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<b>history lesson<br>
</b>Know Thy Allies<br>
<font color="#808080">What Bush got wrong about Yalta.<br>
</font>By David Greenberg<br>
<font color="#cc0000">Posted Tuesday, May 10, 2005, at 10:23 AM
PT<br>
<br>
</font>After World War I, the political right in Germany developed a
myth
called the
<a
href="http://www.history-of-the-holocaust.org/LIBARC/LEXICON/LexEntry/Dolchsto.html">"stab
in the back" theory</a> to explain its people's defeat.
Though military leaders had helped negotiate the war's end, they fixed
blame on civilian leadersespecially Jews, socialists, and liberalsfor
"betraying" the brave German fighting men. This nasty piece of
propaganda was later picked up by Hitler and the Nazis to stoke the
populist resentment that fueled their rise to power.<br>
<br>
America has had its own "stab in the back" myths. Last year,
George W. Bush
<a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4179618/">endorsed</a> a
revanchist
view of the Vietnam War: that our political leaders undermined our
military and denied us victory. Now, on his Baltic tour, he has
endorsed
a similar view of the Yalta accords, that great bugaboo of the old
right.
<br>
<br>
Bush stopped short of accusing Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston
Churchill of outright perfidy, but his
<a
href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/05/20050507-8.html">words</a>
recalled those of hardcore FDR- and Truman-haters circa 1945.
"The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich
and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Once again, when powerful governments
negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet
this
attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent
divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern
Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of
history."<br>
<br>
Bush's cavalier invocations of history for political purposes are not
surprising. But for an American president to dredge up ugly old canards
about Yalta stretches the boundaries of decency and should draw
reprimands (and not only from
<a
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/2005/05/yalta-delusions.html">Arthur
M. Schlesinger Jr</a>.). <br>
<br>
As every schoolchild should know, Roosevelt and Churchill had formed an
alliance of necessity with Josef Stalin during World War II. Hardly
blind
to Stalin's evil, they nonetheless knew that Soviet forces were
indispensable in defeating the Axis powers. "It is permitted in time
of grave danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the
bridge," FDR said, quoting an old Bulgarian proverb. He and
Churchill understood that Stalin would be helping to set war aims and
to
plan for its aftermath. Victory, after all, carried a price.<br>
<br>
In February 1945, the "Big Three" met at a czarist resort near
Yalta, in the Soviet Crimea, to continue the work begun at other
summits,
notably in Tehran in 1943. (Many of the alleged "betrayals" of
Yalta, at least in rough form, were actually first sketched out in
Tehran.) By this time, Soviet troops had conquered much of Eastern
Europe
from the Germans, including Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, East
Prussia, and Eastern Germany. The Western allies, meanwhile, remained
on
the far side of the Rhine River. Having made terrible military
sacrifices
to gain these positions, Stalin resolved to convert them into political
payoffs.<br>
<br>
Many of the agreements the Big Three reached at Yalta were relatively
uncontroversial: The Allies decided to demand unconditional surrender
from Germany, to carve up the country into four zones for its postwar
occupation, and to proceed with plans to set up the United Nations.
<br>
<br>
But other issues were contentious. Asia was one. FDR wanted Stalin to
enter the war against Japan, so as to obviate any need for an American
invasion. In return, Stalin demanded that Russia regain dominion over
various lands, notably
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakhalin">Sakhalin</a> and the
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurile_Islands">Kurile Islands</a>,
then under Japanese control. He forswore any designs on Manchuria,
which
would be returned to China. <br>
<br>
By far the knottiest problemand the source of lingering rage among the
far right afterwardswas the fate of Poland and other liberated Eastern
European countries. Over several months, the Allies had been divvying
up
Europe according to on-the-ground military realities and their own
individual national interests. The United States and Britain had denied
Stalin any role in postwar Italy. Churchill and Stalin had agreed
(without Roosevelt's participation) that Britain would essentially
control Greece, and Russia would essentially control Romania, Bulgaria,
and Hungary.<br>
<br>
Poland was another matter. In Lublin, Poland, the Soviets had set up a
government of pro-Communist Poles. Back in London, however, a
pro-Western
group claimed to be the true government-in-exile. Throughout the war,
Stalin had acted with customary barbarity in seeking an advantage. In
1940 he ordered the slaughter of thousands of Polish army officers in
the
Katyn Forest, fearing their potential allegiance to the London Poles.
In
1944, he stalled his own army's march into Poland to let the Germans
put
down the Warsaw Uprising, again to strengthen the Communists' hand.
<br>
<br>
At Yalta, Stalin wanted FDR and Churchill to recognize the Lublin
government. They refused. Instead, all agreed to accept a provisional
government, with a pledge to hold "free and unfettered
elections" soon. For other liberated European countries, the Big
Three also pledged to establish "interim governmental authorities
broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population"
and committed to free elections.<br>
<br>
Roosevelt knew that Stalin might renege, and it was perhaps cynical for
him to trumpet elections that might never take place. But as the
historian David M. Kennedy has written, he had little choice,
"unless Roosevelt was prepared to order Eisenhower to fight his way
across the breadth of Germany, take on the Red Army, and drive it out
of
Poland at gunpoint."<br>
<br>
Stalin, of course, never allowed elections in Poland or anywhere else.
"Our hopeful assumptions were soon to be falsified," Churchill
wrote. "Still, they were the only ones possible at the time."
Short of starting a hot war, the West was powerless to intervene, just
as
it was in Hungary in 1956 or Prague in 1968.<br>
<br>
Because FDR kept many details of the Yalta agreements under wraps,
people
in Washington began whispering conspiratorially about "secret
agreements." Soon, critics, especially on the far right, were
charging that FDR and Churchill had sold out the people of Eastern
Europecharges that Bush's recent comments echo. They asserted that the
ailing Roosevelthe would die only weeks laterhad come under the
malign
influence of pro-Communist advisers who gave Stalin the store. <br>
<br>
But Yalta did not give Stalin control of the Eastern European
countries.
He was already there. Moreover, as Lloyd C. Gardner has argued, it's
possible that postwar Europe could have turned out <i>worse</i> than
it
did. For all its evident failings, Yalta did lead to a revived Western
Europe, a lessening of open warfare on the continent, and,
notwithstanding Bush's remarks, relative stability. Without Yalta,
Gardner notes, "the uneasy equilibrium of the Cold War might have
deteriorated into something much worsea series of civil wars or
possibly
an even darker Orwellian condition of localized wars along an uncertain
border." Such "what if" games are generally pointless, but
they can remind us that the harmonious Europe that Yalta's critics tout
as a counter-scenario wasn't the only alternative to the superpower
standoff.<br>
<br>
Along with the myth of FDR's treachery in leading America into war, the
"stab in the back" interpretation of Yalta became a cudgel with
which the old right and their McCarthyite heirs tried to discredit a
president they had long despised. Renouncing Yalta even became a plank
in
the 1952 Republican platform, although Eisenhower did not support it.
In
time, however, these hoary myths receded into the shadows, dimly
remembered except as a historical curiosity, where, alas, they should
have remained undisturbed.<br>
<br>
<i>David Greenberg writes the "History Lesson" column and
teaches at Rutgers University. He is the author of</i>
<a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393048969/qid=1057920453/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/103-0532558-6976658?v=glance&s=books&n=507846#product-details">Nixon's
Shadow: The History of an Image</a><i>.<br>
<br>
</i><font size="2">Article URL:
<a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2118394/">http://slate.msn.com/id/2118394/</a></font>
<br>
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