CAMBRIDGE A2 HISTORY: YALTA CONFERENCE. THE ISSUES AND HOW THEY WERE RESOLVED. THE PERSONALITIES OF THE PEACEMAKERS

HISTORY CAMBRIDGE A2
PAPER 3
PRESENTATION 8
COLD WAR
YALTA CONFERENCE

POST WW2 PEACE CONFERENCES BACKGROUND
• Yalta was not a conventional negotiation in this sense. There was no such
comprehensive peace conference after World War II, instead, we see a
string of arranged meetings between 1941 and 1946, several of which
may have contributed to the final outcome. The three great summit
conferences have drawn much attention:
• Teheran in 1943, a strategy-oriented meeting that saw the introduction of
basic but not yet crystallized political themes;
• Yalta in February 1945, for better or worse a kind of creative moment;
• Potsdam in mid-1945, a confrontation with practical post-war problems.

POST WW2 BACKGROUND
• During the War, Britain and the USA were allies of the Soviet Union but
the only thing that united them was their hatred of Germany.
• In 1945, the Big Three held two conferences – at Yalta (in USSR, February
4-12) and Potsdam (Germany, outside Berlin, July 17 to August 2) – to try
to sort out how they would organize the world after the war. It was at
these conferences that the tensions between the two sides became
obvious.

POLISH, FRENCH AND BRITISH PERSPECTIVES
• The high public emotion that Yalta has always inspired is a big problem
for the historians. The wide variety of perspectives include:
• a bitter Polish interpretation, considering territorial and political violations;
• a deeply resentful French view, soon to become a generalized European
sense of subjection to a United States–Soviet domination;
• a British suggestion of a hard-won victory prejudiced by tragically clumsy
diplomacy on the part of the two emergent superpowers;

SOVIET AND AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
• A Soviet belief that President Harry S. Truman, controlled and influenced
by Churchill and American capitalists, betrayed Roosevelt’s well-
intentioned Yalta commitments;
• A conservative charge in the United States that Roosevelt had been
either traitorous or incompetent and naïve;
• And the Truman administration’s conviction that Stalin had violated his
Yalta pledges, especially his declared acceptance of Polish independence
and Eastern European democracy.

JOSEF STALIN
• Stalin had been dictator of the USSR since 1924. He had transformed the
country into a major industrial economy and one of the world’s strongest
military powers.
• During the Second World War the Soviet army did more than any other
to defeat Nazi Germany.
• Over 20 million Soviet citizens died in the war, including 13 million
members of the armed forces.
• By comparison, Britain had lost only 300,000 and the USA 500,000.
• By February 1945 the USSR had the largest army in the world. This army -
the Red Army - was preparing to attack Berlin, Germany’s capital.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT
• FDR had been leader of the USA since 1933. The longest serving President
in the US history, he had helped the USA out of the economic depression of
the early 1930’s.
• He was also very influential in involving the USA in the war in Europe.
• But FDR survived the Yalta Conference by 2 months, dying in April 1945.
• By early 1945 USA was the world’s greatest economic power. It supplied
war materials and food to all its allies, including the USSR. It possessed the
world’s largest navy and air force.
• US armed forces had helped defeat German troops in Western Europe.
• At the time of Yalta Conference, the USA was developing a nuclear weapon.

WINSTON CHURCHILL
• Churchill was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and representative
of the British Empire. British troops had fought Nazi Germany longer than
the USA or the USSR but, by 1945, Britain was almost bankrupt.
• It kept fighting because it received aid from the USA.
• During the war Britain lost its position as the world’s greatest naval
power.
• By February 1945 Britain was much less powerful than either the USSR or
the USA.

OUTCOMES AT YALTA
• Held during the war, on the surface, the Yalta conference seemed
successful. The Allies agreed a Protocol of Proceedings to:
• divide Germany into four ‘zones’, which Britain, France, the USA and the USSR
would occupy after the war.
• bring Nazi war-criminals to trial.
• set up a Polish Provisional Government of National Unity 'pledged to the
holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible'.
• help the freed peoples of Europe set up democratic and self-governing
countries by helping them to (a) maintain law and order; (b) carry out
emergency relief measures; (c) set up governments; and (d) hold elections
(this was called the 'Declaration of Liberated Europe').
• set up a commission to look into reparations.

WHAT WAS DECIDED?
• How to defeat Hitler and Japan?
The Red Army would take Berlin, Vienna and Prague, securing the defeat of
the Nazis. Stalin also agreed to join the war against Japan.
• Zones of occupation in Germany, Austria, Berlin and Vienna
Once Germany and Austria were defeated, they would be occupied by Allies.
• Free elections in Poland and Eastern Europe
Poland was occupied by the Soviets, and a government of communists had
been set up. Stalin promised free elections in the occupied countries.
• Polish territorial changes
Poland lost 30% of the land to USSR and was given a part of Germany
• The United Nations

STALIN GAINS AT YALTA
• At Yalta, the negotiations went very much in Stalin's favour, but this was
because Roosevelt wanted Russian help in the Pacific, and was prepared
to agree to almost anything as long as Stalin agreed to go to war with
Japan. Therefore, Stalin promised that:
• Russia would join the war in the Pacific, in return for occupation zones in
North Korea and Manchuria.
• Russia also agreed to join the United Nations.

MORE FOR USSR
• The USSR committed itself at Yalta to enter the war against Japan two or
three months after the termination of the European war and to
participate actively in preparations for setting up the United Nations
Organisation.
• As a tangible reward for their cooperation, the Soviets were to receive
southern Sakhalin, the southern Kurile islands, a lease on Port Arthur and
Sino-Soviet control of the Chinese eastern and the south Manchurian
railways.

HISTORIAN PERSPECTIVES ABOUT YALTA
• Yalta – initially portrayed by the Big Three as a great success and then,
within weeks, exhibited to the world as a failure – was quickly and
inevitably seized upon as the crucially diplomatic event and was then
caught up in a worldwide media of partisanship and recrimination that
spilled over into academic circles.
• Professional historians during the Cold War wrote books about Yalta that
tended to mirror the political atmosphere of the day. It was difficult to be
objective.

POST-WAR DIVISION AND YALTA ORDERS
• Complexities were brushed aside as Yalta was made to serve, as it still
does today, as a shorthand explanation of the origins of the Cold War,
much as “Munich” has been used since 1939 as a catch-all reference
point for the lead-up to World War II.
• And there is nothing more functional than today’s conventional view, a
distillation of Yalta’s many diverse characteristics, that the three powers
created there the post-war division of Europe as well as “Yalta orders” for
that continent and Asia.

ROOSEVELT AND YALTA
• Yalta was in many ways President Franklin D. Roosevelt conference. Stalin
chose the remote site, to FDR’s and Churchill’s dismay, but Roosevelt did
most to stage-manage Yalta’s form and character.
• He began by refusing to join the Europeans in the traditional task of
setting a preliminary agenda. Determined to control the conference’s
presentation, he took with him carefully chosen domestic political figures
who could convey the right impression to the American people.
• He took the lead in refusing any independent press coverage and
selected a trusted photographer whose group portraits of the three could
be relied upon to send out from the Crimea a striking image of Allied
power and unity.

DECLARATION ON LIBERATED EUROPE
• Viewed bleakly across six decades, these pictures are in fact disturbingly
suggestive far beyond the president’s intentions: Roosevelt ill; Stalin cold
as a statue; Churchill grim. But at the time the grainy newspaper
reproductions served the cause.
• Roosevelt, by artful use of the language he had persuaded the European
allies to accept in the Declaration on Liberated Europe, gave the world
the impression, in the glowing vision he and his associates created
publicly after the conference, that he had been able to bring about a
surprising and deeply degree of harmony and constructive promise
among the Big Three victors, who would now go on, under the auspices
of a liberally refashioned world organization, to build a progressive
Wilsonian order of justice and goodwill.

SECRET DEALINGS AT YALTA
• A large number of Americans also blamed the naïve FDR, who now
became for many of them (and for even more Europeans) a logical if not
inevitable guily for Yalta’s failure to rein in the Soviets and for much else
that was now going wrong in Europe.
• Alarming revelations of Roosevelt’s secret dealings at Yalta – his
willingness to give additional United Nations memberships to the Soviet
Union, territorial concessions made to Stalin at China’s expense, the
forced repatriation of Soviet citizens – which emerged shortly after the
conference and mostly after the president’s death, stoked the fire.

SOLD-OUT OF EUROPE
• As Cold War tensions grew, Roosevelt became the focus of McCarthy-era
allegations that he had “sold out” Eastern Europe and China at Yalta. He
was accused of treason by American right-wingers.
• Even some moderate American opinion was inclined to wonder whether
Roosevelt’s dubious public portrayal of Yalta had not led more or less
directly to the breakdown of United States–Soviet cooperation.

FRENCH POSITION
• The French were also aggrieved from the outset. They, especially General
Charles de Gaulle, resented their exclusion from the conference,
manifestly signifying their lost status. Yalta was seen in Paris as the
symbol first of a disliked Anglo-American and then of a United States–
Soviet hegemony.
• British writers, drawing on memories of President Wilson’s alleged
ineptitude in Paris in 1919, soon joined the parade of resentment,
beginning in the early 1950s to suggest that Roosevelt had similarly
prejudiced a hard-won victory by his irresponsible Yalta diplomacy.

GERMAN POSITION
• The circle of grievance soon widened. As they recovered some self
confidence in international affairs, German spokesmen and writers in the
Federal Republic also began to look to Yalta as a prime source of their
post-war tribulations.
• By the mid-1950s, as the post-Stalin Soviets began to talk seductively of
“disengagement,” we find German scholars blaming “the punitive
attitude” of the British and Americans at the conference for the division
of their country.

EUROPEAN COMMENTATORS
• The most acute point of sensitivity for European commentators was the
apparent subjection of their continent to the hegemonic Anglo-American
and/or Soviet powers. They tended to see Yalta like an affair between
Americans and Russians.
• The abdicatory failure or reluctance of continental European historians
through the Cold War era to look for alternative explanatory scenarios
that might have recognized some purposeful European political role in
the wartime Allied coalition (Anglo-Soviet if not French) naturally
reinforced tendencies in the United States to assume that there had been
an all-encompassing American control of the significant events.

AMERICOPHOBIC SENTIMENTS
• It is demonstrable that Yalta served for millions of French and other
Europeans through the Cold War as a kind of rallying point for
Americophobic sentiment. But balancing this there was also a strong pro-
American symbolism associated, for instance, with memories of
Lafayette, World War I, and the Marshall Plan.

AFTER YALTA
• It was the French too who were initially instrumental in putting Yalta to
constructive uses in Europe. During the Cold War era the continental
lament was steadily transformed into a foundation of Europe-wide
solidarity.
• At every stage in the post-war move toward unity – in the progressive
social democratic Franco-British impulses of the late 1940s; during de
Gaulle’s federally oriented “Third Force” period in the 1950s and 1960s;
and later with the idea of a new Europe built around Franco-German
reconciliation and leadership – Yalta featured in at least some French
public commentary not simply as a moment of unwanted division
imposed from outside, but as a catastrophe to be transcended, a fresh
point of departure.

RECONNECTED, INDEPENDENT EUROPE
• French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut
Kohl were particularly focused on this. As Mitterrand put it in 1989,
“Yalta is the symbol of the division of Europe into zones of power or
influence between the Soviet Union and the United States. I dream of a
reconnected, independent Europe. I dream about it and I work for it.”
• Effusions of this sort, looking beyond the grievances of the immediate
post-war years to a larger European identity and the repudiation of
“Yalta’s dark legacy,” repeatedly appeared in editorial comment at the
anniversaries of the conference and steadily acquired an all-European
character.

HISTORIAN VIEWS
• In the 1980s, Eastern Europeans also began to see themselves as part of
a continent-wide struggle against what many had long seen as Yalta’s
hegemonic superpower imposition, despite a natural sense of the
difficult odds during the Cold War.
• The Hungarian intellectual George Konrad, writing in 1984, drew from the
failure of the 1956 uprising against Soviet rule the pessimistic conclusion
that “it is impossible to alter the Yalta system from inside by means of
dynamic, uncontrolled mass movements.”

BRITISH HISTORIAN VIEWS
• How do British attitudes fit in here? It is a question that brings to
attention a curious feature of the whole post-Yalta process, namely, the
immunity from serious criticism of Britain and its wartime leader. Certain
flinty European conservatives never let Churchill off the hook.
• In his war memoirs de Gaulle was still grumbling about the “endorsement
given by the Anglo-Saxons at Yalta” to the Soviets. Alexander Solzenhitzen
also wrote scathingly of “the cowardly pens of Roosevelt and Churchill.”
• But this is unusual. Most British commentators took their line from two
influential books.

WILMOT’S STRUGGLE FOR EUROPE
• The first to appear was reporter Chester Wilmot’s Struggle for Europe
(1952), which was fiercely critical of Roosevelt’s supposed naivety at Yalta.
Wilmot revived many of the old resentments about American diplomacy
after the previous war and, in the words of one reviewer, “gave voice to the
nagging anti-Americanism that lurked beneath the English sense of
dependency and focused it on Roosevelt.” Fast on the heels of
• Wilmot’s book came Churchill’s Triumph and Tragedy (1953), which faulted
the former president with compelling and unique authority and gave these
negative emotions a respectable gloss. Politically this thinking was perfectly
compatible with the administrations of Truman and Eisenhower, with whom
Britain was now collaborating closely, and who had also now turned away
self-consciously from Roosevelt’s supposed legacy.

REYNOLD’S TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY
• Triumph and Tragedy was the last of Churchill’s six volumes on the Second
World War. It included an artfully Brutus-like critique of Roosevelt’s conduct
at Yalta. The historian David Reynolds, in a recent book titled In Command
of History, suggests that “Churchill’s main object … was to prove that he
had been a far-sighted prophet of the Soviet threat” and “to shift
responsibility for Western mistakes on to the Americans.”
• American liberal reviewers, with some solicitude for FDR’s reputation, had
seen this coming and had laid down a series of warnings as Churchill’s
previous volumes had appeared.

DAVID WATT’S TIMES
• As late as 1985 a respected columnist in The Times, David Watt, condemned
“Roosevelt’s fatuous belief in his own abilities to ‘handle’ Stalin in 1944 and
1945.” Not that there was very much scholarly work in Britain on such
topics during most of the post-war era.
• A traditional suspicion of “contemporary” history, combined, perhaps, with
the perception of declining British power in a fast-changing world, seems to
have inhibited the development of a school of Cold War historians.
• This was the reverse of the situation in the United States, where, following
World War II, a heightened sense of national power, destiny, and purpose
led many toward Cold War studies.

EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE
• Much of the difficulty was that the British documents for the World War II
era were released only in the 1970s, nearly two decades after the American
Yalta documents had appeared.
• From that moment on, British (and later some American) historians began
to break down, to some degree, the politically established Churchillian view
of an intimate Anglo-American wartime relationship that came to grief with
the fateful divergence at and immediately after Yalta, and to develop a
more typically European perspective. But, in general, the Wilmot-Churchill
perspective persists in much British thinking.

CAMBRIDGE A2 HISTORY: YALTA CONFERENCE. THE ISSUES AND HOW THEY WERE RESOLVED. THE PERSONALITIES OF THE PEACEMAKERS

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