At the same time, Roosevelt told Harriman, who was on home leave from Moscow, that “he wanted to have a lot to say about the settlement in the Pacific, but that he considered the European questions were so impossible that he wanted to stay out of them as far as practicable except for problems involving Germany.” When Arthur Bliss Lane, former U.S. ambassador to Warsaw, pressed him to insist on Polish independence in talks with Stalin, Roosevelt flared, “Do you want me to go to war with Russia?”
Harriman wrote, after another discussion with Roosevelt, that the president “consistently shows very little interest in Eastern European matters except as they affect sentiment in America.” With U.S. public opinion turning negative toward Britain over interventions in Greek and Italian affairs that registered as blatant demonstrations of traditional sphere-of-influence diplomacy, and toward Russia for its unyielding determination to impose a Communist regime on Poland, Roosevelt was fearful of reviving isolationist sentiment. The New York Times, apparently relying on a leak from the White House, reported that the president had sent Churchill a message in January saying that “the American people are in a mood where the actions of their allies can precipitate them into wholehearted cooperation for the maintenance of the peace of Europe or bring about a wave of disillusionment which will make the isolation of the nineteen-twenties pale by comparison.” The country was unhappy with its allies for practicing power politics.
The Big Three convened at Yalta on February 4. Two days earlier, however, Churchill and Roosevelt met on Malta in the Mediterranean. The president no longer resisted meeting Churchill without Stalin, hoping no doubt to send the Soviets a signal that Britain and America might gang up on them if they proved too unyielding in the upcoming talks. With U.S. forces just recovering from setbacks in the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium, and Soviet troops approaching Berlin, the Russians had an advantage that the president and prime minister thought they might counter with a meeting that could arouse Stalin’s concerns about their intentions.
Roosevelt and Churchill had three discussions during their day on Malta—a social get-together over lunch, a conference with their military chiefs in the evening, and a dinner meeting about future political problems. Although Roosevelt’s appearance shocked the British—it seemed to one observer that the president was so frail that “he is hardly in this world at all”—he nevertheless was fully in command of himself and alert to the proceedings.
Churchill set the tone when he said at the evening meeting that “it was essential that we should occupy as much of Austria as possible, as it was undesirable that more of western Europe than necessary should be occupied by the Russians.” Roosevelt had no objection. Churchill wrote his wife, “The misery of the world appalls me and I fear increasingly that new struggles may arise out of those we are successfully ending.” At the same time, however, the president did not wish to make political commitments that might create unnecessary tensions with the Russians. Consequently, nothing of political importance was discussed over lunch or dinner. It frustrated Eden, who complained to a diary that “we were going into a decisive confer ence and had so far neither agreed what we would discuss nor how to handle matters with a Bear who would certainly know his mind.”
The Yalta conference, which lasted a week—February 4 to 11—is the most overrated event of World War II. While every major issue—from Germany’s occupation, to Soviet entrance into the Pacific War, to Poland’s autonomy, to the organization of a United Nations—was considered, the impact of these discussions was much less than the participants believed or perhaps hoped at the time. “We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had all been praying for,” Harry Hopkins said later. Roosevelt had some hope that accommodations with Stalin would lead him to grant the East European countries his armies were occupying a substantial measure of domestic autonomy if they adopted a pro-Soviet foreign policy. Similarly, Churchill recalled that at the first plenary session of the conference at 5:00 p.m. on February 4, “We had the world at our feet. Twenty-five million men marching at our orders by land and sea. We seemed to be friends.”
In an appearance before a joint congressional session on March 1, Roosevelt declared the meeting to have been a great success. But its final result, he said in a plea for an end to isolationism, would depend on the Congress and the American people: “lasting results” would require “active support” from both for “the general conclusions reached at Yalta.” The conference, he declared, “ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balance of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed. We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organization in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join.” The results of the conference represented “the beginnings of a permanent structure of peace.”
Roosevelt’s optimism might be attributed to his debilitated condition, which made him unrealistic about what the conference had achieved. There is no doubt that he was not at his best during the discussions, and that he was dying by the time he returned to the United States. He had a limited attention span during the talks and, according to one British observer, “does not know what he is talking about and clings to one idea.”
During an address to a joint congressional session, his appearance and spoken delivery shocked members of Congress, who had not seen him for a while: he uncharacteristically delivered his speech sitting down, making a unique reference to his disability and his weariness from a journey of fourteen thousand miles. “He spoke haltingly, slurring some of his words and stumbling over part of his text; his right hand trembled, and he awkwardly turned the pages of his speech with his left hand.”
Yet however much his weakened condition limited his conference interactions, Roosevelt’s preoccupation during the conference and his public pronouncements afterward were calculated to encourage American internationalism he believed essential to the future peace. He was not very confident that the Yalta agreements represented the potential shift in world affairs he described. When he saw Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle Jr., who had great doubts about Stalin’s intentions, the president threw his arms up and declared, “I didn’t say the result was good. I said it was the best I could do.” He explained that because the Soviets had their armies in Eastern Europe, the Allies had no recourse but to rely on Stalin’s promise to hold free elections in the liberated countries. As he worked on his congressional address, he told Sam Rosenman, his speechwriter, that he doubted whether Stalin would follow through on this commitment. His continuing silence at the conference about the development of an atomic bomb was another indication of the limits of Roosevelt’s trust in future Soviet actions.
For Churchill, the conference was a series of high and low notes. He and his staff were amazed and impressed with the degree to which the Soviets managed to provide for all their creature comforts in so devastated an area. On arrival, they were greeted with a “most magnificent luncheon … champagne, caviar, every luxury.” Churchill’s daughter, Sarah, wrote her mother, “Whatever material difficulties of this place our paws are well buttered here. Wow.” Churchill said of the palaces in which he and Roosevelt were housed, “We squat on furniture carried with extraordinary effort from Moscow and with plumbing and road-making done regardless of cost in a few days by our hosts, whose prodigality excels belief.”
Churchill was certainly gratified by Stalin’s agreement to a Polish coalition government and free elections for liberated East European countries, British and American demands for a French occupation zone, and a seat on the Allied Control Council for Germany, and to a less dominant Soviet role in a United Nations organization. On the seventh and last day of the conference at a dinner at his residence, Churchill offered a toast that one of his associates described as “insincere, slimy sort of slush.” He referred to “a time when the Marshal was not so kindly to us, and I … said a few rude things about him, b
ut our common dangers and common loyalties have wiped all that out. We feel we have a friend whom we can trust, and I hope he will continue to feel the same about us.”
At the same time, however, like Roosevelt, Churchill was less than confident that alliance arrangements would endure. Midway through the conference, at a dinner hosted by Stalin, Churchill prophetically urged his two allies not to “under-estimate the difficulties. Nations, comrades in arms, have in the past drifted apart within five or ten years of war. Thus toiling millions have followed a vicious circle, falling into the pit, and then raising themselves up again. We now have a chance of avoiding the errors of previous generations and of making a sure peace.” Yet, at the end of the day, he believed that “the only bond of the victors is their common hate,” which he feared would disappear once Germany was defeated.
For Stalin, the conference was an opportunity to lull his allies into believing that he shared their concern with establishing an ideal structure of peace as opposed to securing Russia from foreign and domestic dangers by his own devices. Because he had so much credit with the Allies for having borne the principal burdens of the fighting against Germany and because the Americans were so eager for him to enter the war against Japan, he could assert Soviet demands up to a point over Poland and Eastern Europe without overtaxing the support of his allies. Stalin’s need, however, for a postwar U.S. loan and his understanding that Washington and London would have atomic bombs before Moscow did made him cautious about antagonizing them.
Neither Stalin’s interest in a loan nor his concerns about the A-bomb were great enough to make him trust his country’s future security to a world organization, or to the goodwill of any other country. He liked Roosevelt and appreciated his apparent regard for him and the sacrifices of the Soviet nation. But he could not imagine giving the United States or Britain a determining say in how the Soviet Union would protect its future safety from another devastating attack on its homeland.
However much the United States and Britain had contributed to Soviet military success against the Nazis with supply shipments, day and night bombing of Germany, and what Stalin saw as the peripheral offensives in North Africa and Italy and the “belated” cross-Channel attack, he believed—and with some substantial justification—that the Red Army and Soviet citizens, at a cost of some 25 million lives, were the ones that had “torn the guts out of Hitler’s war machine.” In short, Soviet Russia could only survive if it looked to its own interests rather than depending on the generosity of any outside forces.
There was a substantial measure of rational calculation here for the leader of a nation that had suffered so terribly in the war. But Stalin’s resistance to an enduring accommodation with the West also rested in significant part on fears bred by the history of Soviet Russia under his rule. His life experience and understanding of political power made him distrustful of anyone he did not control. For Stalin, power rested in intimidation and dominance. As demonstrated by his brutal repression of anyone representing the slightest challenge to his authority, he could not live with anything resembling political pluralism. Democracy, a word he used frequently in his discussions with foreign visitors, meant not representative government but the well-being of the masses as determined by him and him alone.
The Soviet prisoners of war, for example, who had glimpsed the higher living standards of their captors, were potential critics of the Communist system; they represented a threat to the Soviet state, or so Stalin believed. True, some of them had collaborated and fought with the Nazis, but many had committed no greater crime than having been captured. This was enough, however, to send them into exile or confinement in a prison camp, where many of them perished.
It was de Gaulle who had the most clear-eyed view of Stalin. Not burdened with the responsibilities shouldered by Churchill and Roosevelt for postwar accommodations that could maintain world peace, de Gaulle had the detachment to take a more realistic measure of the Red Czar.
His meeting with Stalin in December 1944 left de Gaulle with “the impression of confronting the astute and implacable champion of a Russia exhausted by suffering and tyranny but afire with national ambition. Stalin was possessed by the will to power. Accustomed by a life of machination to disguise his features as well as his inmost soul, to dispense with illusions, pity, sincerity, to see in each man an obstacle or a threat, he was all strategy, suspicion and stubbornness…. As a communist disguised as a Marshal, a dictator preferring the tactics of guile, a conqueror with an affable smile, he was a past master of deception. But so fierce was his passion that it often gleamed through this armor, not without a kind of sinister charm.” But beneath Stalin’s “good-natured appearances, the fighter engaged in a merciless struggle was apparent.” In the Soviet world, de Gaulle found an “abyss separating words from deeds.”
In the two months following Yalta, the extent to which Stalin was set upon a course of external control in Eastern and Central Europe without regard for local self-determination became evident to Roosevelt and Churchill. Stalin’s eagerness for safety from Germany in his reach for external dominance did not trouble them as much as his resolve to impose his will on Soviet-occupied areas, despite promises to the contrary. More troubling, it suggested a vision of greater Soviet ambition to control countries farther to the West by helping to elevate allied Communist parties. The hope that their shared sacrifices in defeating Germany would convince Stalin that they had no hostile intentions toward his government and that he would see pro-Soviet foreign policies by East European neighbors as sufficient to assure their domestic self-determination was a mirage.
By the end of March, Roosevelt bluntly told Stalin, “I cannot conceal from you the concern with which I view the development of events of mutual interest since our fruitful meeting at Yalta. The decisions we reached there were good ones…. We have no right to let them be disappointed.” He complained of “a discouraging lack of progress made in carrying them out … particularly those relating to the Polish question.” Stalin’s decision not to send Foreign Secretary Molotov to a United Nations organizing conference in San Francisco scheduled for April also frustrated Roosevelt. He warned that if the agreements on Poland and a world organization were not implemented, “all the difficulties and dangers to Allied unity which we had so much in mind in reaching our decision at the Crimea will face us in an even more acute form.”
At the same time, a Soviet-American clash over negotiations between German and U.S. representatives in Switzerland about the surrender of German forces in Italy intensified differences. Believing that the Germans hoped to free Allied armies in the west to limit Soviet advances in the east, Stalin upbraided Roosevelt for hiding the conversations from him, questioned the motives for holding them, and warned that they jeopardized “trust among the Allies.” An astonished president angrily replied that there were no political designs in the Swiss discussions aimed at inhibiting Soviet advances in Germany . “Frankly,” Roosevelt concluded, “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.”
Churchill’s distress at the rising tensions registered in a prediction to Roosevelt that “the brutality of the Russian messages” might “foreshadow some deep change of policy for which they are preparing.” He believed it “of the highest importance that a firm and blunt stand should be made at this juncture by our two countries in order that the air may be cleared and they realize that there is a point beyond which we will not tolerate insult…. If they are ever convinced that we are afraid of them and can be bullied into submission, then indeed I should despair of our future relations with them and much else.”
Roosevelt was in “general agreement” with Churchill’s conclusion: “We must not permit anybody to entertain a false impression that we are afraid,” he cabled on April 6. “Our Armies will in a very few days be in a position that will permit us to become ‘tougher’ than has heretofore appeared advantageous to
the war effort.” Five days later, after the tensions over the Swiss “negotiations” had faded away, Roosevelt struck a more optimistic note with Churchill. Ever hopeful that Stalin would liberate himself from his suspicions and accept his allies’ sincere good intentions, Roosevelt urged patience: “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 Bern meeting. We must be firm, however, and our course thus far is correct.”
Stalin would not reward Roosevelt’s decent intentions with reduced suspicions of his allies or, as a consequence, any modification of his reach for Soviet control of adjacent or even distant countries. Nothing, apparently, could convince Stalin that the outside world was anything but a cauldron of current and potential enemies. It is probably impossible for someone as wedded to repressive brutality as he was to see anything but similar motives in others—whether at home or abroad.
While Churchill ultimately proved to be more realistic about what America and Britain faced in their future dealings with Moscow, Roosevelt’s eagerness to give change a chance is not to be decried. After so vivid a demonstration of the human capacity for brutality, it was not unreasonable to hope that a leader and nation so victimized by wartime horrors would at least want to try, however tentatively, dealing more humanely with other nations and peoples. It was conceivable that most Germans and Japanese would see the end of the war and their failed experiments in ruthlessness as a chance for something new. Nor could Stalin have believed that Roosevelt and Churchill were ready to let either German or Japanese leaders off without retribution.