For a variety of reasons--the major one being the Soviet Union's increasing aggressiveness, hostility, and intransigence after the war--the Yalta Conference has, in some quarters, tended to become a symbol of sinister power politics, secret agreements, sellouts, appeasement, and subservience to the Soviet Union. Ardent Roosevelt-haters, perpetual isolationists, and many well-meaning people who simply have been misled have sought to draw a picture of President Roosevelt at Yalta as sick, weary, and incapable of protecting the interests of the United States. The symbol and the picture are not warranted by the facts. (For an excellent description of the Yalta Conference, see Roosevelt and the Russians: The Yalta Conference by former Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr.; see also Robert E. Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins, Chapter XXXIII, Other descriptions which help to bring the events and agreements at Yalta into proper perspective are James F. Byrnes' account in Speaking Frankly, and Sumner Welles'
Where Are We Heading?)
There had been no meeting of the so-called Big Three since Teheran, December, 1943. ... In the intervening period, a number of old problems had become more critical and a number of new ones had arisen. In September, 1944, President Roosevelt began to lay the groundwork for another Big Three meeting; in November, 1944, Marshal Stalin suggested Yalta as the site of the conference, and President Roosevelt approved.
On January 22, 1945, President Roosevelt sailed aboard the U.S.S. Quincy. He arrived at Maita on February 2, where he met Prime Minister Churchill; and they reached Yalta after a 1,400-mile airplane flight on February 3. Marshal Stalin arrived on February 4. Formal meetings were held on that day and on every day thereafter until February.
These were the issues and problems---other than the military ones--which confronted the conferees, and which they discussed: the plans for the formal organization of the United Nations; Poland's boundaries and her government; the so-called "voting formula': in the Security Council of the United Nations; French participation in the government of postwar Germany; Russia's claim for reparations from Germany; the treatment to be accorded liberated areas; the form of government for Yugoslavia; the Soviet Union's claims concerning the Dardanelles; foreign access to the oil of Iran; territorial trusteeships; and the Soviet Union's claims with respect to Sakhalin, the Kurile Islands, Dairen, Port Arthur, and other territories in the Far East--including the Manchurian railroad. And underlying the consideration and discussion of all these problems was one all-important military question: the time of the Soviet Union's entry into the war against Japan--and the conditions upon which she would participate.
No decision was reached in respect to some of these questions; they were left substantially where they were found. For example, the Dardanelles question was referred to a future meeting of the Foreign Secretaries. There was flat
disagreement in respect to Iran---so it was left open. The discussion concerning trusteeships was inconclusive, but it was agreed that provision for them would be made in the United Nations Charter.
On other problems, agreements were reached. They were reached, as the parties concerned. With several exceptions, the agreements were all announced in the ... communiqué issued at Yalta.
Reparations was a much-discussed issue at Yalta; Churchill and Roosevelt on the one hand disagreed in many respects with Stalin. In a rather typical Rooseveltian device for avoiding deadlocks--which at Yalta might have been dangerous not only to world peace but also to the winning of the war--the issue was postponed by referring it to a British-American-Soviet commission "to consider the question of the extent and methods of compensating damage caused by Germany to the Allied countries." Roosevelt was willing to agree that the commission should "take in its initial studies as a basis for discussion the suggestion of the Soviet Government that the total sum of reparations should be 20 billions and that 50 percent should go to the Soviet Union," but the British refused to agree to any mention of figures even as a tentative basis of study (Sherwood, pp. 861-862; Bymes, Speaking Frankly, pp. 2~29; italics supplied). While this agreement at Yalta plainly involved no commitment that the Soviet would receive ten billion dollars, and while the absence of commitment was made clear in the discussion at Yalta, the Soviet subsequently insisted upon treating the discussion practically as a commitment of ten billions.
The British-American-Soviet Commission met in Moscow to consider the question. The Soviet representative, Maisky, after some twenty meetings, was unable to produce any figures whatsoever to support their claims. Thereupon our American representative, Pauley, wrote Maisky a letter stating that the United States delegation considered the proposal no longer valid even as a basis for discussion. In July, 1945, the matter of reparations was settled at Potsdam by agreement that each country would look to its own zone for reparations with some additional percentage to go to the Soviet Union from the western zones. In spite of this history, the Soviet leaders without any justification have since insisted that the Yalta discussion was a binding commitment.
In respect to the formal organization of the United Nations, it was agreed (as announced in the communiqué) that a conference would be held at San Francisco on April 25, 1945--a date which Churchill had opposed as too early. Russia consented to follow the American formula for selecting the countries to be invited to attend the San Francisco Conference: viz., all the allied Nations that had declared war on the Axis by March 1, 194_5. This extended date allowed a number of Latin-American Nations to participate. Agreement was also reached at Yalta on voting procedure in the Security Council of the United Nations although, as the communiqué stated, announcement thereof was deferred until "consultation with China and France has been completed."
The discussions on voting procedure concerned chiefly the extent of the permissible use of the veto by any one of the major powers. The compromise reached at Yalta was substantially the proposal made by the United States. This same proposal had been submitted to Stalin in December, 1944, but had been flatly rejected by him. However, at Yalta he finally agreed to it. It provided that procedural questions should be determined by a vote of any seven of the eleven members of the Council, but that substantive questions would require a vote of seven members including, however, the affirmative votes of all the five great powers (United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China). It was further agreed that any council member which was itself a party to a dispute should not be permitted to vote, unless the matter involved enforcement action or sanctions.
This was the formula finally adopted at San Francisco. After extended consideration and discussion at San Francisco (including conversations between Stalin and Hopkins in Moscow, where Hopkins had been sent by President Truman in May 1945, to try to iron out differences which had arisen with the Soviet Union) it was also agreed that the discussion of a topic or complaint would be considered a procedural question which was not subject to veto.
Another aspect of United Nations procedure concerning which agreement was reached, but no announcement made in the communiqué, concerned two additional votes in the Assembly for the Soviet by treating the Ukraine and Byelorussia as separate entities. The Soviet had asked for this, and Great Britain supported her. The President had been informed in advance of Yalta that Great Britain was going to take this position because of the problem of India which at that time was not independent and had no separate Foreign Office.
Roosevelt finally agreed that the United States would at the San Francisco Conference also support the Soviet demand if the Soviet would submit it for full and free consideration and decision by the Nations gathered at San Francisco. Stalin agreed in return to support two additional votes for the United States if we would request them at San Francisco. Roosevelt insisted upon this reciprocity, remembering the debates about the League of Nations in 1919 and 1920 and the strong popular reaction against any charter which gave the United States fewer votes than any other country. The United States, however, never made the request at San Francisco. The agreement in respect to the Soviet's additional votes in the United Nations Assembly was not announced in the communiqué and did not become public until the information "leaked" on March 29, 1945.
It is a matter of record, however, that the three Soviet votes in the Assembly have not played any decisive part in the United Nations decisions or made very much difference one way or the other. Where the United Nations been ineffective, it has generally been due to Soviet intransigence--and not that she has three Assembly votes. It has served chiefly to help Soviet propaganda and to give a fictitious cloak of independence to the Soviet republics, which, in fact and in law, have no independence at all.
One of the very important areas of agreement concerned the postwar treatment of liberated European countries.... The Declaration on Liberated Europe was prepared in the United States State Department, and submitted at Yalta as an American proposal. It was modified only slightly at Yalta--and not at any Soviet suggestion. The Declaration is a direct answer to unfounded charges sometimes made by Roosevelt-haters that the President agreed at Yalta directly or indirectly to some kind of sphere of influence or some form of arrangement which would give the Soviet Union control in Eastern Europe. The words and the spirit of the Declaration are exactly to the contrary. They were designed and directed against the formation of any exclusive spheres. Indeed the Declaration is replete with statements that the three great powers will jointly assist the people in the liberated and Axis satellite countries to create democratic institutions of their own choice with the right--which is expressly stated to be a principle of the Atlantic Charter--to choose the form of government under which they will live. And they agreed jointly to assist in holding the earliest possible free elections for that purpose. No agreement could have been drawn in language less susceptible of any implication of spheres of
influence.
Present-day failure in this area is not due to anything which happened at Yalta. The principles and formula there agreed upon were unassailable. What has happened is due to the Soviet refusal to carry out the agreement made at Yalta; in fact it has been a square repudiation of Yalta.
Though the Soviet leaders still refuse to pay any attention to what Stalin signed at Yalta, this Declaration has been used as the foundation of almost every diplomatic protest the United States has made in connection with the events in Eastern Europe since the end of the war.
One aspect of the Yalta Conference which has since given rise to much debate and criticism concerned Soviet participation in the war against Japan and her claims to certain territory and concessions in the Far East. These items were embodied in a separate agreement. The matter was treated more as a military than diplomatic one; and the issues were not discussed at the plenary sessions. In substance, it was agreed that the Soviet would join the Allies in the war against Japan "two or three months after Germany had surrendered and the war in Europe has terminated"; in return, "the former rights of Russia violated by the treacherous attack of Japan in 1904 shall be restored." This "restoration" was to include: the return of the southern half of Sakhalin Island, the return of the use of Port Arthur as a naval base, internationalizing the commercial port of Dairen, and the joint control with China of the Manchurian railroad and Chinese-Eastern railroad. In addition, the Soviet Union was to get the Kurile Islands.
For obvious reasons, the agreements described in the preceding paragraph were not included in the ... communiqué. It could not be revealed in advance that Russia had agreed to enter the war against Japan, or when she would do so. If a premature disclosure had been made, Japan might have at tacked the Soviet in the Far East while her energies and her armies were still so thoroughly absorbed in the war against Germany. China could not be apprised of these decisions in advance because, by long experience, it had become common knowledge how easily and quickly news leaked out of Chungking. Those who complain that these agreements were secret and underhanded, therefore, ignore the facts of the military situation.
The agreement with the Soviet was made not merely in order to induce her to come into the Japanese war. The Soviet had already indicated her intention to do that, but had not disclosed what she wanted in return. The great military concern now had to do with the timing of that entry. The President's top military advisers were most eager for Soviet participation as soon as possible. Though victory seemed assured in Europe, the Yalta Conference was held only a few weeks after the powerful German counterattack in the Ardennes had been overcome. Victory still seemed to be far away in the Pacific--and very bloody and costly. The operations at Iwo Jima and Okinawa were yet to get under way. An invasion of Japan was being planned for November, 1945. And the potential, almost certain, loss of American lives weighed heavily on President Roosevelt's mind. Military sources anticipated the probability of one million casualties in the invasion and mopping-up of Japan and the Japanese war was generally expected to end no earlier than in one year and probably no earlier than 1947.
Above all, neither President Roosevelt nor anybody else at Yalta, or elsewhere, knew in February, 1945, that the atomic bomb was going to be successful. It was not until several months after Roosevelt's death that our atomic experiments culminated successfully in the test in the desert of New Mexico. The commitment by the Soviet to join against the Japanese meant shortening of the war and saving hundreds of thousands of American lives.
In these circumstances, whatever concessions were made by President Roosevelt to get the Soviet into the Japanese war quickly must be balanced against the overriding necessity expressed by our military leaders to achieve that result. It would not have done us much good had she declared war after our invasion date. We wanted her to share in that enterprise--in men and resources. And if as anticipated at Yalta, we had invaded Japan and the Soviet Union had joined us, she undoubtedly would have occupied nearly all the territory given her at Yalta--and probably would have claimed much more. And even without the invasion, there was not a single territorial concession made at Yalta, with the possible exception of the Kurile Islands, which the Russians could not have moved in and taken at any time with the greatest or ease, without the consent of the United States, Great Britain, or China.
President Roosevelt may be criticized for not being psychic enough to foretell that the Japanese war was going to end in six months, but he cannot fairly be criticized for surrender or appeasement, for inept bargaining, or for any lack of good sense or good faith. The Far Eastern agreements at Yalta were not an item of foreign policy. They were war measures executed in time of war emergency, and the quid pro quo was to save American boys from death. It is easy to criticize with hindsight now that we know that the war with Japan actually ended in a few months--but what American mother or father whose boy was in the armed forces would have criticized the President in February, 1945, for making the military deal he did at the earnest solicitation of his military leaders? Suppose he had refused to make the deal, and as a result some hundreds of thousands of Americans had lost their lives because of that refusal?
The record shows that greater concessions to the United States and Great Britain were made by the Soviet Union at Yalta than were made to the Soviet by the other two powers. The Soviet concessions were:
1. Acceptance of the American formula for voting in the Security Council.
2. Agreement to grant an occupation zone to France. Although at the start of the Yalta Conference the Soviet vigorously opposed the inclusion of France on the German control commission, she later yielded to American and British pressure on both of these points.
3. Agreement on the reorganization of the Government of Poland as suggested by the Americans and British. Although the Soviet initially argued for a mere enlargement of the Polish Provisional Government, both the President and Prime Minister Churchill insisted on a genuine reorganization of the Provisional (Lublin) Government so as to include democratic leaders from outside Poland. Stalin finally agreed at Yalta to go along with full reorganization as stated in the communiqué. This was in itself a substantial accomplishment by the Western powers. It is emphasized by the fact that at the time the Red Army was occupying practically all of Poland. Although the Soviet repudiated its agreement on Poland almost immediately, it was a concession in an area where her army was in complete de facto control.
4. Agreement to leave the Polish western boundary to be settled at the peace conference. The President and Prime Minister Churchill had refused to accept the Soviet request that the West Neisse River be made the western boundary of Poland.
5. Agreement on the American draft of the Declaration on Liberated Europe. Stalin withdrew two amendments proposed by Molotov to which the President had objected.
6. Agreement to the American formula of selecting the countries which should be invited to attend the San
Francisco Conference.
7. Agreement, at the request of President Roosevelt, to coordinate Soviet military activities with those of the
western Allies. The Soviet Union for the first time made a frank statement of her future offensive
plans; United States Army Air Forces were given Soviet air bases near Budapest.
The fact is that the Yalta Conference produced the United Nations organization; committed the Soviet firmly to the war in the Pacific at an early date; and agreed to apply sound principles to the solution of many of the problems facing the Allies after the war.
Had the Soviet carried out the letter and spirit of the Yalta agreements, that conference would be marked as the greatest step in history toward a lasting world peace. As the President was winding up the conference at Yalta, he sent a cable to me in London, where I was engaged at his direction in discussion with the British on the trial of Nazi war criminals and the question of civilian supplies for Western Europe. He instructed me to join his ship, the U.S.S. Quincy, on the homeward journey in order to work with him on the report he was to make to the Congress and the Nation on his return to the Capital....
I flew from London to Naples and then proceeded with Admiral Hewitt on his flagship to Algiers to await the Quincy on its westward journey. I boarded the Quincy at Algiers, and returned to Washington with the President. Charles E. Bohlen, who had been at Yalta and had acted as Russian interpreter for the President, turned over to me, at the request of the President, all the original agreements signed at Yalta, to use as a basis for the first draft of the report. Since Bohlen and Hopkins were leaving the ship at Algiers, the three of us had a conference in Hopkins' cabin during which I was briefed as to the important conversations which had taken place at Yalta.
In preparing his report, the President made one of his few major mistakes in public relations. He decided to keep one of the Yalta agreements secret, although it had nothing to do with military security. It was the agreement about three votes for the Soviet and the United States in the Assembly. His decision not to disclose it was the kind of mistake he had never made before in any of his reports on international conferences, and I have never been able to understand the reason in this case. Of course, as always, military arrangements had to remain secret. That is why it was obvious that the Far Eastern agreement with the Soviet could not be mentioned or discussed. But there seemed to be no reason why the three votes arrangement should not be disclosed. The whole matter was bound to come out shortly in San Francisco when the Soviet would make her demand. Besides, anyone with any experience in Washington would have anticipated that the matter would soon "leak out" anyway, even before the meeting at San Francisco. But the President insisted that it be not mentioned, and it was not.
The only reason I can assign, after talking with many other people with whom the President might have discussed it, was that the President thought that he might be able to agree with Stalin to drop the project so that neither country would make the demand at San Francisco for two extra votes in the Assembly. The matter did soon leak, prior to the San Francisco Conference, and Roosevelt was justifiably attacked for trying to keep the arrangement secret. Had he taken the American people into his confidence he could have explained how unimportant a concession this was... ; but having kept it from them he never was able adequately to justify his action.
Shortly after the conclusion of the Yalta Conference, it became evident that the frank and forthright spirit of cooperation which had prevailed at Yalta among the "Big Three" powers was breaking down. During the two months he still had to live after Yalta, the President began to recognize the dangerous, new attitude of the Soviet Union. To several people he privately expressed his growing reservations and doubts about the good faith of the Russians and their willingness to live up to their agreements at Yalta. On March 27, he expressed to Churchill his "anxiety and concern" over "the development of the Soviet attitude" since Yalta.
One can only speculate concerning the reasons for the Soviet about-face after Yalta. Perhaps it was opposition in the Politburo after Stalin returned from Yalta; perhaps it was Communist Party pressure against any agreement with capitalistic countries; perhaps it was Soviet fear that the Communists would be ousted if "free" elections were really free in eastern European countries. Soon after Yalta, the Soviet Union showed that she did not intend to respect either the spirit or the letter of her agreement regarding Poland. At Yalta, a commission representing the Three Powers had been set up to consult with Polish leaders in and out of Poland, to carry on the reorganization agreed upon and announced in the communiqué. Molotov, the Russian member of the commission, continued to insist as he had unsuccessfully done at Yalta, that the new Polish Government should merely be an enlarged edition of the Provisional Government; furthermore, he seemed determined to reject the suggestion that any but Communists and their sympathizers should constitute the new Polish Government.
Disturbed over this turn of events, the President on April 1, 1945, cabled Stalin that he was disappointed in "the lack of progress made in the carrying out, which the world expects, of the political decisions which we reached at Yalta, particularly those relating to the Polish question." The President warned Stalin sharply against the plan merely to enlarge rather than completely reorganize the Polish Provisional Government. The President also said that "any such solution which would result in a thinly disguised continuation of the present government would be entirely unacceptable, and would cause our people to regard the Yalta agreement as a failure." Marshal Stalin replied on April 7, admitting that the Polish issue had reached an impasse, but he evaded the question by charging that the impasse was due to the British and American Ambassadors. Before a reply could be prepared the President was dead.
A few days before his death the President received a request from Churchill asking what he might say to the House of Commons on the Polish question. From Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945--the same day that the President died--he sent the following message to Churchill: "I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible because these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day and most of them straighten out as in the case of the Berne meeting. We must be firm, however, and our course thus far has been correct." There is no question from the correspondence that the "course" the President was referring to was not the general wartime policy toward the Soviet Union but the firm, even tough, position that he and Churchill had taken with Stalin on Poland.
The President's reference to the "Berne meeting" in his April 12 message to Churchill concerned another irritating episode in Roosevelt's post-Yalta relations with Stalin in which the President had to take a firm stand. Stalin had charged that Allied and German officers were meeting in Berne, without consulting the Soviet Union, to arrange for the surrender of the German Army in Italy. The President had previously assured Stalin that no such negotiations had taken place. Now, in reply to Stalin's repeated charge, the President stated that he resented the "vile misrepresentations" of Stalin's informants who apparently were trying to destroy friendly relations between the two countries. Stalin then replied in a more conciliatory tone.
In the concluding chapter of his book, former Secretary of State Stettinius, says:
From my close association with Franklin D. Roosevelt, I know that he was primarily motivated by this great ideal of friendly cooperation among Nations. At the same time he had no illusions about the dangers and difficulties of dealing with the Soviet Union. President Roosevelt emphasized many times that we must keep trying with patience and determination to get the Russians to realize that it was in their own selfish interest to win the confidence of the other countries of the world. We must help them see, he said, that cooperation with other Nations was the only way they or we could have a peaceful world. If the Russians could acquire confidence in a world organization, the President was convinced that much could be accomplished. Although he knew that the winning of Russian confidence in a world organization would be difficult, and would take time and patience, peace was too vital a necessity not to make a supreme effort toward achieving this goal.
Although what the President did at Yalta indicates an attitude of patient, tolerant effort to cooperate with the Soviet Union--that was his attitude of February 12, 1945. That was also his attitude on March 1, 1945, when he made his report on Yalta to the Congress.
The President lived too short a time after March 1, 1945, to give any clear official indication of his reaction toward the changing behavior of the Soviet Union. Certainly Roosevelt was not one to consider himself bound to persist in his attitude of February 12, 1945, toward the Soviet Union no matter how she acted. I think it is easy to estimate how he would have reacted to the Russian intransigence and treaty-breaking which came after his death, assuming that they would have occurred had Roosevelt lived. His last few messages to Stalin are clear indications of what his attitude would have been.
The fact is that the President was enthusiastic about the results of the Yalta Conference. He sincerely believed that the foundations had been laid for a long period of peace and good will. Certainly Yalta was the nearest approach to world unity for peace which civilization up to that time had ever made.