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Los Angeles Times
COMMENTARY
Once Again, the Big Yalta Lie
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Jacob Heilbrunn is a Times editorial writer.
May 10, 2005
During his visit to the Baltics over the weekend, President Bush
infuriated Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin by declaring the obvious:
that the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was "one of the greatest
wrongs of history." But it was what he said next — comparing the Yalta
accord among Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin
in 1945 to the Hitler-Stalin pact — that should cause outrage here at
home.
The claim that Roosevelt betrayed Eastern Europe at Yalta, and that he
set the stage for 40 years of Soviet domination, is an old right-wing
canard. By repeating it, and by publicly charging that the Yalta
agreement was in the "unjust tradition" of Hitler's deal with Stalin,
Bush was simply engaging in cheap historical revisionism. His glib
comments belong to the Ann Coulter school of history.
The slander against Roosevelt that Bush has taken up dates back to the
early 1950s, after Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had supposedly "lost"
China to communism. That's when the American right first decried what
it viewed as a consistent pattern of "appeasement" in the Democratic
Party. The right contended that Roosevelt "sold out" Eastern Europe at
the Yalta conference by promising the Soviets an unchallenged sphere
of influence in the region.
One element of the right-wing mythology developed in those years was
that Alger Hiss, who served during the war as an assistant to
Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. — and who was charged in the
years that followed with being a Soviet spy and was convicted of
perjury — was instrumental in getting Roosevelt to collude with Stalin
against Churchill. It was none other than Joseph McCarthy who declared
in February 1950 that "if time permitted, it might be well to go into
detail about the fact that Hiss was Roosevelt's chief advisor at Yalta
when Roosevelt was admittedly in ill health and tired physically and
mentally." In later decades, conservatives such as Ronald Reagan would
denounce any negotiations with the Soviet Union as portending a new
"Yalta."
But what actually happened at Yalta? Let's review the facts. The
conference itself took place in the seaside Crimean city in February
1945, during the final months of the war. A delegation of more than
600 British and U.S. officials, including FDR and Churchill, met with
Stalin. They discussed postwar borders and issued a "Declaration on
Liberated Europe" calling for free elections in Poland and elsewhere.
The truth is that Yalta did not hand Eastern Europe to the Soviets.
That territory was already in their possession. Stalin had made clear
his plan to take over as much territory as possible back in the
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, which carved Poland in half and gave
the Soviets the Baltic states. The discovery in 1943 of the massacre
of Polish officers by the Soviet army in the Katyn forest was further
evidence of Stalin's malign intention to exterminate the leadership of
Poland. Then, in 1944, during the Warsaw uprising by the Polish Home
Army, Stalin halted the advance of his army on the banks of the
Vistula River and allowed Nazi SS units to return to slaughter the
Poles. By the time of Yalta, the Red Army occupied all of Poland and
much of Eastern Europe.
Theoretically, Churchill and Roosevelt could have refused to cut any
deal with Stalin at Yalta. But that could have started the Cold War on
the spot. It would have seriously jeopardized the common battle
against Germany (at a moment when Roosevelt was concerned with winning
Soviet assent to help fight the Japanese, which he received).
Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower was happy to let the
Soviets bear the brunt of the fighting as they marched toward Berlin,
and he was unwilling to expend American troops on storming the German
capital. The only one who was eager to do that was Gen. George Patton,
who hoped to take on the Russians as well. Given the domestic pressure
to "bring the boys back home," Roosevelt would have been taking a
politically suicidal course had he broken with our allies, the
Soviets.
Roosevelt was hardly perfect at Yalta. He was naive about Stalin's
intentions and believed he could cajole the dictator into following
more moderate policies. But FDR's approach was not particularly
different from that of Churchill (who had declared that he would "sup
with the devil" to win the war, which is what he and Roosevelt, in
effect, did).
As for the charges about Hiss' influence, they've been overblown by
the right for political purposes; in fact, Hiss was a minor player at
Yalta.
What's more, it was the isolationist right that never wanted to fight
the war in the first place, which it conveniently forgot once it began
attacking Democrats as being soft on communism. Nothing of course
could be further from the truth. Roosevelt went on to recognize
Stalin's perfidy shortly before he died, and it fell to Truman to
fight the Cold War.
Roosevelt's record is no cause for shame, but Bush's comments are.
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