“Stalin had his secret police bug
Roosevelt and Churchill”
S
talin was probably the best
prepared of the three leaders
at Yalta. Certainly, he was
the clearest about his aims:
he wanted to defeat and
occupy Germany as quickly as possible.
His nagging fear, never fully recognised
by either Roosevelt or Churchill, was
that his allies might attempt a separate
peace deal with Germany – and perhaps
even turn their collective armies against
him. He had his secret police bug the
two palaces in which Roosevelt and
Churchill stayed so that every night
those agents could report any such
intentions to him.
Throughout the conference, Stalin
repeatedly stressed the closeness of the
alliance between the three powers. He
emphasised the blood debt owed by the
other two because of the massive loss
of life suffered by Soviet forces – many
times greater than that of the UK and
the US combined. Discussions about
the strategy for ending the war reassured
Stalin, especially British and US com-
mitments to launch heavy air attacks on
Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz
in order to hamper Nazi efforts to trans-
fer troops to the eastern front, and to
also cross the river Rhine into Germany
in force as soon as weather allowed.
Stalin’s next priority was to ensure
postwar Soviet dominance over eastern
Europe. He wanted a cordon sanitaire of
subordinate states bordering the Soviet
Union – an ambition little different from
that of his tsarist predecessors. Britain’s
foreign secretary Anthony Eden, who
spent many frustrating hours at Yalta
arguing with his Soviet counterpart
Vyacheslav Molotov – nicknamed
‘Stone Arse’ for his ability to sit for hours
refusing all compromise – thoughtStalin was “much more the heir of Peter
the Great than of Lenin”.
Stalin knew that the position on the
ground was in his favour. Roosevelt had
twice postponed the conference, origi-
nally proposed for summer 1944, first to
campaign for an unprecedented fourth
presidential term and then again until
after his inauguration in January 1945.
During that period, Stalin’s forces had
occupied much of eastern Europe, and
by late Januar y Soviet troops had crossed
the river Oder (then in German terri-
tory) and were within striking distance
of Berlin. As a believer that “whoever
occupies a territory also imposes on it his
own social system”, Stalin intended to
make full use of his armies’ gains
He also planned to extract a high
price for joining the war against Japan.
This included the restoration of eastern
territories and concessions surrendered
by Russia after its humiliating defeat
in the 1904–05 war with Japan. Some
concessions would be at the expense of
Nationalist China, whose leader, Chiang
Kai-shek, a major American ally, had- like the Free French leader General
Charles de Gaulle – not been invited to
Yalta. Stalin’s other priorities included
extracting massive reparations from
Germany for the damage inflicted on
the Soviet Union, and the speedy return
of Soviet prisoners of war.
Soviet gains
From Stalin’s perspective, the conference
went well. Towards its end he exulted to
his security chief, Lavrentiy Beria, that
he had achieved his aims and yielded
little that mattered. On eastern Europe,
with Molotov’s loyal assistance, he
doggedly frustrated attempts by
Roosevelt and Churchill to ensurearrangements for a new, democratically
elected Polish government. On the
Pacific war, the secret protocol he agreed
with Roosevelt, and to which Churchill
subsequently acquiesced, gave him the
territorial concessions he wanted. On
prisoners of war, he won agreement
from Roosevelt and Churchill – anx-
ious about the treatment of their own
liberated prisoners of war in Soviet
hands – that Soviet prisoners would be
returned swiftly to their homeland. As
Stalin intended, these included Cossacks
and others who had fought with the
Nazis, who were handed over with their
families to their deaths by reluctant
British troops.
On the United Nations, Stalin was
satisfied that the agreed voting arrange-
ments would allow the Soviet Union,
as a permanent member of the Security
Council, to protect its interests by exer-
cising a veto. He also won US and UK
agreement to the admission to the Gen-
eral Assembly of two Soviet republics,
Belorussia and Ukraine.
As Stalin’s armoured train carried
him back across the frozen landscape to
Moscow, the issue on which he was
perhaps least satisfied was reparations
from Germany. When reminded by
Roosevelt and especially Churchill of
the consequences of bleeding Germany
dry after the First World War, he lost
his temper – a rare occurrence during
the conference – querying whether his
allies intended not to punish Germany.
Though Stalin won agreement that
the Soviet Union would receive the
lion’s share of any reparations, he had
to accept that their level and nature
would be resolved by an Allied
commission that would convene
later in Moscow. 5