Soviet–American understanding founded on
trust. He regarded Churchill’s ‘Victorian’ imperi-
alism and his lifelong anti-communism as out-
dated in the post-war world.
As for Churchill, he felt keenly on the eve of
Germany’s defeat that Europe was in danger from
the overbearing, immensely powerful Russian
bear. He was looking to a less rosy future than
Roosevelt was, in a world in which a United
Nations organisation could no more be relied
upon to preserve peace with justice than the
League of Nations had been. He wanted to dilute
the bilateral relationship between the US and
Russia that Roosevelt was trying to establish.
Conscious of Britain’s comparative weakness,
Churchill tried to bring in another European ally,
France. He failed. De Gaulle was not invited and
would henceforth refer to the Yalta carve-up with
bitterness and blame the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ for it.
The only concession Churchill did win, finally
gaining Roosevelt’s support for it, was to secure
for France participation on the Allied Control
Commission for Germany, which was to coordi-
nate Allied rule over the defeated Reich. France
would thus have its own occupation zone and its
own sector in Berlin. On reparations there was an
acceptance that the Soviet Union had a special
claim but the final amount was left to a commis-
sion to propose. Perhaps the most significant thing
about Yalta was what was not discussed and
agreed. The question of Germany’s future was
really shelved. Churchill and Roosevelt had moved
away from turning Germany into a ‘pastoral’ coun-
try. The dismemberment of Germany was not now
determined. The destitute plight of the Germans,
so Stalin may well have calculated, would strength-
en communism throughout Germany. To gain
material ends, he was ready to make promises that
would appear as major concessions. He agreed to
modify the Soviet stand on the organisation of the
United Nations, whose success was closest to
Roosevelt’s heart. But Roosevelt had incautiously
told him that American troops would be with-
drawn from Europe within two years. Stalin there-
fore knew that he had only to wait until 1947; no
military threat would then be able to stop him
from doing whatever he then deemed to be in the
Soviet interest.
The debate about Poland occupied much of
the conference and was the most vexed. History
did not have the same meaning for Churchill,
Roosevelt and Stalin. Stalin looked at the fron-
tiers of post-Versailles Europe through different
eyes. For the West, 1937 was the last year that
was ‘normal’, when the political geography of
Europe reflected the peace settlements reached
after the First World War. After 1937, Hitler first
blackmailed the West and then redrew the map
of Europe by force. For Russia, international
injustice pre-dated Hitler and had occurred after
it had lost the war in 1917. The settlement then
of the post-1918 Versailles era represented the
humiliating acceptance of the superior force of
the capitalist West at a time of Soviet weakness.
From its own perspective, the Soviet Union
had simply not in its infancy had the necessary
strength to regain Russia’s ‘just’ frontiers. And so
it had to acquiesce in the detaching of the Baltic
provinces, which became independent states –
Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Large territories
were also carved out of what was formerly imper-
ial Russia to create the Polish state, which
included many Ukrainians and White Russians.
Bessarabia was detached and added to Romania.
As Stalin saw it, the frontiers of 1918–20 were
those imposed on Russia; they were neither ‘just’
nor settled. He took advantage of the war
between Germany, Poland, Britain and France in
1939–40 to put right what he believed were past
wrongs by first making deals with Hitler. By
1941, with the absorption of eastern Poland, the
three Baltic states and Bessarabia, Russia had
regained most of its ‘historic’ frontiers. Stalin
claimed that the Russian frontiers of 1941 should
be regarded as the settled ones and not those of
1921 or 1937; he was prepared to consider only
minor concessions. With remarkable consistency,
he took his stand on this issue in discussions and
negotiations with his Western allies from the ear-
liest to the last months of the war.
The Czechs in 1943 had arranged their own
settlement over the frontiers and future govern-
ment of their country. Benesˇ, head of the exiled
government in London, after the Munich experi-
ence of 1938 was not prepared to rely on Western
support again. He did not allow a confrontation
1
THE VICTORY OF THE ALLIES, 1941–5 293
