of outmaneuvering 'capitalist encirclement'(his most important ideological construct) by both creating buffer states against attacks on the Soviet’s huge Eur-asian borders and in effect waiting for the contradictions within capitalism to bring about revolutions that would see the victory of Socialism.
To prevent the capitalist-imperialist states from attacking the Soviet Union, the Soviets had to maintain their strength, but it was possible to negotiate with groups of these states in order to play for time, to try to build a unite front against Hitler with England and France for example and then when that failed to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler and then form the alliance with England and the U.S. to win the war against the Axis.
Stalin until the early cold war period was, from everything that I have read seriously about his world-view, more positive to the U.S., whom he saw as a great land power with a huge sphere of influence through the Western Hemisphere than he was to the British Empire, whom he identified with endless conspiracies from 1917 on to destroy the Soviet Union and whom he largely blamed for 'appeasing' Hitler in resisting collective security and giving Hitler Czechoslovakia at Munich, which he interpreted as an settlement to turn Hitler’s legions east against the Soviets.
Roosevelt didn’t have a colonial empire to defend and he didn’t like colonial empires either. He wasn’t fond of the Soviet system or Soviet ideology, but he realized that the German and Japanese states that the Allies were in the process of defeating had based themselves on a much more intense anti-Communist ideology, and that excluding the Soviets and maintain the 'quarantine' against them in Eastern Europe were important reasons for Chamberlain appeasement policy and the Munich agreement (although I don’t at all believe that Roosevelt saw these policies as a deliberate attempt to 'unleash' Hitler against the Soviets, as Stalin did).
In any case, Roosevelt like Stalin, believed that he had time on his side, in Roosevelt’s case not time to rebuild the Soviet Union and wait for revolution but time to use the U.S. enormous economic advantages and political advantages in 1945(the fact that the U.S. outside the Western Hemisphere wasn’t identified with colonialism and imperialism and the New Deal, even in the Western Hemisphere was associated with a more progressive foreign policy than its predecessors) to construct a United Nations organization, build its labor and social agencies to ameliorate the poverty and iniquities that bred war, and in the process, establish regional and global peace keeping forces to prevent war.
For all of that to work, the Soviets could no longer be treated as international outlaws and forced out of Eastern Europe. The British would also have to modify their colonial policies(although Roosevelt had no intention of leading a crusade against colonialism either). To try to bring back the old quarantine against the Soviets in Eastern Europe might very well lead to World War III, and for what--the successors of Field Marshall Pilsudski in Poland, Admiral Horthy in Hungary, the Romanian monarchy and Iron Guard Fascists, the rabidly anti-Communist nationalist refugees from the Russian revolution who fought on Hitler’s side in the war and often believed the Nazi propaganda about a 'Judo-Bolshevik' plot to rule the world more than most Germans.
Yalta as I see it affirmed what was the status quo in Europe when the conference was held in the last months of the war, established a Declaration on Liberated Europe which was essentially a lawyers brief in that there were as everyone understood privately loopholes for the Soviets on the question of establishing 'free elections,'(free elections which would guarantee governments that were friendly to the Soviets, which was a lot like those treaties with Japan, Taft-Katsura and Lansing-Ishi, in which the U.S. recognized Japan’s special interest in China and Japan recognized the Open Door!).
Yalta continued settlements made at Tehran for redrawing the borders of Poland and Germany and other issues of territory. Roosevelt broached the question of reparations to the Soviets(who had lost 42 percent of their productive capacity during the war and, today’s scholarship shows, 27 million people, not the 20 million that became the most common postwar estimate) in a very generous way(the figure was 20 billion, although who knows what would have happened had Roosevelt lived). Power politics oriented scholars accused Roosevelt subsequently of over-selling the treaty, but, given the fact that a World War was winding down and he faced powerful conservative coalition enemies in Congress, I really don’t know what these critics expected him to do--provide a Harvard School geo-political seminar analysis to the general public. Although I have held academic jobs for the last 35 years, I know that political leaders like Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, and on major foreign policy questions, John Kerry, who have used academic approaches in appeals to the people have not fared that well). Actually, I have, and I am not kidding, just received a call from my wife (not about the New Deal Network) so I will end this long missive, which hopefully will not lead to brick bats from those who disagree since I am aware that many may disagree. I will also in the future suggest some European accounts of the Yalta settlement. As for the original event that led to this discussion, the monument being suggested for construction at Yalta, now a part of the Ukraine, which has angered anti-Communist Ukrainians who see it as a monument to Joseph Stalin, what else is Yalta, a resort, famous for. I have never been to Fulton, Missouri, but I wouldn’t have any difficulty with a monument to Churchill’s 'Iron Curtain' speech in the town, which is known only for that, whatever not so sympathetic opinions I do have on the speech and its role in the development of the cold war.
Finally, the new president of Ukraine, hailed as the leader of an 'orange revolution' against a fixed election and pro Russian opponents, has as his wife a former minor official of the Reagan administration. I think the Ukrainians have a lot more to worry about than a monument to the Yalta conference, which by the way did see the restoration of territories in the Western Ukraine which Polish Field Marshall Joseph Pilsudski had seized in the aftermath of the Soviet revolution, which provided the shock troops for pro Fascist Ukrainian elements during WWII, and which today are the political stronghold for the new government.
--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.
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