President George W. Bush was a lot closer to right than he usually manages when he placed the Yalta agreement, signed by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, in the context of the agreements that viewed “the freedom of small nations [as] somehow expendable.” What Bush, like most Republican critics before him, misses, however, is that the deal with the Soviets was inevitable. Roosevelt was forced to recognize the realities of the postwar map. Indeed, the cause of much bitterness and confusion arising from the Yalta deal in the decades that followed flowed from FDR's unwillingness to admit what he had done.
To be sure, the Western leaders had little choice. In the first place, the Red Army had liberated the area from the Nazis in perhaps the most costly military victory in all human history, leaving as many as 27 million dead. Already tending toward paranoia on security matters on the basis of both ideology and experience -- together with Stalin's own neurotic tendencies -- the Soviet leaders' one nonnegotiable condition was that they be allowed to install friendly governments in the nations that stood between the USSR and Germany, with Poland being the most crucial. As they already occupied those nations anyway, little short of war -- and certainly not any sentimental attachment to what they regarded as a bourgeois conception of democracy -- was going to stop them.
As host of the conference, Marshal Stalin offered his guests generous hospitality but precious few concessions. To secure the Soviet dictator's support for the creation of a powerful United Nations -- which, unlike Wilson's impotent League of Nations, would be underwritten by the military muscle and political will of the Great Powers -- Roosevelt was forced to agree to a plan lending U.S. legitimacy to Soviet states across Eastern Europe and the Balkans. State Department internal documents reveal that the Americans had feared that such concessions might be necessary, though they hoped to avoid them. But the fact of the Red Army's occupation of these countries ensured their postwar political shape, regardless of Churchill's or Roosevelt's opinion.
Before going to Yalta, the president informed congressional leaders that “[t]he Russians had the power in Eastern Europe, that it was obviously impossible to have a break with them and that, therefore, the only practical course was to use what influence we had to ameliorate the situation.” Churchill was even more pessimistic. The British prime minister complained to his personal secretary, upon departing for Crimea, “Make no mistake, all the Balkans, except Greece, are going to be Bolshevised, and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. There is nothing I can do for poor Poland, either.”
FDR was well aware of the weaknesses of the deal he had just signed. He knew, for instance, that he had failed to secure Poland's freedom at Yalta. But “freedom” as such was hardly Roosevelt's primary concern, nor Churchill's, for that matter. When Averell Harriman pointed out to Roosevelt that a sphere-of-influence arrangement appeared to be in the offing for the Balkans, FDR explained that his aim was “to insure against the Balkans getting us into a future international war.”
Harriman had noted in October 1944 that FDR had demonstrated “very little interest in Eastern European matters except as they affect sentiment in America.” After difficult and occasionally acrimonious haggling, the final language on the arrangements for Poland's future contained no assurances for replacing Moscow's Lublin-based regime with members of the London-based Polish government-in-exile. The accord did speak of including “Poles from abroad”; but given the lack of specificity, those could just as easily have implied Communist union leaders in Cleveland or Milwaukee as members of the government-in-exile. (This fact did not elude the London Poles, who bitterly denounced the accord when it became public.) While the accord called for elections, it contained no means to assure their fairness, nor even any firm date by which they might be held. Stalin did agree to sign the American “Joint Declaration for a Liberated Europe,” in which the three powers announced their “determination to build in cooperation with other peace-loving nations a world order under law, dedicated to peace, security, freedom and general well-being of all mankind.”
Practically, however, the document was almost meaningless, as it defined none of its terms. An early American draft -- providing for “free and unfettered elections,” jointly administered -- was watered down at the Soviets' request to require only “consultation” between the three powers, “looking toward” free elections at some unspecified date. Instead of pledging to “immediately establish appropriate machinery for the carrying out of the joint responsibilities set forth in this declaration,” the Soviets won a concession that merely obliged them to “immediately take measures for the carrying out of mutual consultation.” The conference record demonstrates, however, that the changes made in the American draft provoked little discussion.
FDR operated under no illusion regarding what he had and had not achieved at Yalta. Admiral William D. Leahy, the president's chief of staff, [] complained to Roosevelt, upon departing from Yalta, that the agreement's language on Poland was “so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without ever technically breaking it.” “I know, Bill,” Roosevelt responded. “I know it. But it is the best I can do for Poland at this time.”
FDR's trade-offs at Yalta were those of a shrewd nineteenth-century European realist, but he was president of a country that lacked a comparable political tradition, and he had no inclination to learn its fundamental principles. At 63 years old and in failing health, Roosevelt had no desire to try to undertake its education. The war had been publicly fought under the flag of American idealism, on behalf of the spread of freedom and democracy, and with a purposely myopic view of Stalin and the Soviet Union. Roosevelt decided that the postwar peace must be constructed under the same flag.
The confusion about what took place at Yalta derived from FDR's insistence on secrecy within the government -- Vice President Harry S. Truman did not even know where his boss was during the conference -- and his insistence on overselling what he had achieved. While Roosevelt knew that he could not escape typical diplomatic calculations in negotiations at Yalta, he was unwilling to spend the political capital necessary to explain why Americans had to accept them as well. Instead, he went before a joint session of Congress after his return from Crimea and told Americans what they, in their innocence and ignorance, expected to hear from Yalta; he promised that it spelled “the end of the system of unilateral action and exclusive alliances and spheres of influence and balances of power.” While this description fit comfortably into Americans' self-images, it had nothing to do with the hard bargaining FDR had just completed in Yalta.
In misleading not only Congress and the country but also his own close advisers about the deal, FDR probably placed great faith in his ability to solve any problems that arose in the new United Nations. In the meantime, he likely expected to juggle his various constituencies as best he could, keeping his eye on the big picture, as they battled one another on this or that devilish detail.
Unfortunately, Roosevelt did not live long enough to work his magic on the various parties involved and convince them to trust to his good judgment. Instead, within just 10 weeks of his return from Crimea, he left the remains of his bargaining in the hands of his inexperienced vice president -- a man who knew less about Roosevelt's thinking about the shape of the Yalta agreements than even Joseph Stalin did. The resulting confusion doomed any hope of postwar concordance between the United States and Soviet Union. And it opened up the field of American politics to McCarthyite attacks on the Democrats -- for having “sold out” the freedom of not only the Balkans but also China (which was included in a secret agreement unknown to almost anyone in the U.S. government).
Whether he ever considered telling Americans the truth about the postwar world and the concessions it demanded of its victorious powers, we'll never know. Perhaps he was genuinely too sick to summon the energy to summon the energy. What is for certain is that, in dying so soon after he concluded his difficult Yalta bargain, Roosevelt finally outsmarted himself.
Nation media columnist Eric Alterman is a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress. Parts of this article are draw from his recent book When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences.
