Yalta and Potsdam 733to accept their decision. At the same time,
Stalin never concealed his determination to
protect his country from future attack by
extending its frontier after the war. He warned
the Allies repeatedly that he would not tolerate
any unfriendly government along the western
boundary of the Soviet Union.
Most Allied leaders, including Roosevelt,
admitted privately during the war that the
Soviet Union would annex territory and pos-
sess preponderant power in Eastern Europe
after the defeat of Germany, but they never said
this publicly. They believed that the Soviets
would allow free governments to be created in
countries like Poland and Bulgaria. “The
Poles,” Winston Churchill said early in 1945,
“will have their future in their own hands, with
the single limitation that they must honestly
follow... a policy friendly to Russia. This is
surely reasonable.”
However reasonable, Churchill’s statement was
impractical. The Polish question was a terribly difficult
one. The war, after all, had been triggered by the
German attack on Poland; the British in particular felt
a moral obligation to restore that nation to its prewar
independence. During the war a Polish government
in exile was set up in London, and its leaders were
determined—especially after the discovery in 1943 of
the murder of some 5,000 Polish officers several years
earlier at Katyn, in Russia, presumably by the Soviet
secret police—to make no concessions to Soviet terri-
torial demands. Public opinion in Poland (and indeed
in all the states along Russia’s western frontier) was
not so much anti-Soviet as anti-Russian. Yet the Soviet
Union’s legitimate interests (to say nothing of its
power in the area) could not be ignored.
Yalta and Potsdam
At theYalta Conference, Roosevelt and Churchill
agreed to Soviet annexation of large sections of eastern
Poland. In return they demanded that free elections be
held in Poland itself. “I want this election to be...
beyond question,” Roosevelt told Stalin. “It should be
like Caesar’s wife.” In a feeble attempt at a joke he
added, “I did not know her but they said she was
pure.” Stalin agreed, almost certainly without intend-
ing to keep his promise. The elections were never held;
Poland was run by a pro-Soviet puppet regime.
Stalin apparently could not understand why the
Allies were so concerned about the fate of a small
country remote from their strategic spheres. That they
professed to be concerned seemed to him an indica-
tion that they had some secret, devious purpose. He
could see no difference (and “revisionist” American
historians agree with him) between the Soviet Union’s
dominating Poland and maintaining a government
there that did not reflect the wishes of a majority of
the Polish people and the United States’ dominating
many Latin American nations and supporting unpop-
ular regimes within them. Roosevelt, however, was
worried about the political effects that Soviet control
of Poland might have in the United States. Polish
Americans would be furious if the United States
allowed the Soviets to control their homeland.
But had Roosevelt described the difficulties to the
Polish Americans and the rest of the American people
more frankly, their reaction might have been less angry.
In any case, when he realized that Stalin was going to
act as he pleased, Roosevelt was furious. “We can’t do
business with Stalin,” he said shortly before his death
in April 1945. “He has broken every one of the
promises he made at Yalta.” In July 1945, following
the surrender of Germany, the new president, Harry
Truman, met with Stalin and Churchill at Potsdam,
outside Berlin.^2 At the Potsdam Conferencethey
agreed to try the Nazi leaders as war criminals, made
plans for exacting reparations from Germany, and con-
firmed the division of the country into four zones to be
occupied separately by American, Soviet, British, and
French troops. Berlin, deep in the Soviet zone, had
itself been split into four sectors. Stalin rejected all
arguments that he loosen his hold on Eastern Europe,
and Truman (who received news of the successful test-
ing of the atom bomb while at Potsdam) made no con-
cessions. But he was impressed by Stalin. The dictator
was “smart as hell,” he wrote in his diary. “Stalin was
an SOB,” the plainspoken president explained to some
officers while returning to the United States fromChurchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin meet at the Yalta, U.S.S.R., conference in February- By April 1945, Roosevelt was dead.
(^2) Clement R. Attlee replaced Churchill during the conference after
his Labour party won the British elections.