In 1945, the Soviet Union, the UK and the US met at the town of Yalta, to discuss how to manage the world. But it failed and led to the Cold War in Europe and beyond. Eighty years on, President Donald Trump wants a second Yalta to secure American global hegemony. His tariff threats are meant to show foes and friends how enormous American economic power is, so they’ll fall in line with his plans. The first Yalta failed, though, and the second one almost certainly will, too.
New Delhi: The invitations to the last supper came on the Prime Minister’s personal letterhead, marked 10, Downing Street. The host didn’t particularly matter though. Because there was only one set of chefs at the venue. And dinner hadn’t varied that much from national banquet to banquet.
This time, the guests were offered caviar pies, white and red salmon, suckling pig with horseradish and Shashlik of mutton. The Soviet cooks had thrown in roast turkey, green peas and roast almonds as a concession to Anglo-Saxon palates. Forty-eight hours earlier, the Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin had infuriated Prime Minister Winston Churchill with a rye toast to the King of England.
As a rule, Stalin said holding up his glass, “he was on the side of the people, not kings, but in this war, he had learned to honour the British people who honoured their king.” This time as the guests waited for their caviar pies, the Prime Minister had his revenge.
He raised his glass to the “health of His Majesty the King, the President of the United States and the President Kalinin of the USSR, the three heads of the three states”. The Prime Minister had two distinguished guests at his table and had found a way to toast only one of them. Keep right on the end of the road, sang Churchill afterwards.
Stalin looked puzzled. “Tell your chief”, President Franklin Roosevelt told Stalin’s translator, “that this singing by the Prime Minister is Britain’s secret weapon”. And thus after that party our new world born.
Or so, the story goes anyway. Hi and welcome to this episode of the Print Explorer. I am Praveen Swamy, a contributing editor at The Print.
For weeks now, amid all the chaos unleashed by US President Donald Trump’s tariff policies, large numbers of people have been wondering what his endgame actually is. One thesis is that it isn’t about economics, or trade, or the budget at all. Will Dunn writes in the New Statesman that the real game is to show what a tremendous thing American power is and how much pain its use can inflict to coerce other nations into falling in line.
But fall into line with what? The thing Trump really wants, commentators like Othon Leon believe, is a new version of Yalta. The 10-day conference was held 80 years ago from the 4th of 11th to February 1945. At that conference, the three great victorious powers of the Second World War carved up Europe and arrived at some of the guiding principles and institutions that would shape the course of the world after it.
In its most crude form, you might think of a new Yalta like this. Trump at some fantastic dinner at Mar-a-Lago says, Vladimir, Vladimirovich, Putin, you keep Ukraine and the Baltics, but I get Greenland and Canada. And Xi Jinping might get Taiwan in return for the Panama Canal or Mexico or a monopoly in Central Asia and Africa.
This is all fantasy of course, but the point is there are serious people who think this is how the post-globalization world might be ordered by Trump and other world leaders. The part of the story people mostly forget though, is that Yalta failed. The historian Serhii Plokhi points out: “The Big Three could reach tactical agreements by avoiding the problems that divided them, but that was hardly the same thing as solving them.”
The outcome was the Cold War, which as we all know was a very hot war involving millions of deaths in countries across the world. And so today we’ll be looking at Yalta and why things unraveled so soon after a conference that was meant to have settled everything. There were very many issues at Yalta, but three were to prove key. The structure of power in the United Nations, the fate of Germany and the balance of power in Europe.
The making of the stage
From their car windows, the guests who arrived at Yalta received a grim reminder that the region Crimea had only just been at war. The rolling countryside was littered with burned out tanks and gutted buildings and destroyed German freight trains that had been abandoned and burned by the Nazis in their retreat, wrote one diplomat.
There was little left in Yalta bar, the one-time Russian imperial palaces, which now hosted the three delegations. And even those were brought up to shape only because of the last-minute efforts by the Soviet secret service, the NKVD. The idea of the conference had been proposed by Churchill in the summer of 1944 and he suggested nicer places like Casablanca, Rome or Tehran.
A few days before Churchill wrote to Roosevelt proposing the conference, the Red Army had just taken Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. The Red Army had also crossed its pre-war borders across the front and were closing in on Central Europe. Churchill sought a western offensive into the Balkans to close them off to the Soviets and begin a negotiation on Eastern Europe’s future.
Looking back, it’s interesting to note that Churchill almost did not make it to the conference. Flying with his entourage on a fleet of three DC-3 aircraft, Churchill landed in Malta on 29 January, 1945. Tragically though, one of the other two planes never made it.
Three foreign office officials and an aide-de-camp to the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff were among those killed when that third DC-3 overshot the runway at fog-bound Malta. For his part, Stalin had dug in his heels on holding the conference on the Black Sea resort. In part perhaps because of his well-known fear of long air journeys, but also because the venue involved long delays in planning, which meant time was on his side.
Things were in fact going exceptionally well for Stalin. Led by the legendary Marshal Georgi Zhukov, Soviet forces had massed at the Oder River, just 70 km from Berlin. The process of getting there had involved the destruction of 45 German divisions and the capture of close to 100,000 prisoners.
For their part though, the Allies had just begun to recover from the debacle inflicted by the surprising Nazi counter-offensive in the Ardennes in France. And even British military commanders were unwilling to support their Prime Minister’s calls for opening a new front in the Adriatic. Likely, Stalin’s generous offers of help to the Allies and the contempt he expressed for Nazi generals and soldiers were meant to send a message. Stalin was letting Churchill and Roosevelt know that if they did not come to terms with him, his armies could soon settle the question anyway.
The dismemberment of Germany
The first of those questions, as we discussed, was the idea of partitioning Germany. It had first been raised by Stalin in circumstances which might have led some of his aides to wonder if he had become delusional.
In November 1941, German troops were rapidly approaching Moscow, forcing Soviet ministries and diplomats to leave their capital for Samara on the banks of the Volga. On 21 November, 1941, with the Germans only 65 km from Moscow, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov telegraphed the Soviet ambassador in London: “Stalin thinks that Austria should be separated from Germany as an independent state and that Germany itself, including Prussia, should be divided into a series of more or less independent states so as to provide a guarantee for the peace of European states in the future.”
Four, five, seven states, even one hundred and seven, the parties at Yalta began their discussions with an acknowledgement that Nazi Germany would be dismembered but had a lot of different ideas.
And then there was another question, how? The negotiators at Yalta came up with a compromise. In 1944, the British had suggested partitioning Germany into three zones, obviously one controlled by each of the victorious powers. The Soviets had agreed to the idea but had some problems with the way the British had designed it.
First, the plan spoke of zones in which an occupying power had primary but not complete authority. The Russians did not want British and US troops in territories they controlled. Then the British sought an enclave for Poland in Eastern Germany, a proposal the Russians flatly shot down.
Fresh proposals at Yalta from the British for a French occupation zone created more friction. The British argued that they needed France to be built up again as a buffer against German power in Europe. The French, Churchill argued, also had long experience of administration in Germany because they had occupied parts of it in the First World War.
To this, Roosevelt added the observation that he did not believe Congress would authorise the presence of American troops in Germany for longer than two years. The discussions eventually ended with a compromise. The French would get an enclave but on territory carved out of the American and British spheres in Germany.
French officials, moreover, would have no say in the three-part commission that would make all the important decisions on Germany’s future. There was also some dispute over reparations. The British argued that excessive reparations would imissarate the German population, breeding the same conditions that had led to the rise of the Nazis after the Great Depression.
The Soviets responded by saying there was no reason for East German living standards to be higher than those of the nations they had plundered and pillaged. From Yalta, the three powers were able to leave with a compromise on Germany’s future, but not an agreement. That compromise would create tensions that would repeatedly explode in the course of the Cold War, sometimes threatening the peace in all of Europe.
Carving a country into parts wasn’t the solution, it seemed to be. The fate of Germany, as we’ll see, was part of an even larger question. How would the victorious powers parcel out the Europe they had triumphed over and the world?
Spheres of influence
Late in 1944, a pseudonymous article appeared in the Soviet foreign policy journal, War in the Working Class. The author argued against the concept of spheres of influence and the formation of military blocs, saying they led inevitably to geopolitical conflict. Instead, he proposed what were described as “security zones”, consisting of negotiated agreements between a power and the countries on its peripheries. These security zones, he argued, would work well within a new multinational organisation that was being discussed, called the United Nations.
The author of the article was, in fact, the Soviet deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs, Maxim Litvinov, a man who would later become known as a critic of Cold War competition and an advocate for Soviet cooperation with the West. Perhaps not coincidentally, Litvinov died a mysterious death in 1951. Litvinov came to Yalta armed with proposals for assigning Sweden, Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and all of the Balkans, excluding Greece and Turkey, to the Soviet “security sphere”.
The British sphere would include Western Europe, with Denmark, Germany, Austria and Italy constituting a neutral zone. Like the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, Litvinov’s proposal was in essence a plan to divide Europe into two, irrespective of the will of the nations in question. The fate of Poland became a test of this principle and a test of wills for the two sides.
For London, Poland was a valued wartime partner. Its intelligence services and armed forces had served alongside the British. The Polish government-in-exile, too, had operated from London ever since 1939, when the country was vivisected by Soviet and Nazi forces.
Fighting middle ground that would accommodate Poland’s exiles was one of the few issues on which Churchill and Roosevelt completely agreed. For the Americans, Poland was an acid test of Soviet goodwill and an essential guarantee that their dream of the United Nations could come to fruition. For the British, Polish independence was a matter of obviously enormous symbolic importance.
The United Kingdom had, after all, entered the Second World War only on account of the Nazi invasion of Poland. It saw the fate of Poland as the last hope of checking Soviet expansion across all of Eastern Europe. To the Soviet Union though, it seemed improbable that a Poland dominated by anti-communist political parties would prove to be a good neighbour.
Ever since the time of the Tsars, Russia had feared Poland and claimed control of parts of Ukraine and Belarusia, which Poland insisted were its territory. The two countries over history had repeatedly gone to war. In Yalta, Stalin raised the case of France, noting the Soviet Union had not sought a role in political arrangements there.
“We do not know how governments were organised in Belgium, France, Greece and elsewhere,” he said. “No one asked us, although we do not say that we are displeased with one or another of those governments.” That was a polite way of asking the British and the Americans to mind their own business.
Like so much else, the fate of Poland was eventually settled by force. As late as May 1945, well after Yalta, the British Foreign Office was receiving reports that the Polish population of Lviv was refusing to leave the city and continued to hope that the founding conference of the United Nations would revisit Yalta and assign the city to Poland. At the same time, Ukrainians living west of Lviv were refusing to leave the Soviet occupied zone, hoping that the town would again be included in a Ukrainian Republic.
The NKVD was, meanwhile, helping local Poles make the right choice by unleashing a campaign of terror. In 1944 alone, more than 117,000 Poles were forcibly moved from the Ukrainian Republic, part of the Soviet Union, to Poland. The deportations did not come as a complete surprise to the population of the area, as according to Soviet statistics, close to 400,000 Poles alone had been arrested or deported in former Polish territories between 1939 and 1941.
The Polish government-in-exile put that figure at 900,000. The Poles constituted the absolute majority of those deported, but they were not the only group targeted by Stalin. Significant numbers of Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Jews went through this same experience.
As one dictatorship replaced another, Polish refugees were herded into former German concentration camps not long after their original inmates had been liberated by the Red Army. Some Lviv Poles found themselves in Majdanek, the former Nazi forced labour camp on the outskirts of Lublin, where some 60,000 Polish Jews and 20,000 ethnic Poles were murdered between 1941 and 1944.
A report received by the Polish government in London in September 1944 described the situation as follows. “The Lwów district is being rapidly emptied of its Polish population and being replaced by Soviet nationals. Poles conscripted up to the age of 36 are being sent to Yaroslav and thence to Majdanek, where they exist in indescribable poverty, starving behind wires and under Soviet guard.”
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The Dis-United Nations
Looking back at Yalta, this much is clear. Faces might have changed, language might have changed, but the nature of power hasn’t. The big debate on the third issue, the setting up on the United Nations, was how much power a big power should have relative to small nations. To Stalin, it seemed absurd that the three great powers, which had been forced to shed blood to liberate occupied nations, were now receiving scoldings for failing to take into consideration the rights of small nations.
The small nations hadn’t fought, they hadn’t paid in blood. The Soviet leader likely had France on his mind and, perhaps, China. The weak, he believed, ought to have no place at the table.
For Churchill though, this seemed too narrow-minded. He argued that the great nations of the world should discharge their moral responsibility and leadership and should exercise their power with moderation and great respect for the rights of smaller nations.
This of course made strategic sense for England. Allies like France, after all, were key to protecting England from a strong German army of the future. To make his point, Churchill paraphrased from the playwright William Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus: “The eagle should permit the small birds to sing and care not wherefore they sang”.
Even if this sounds very nice for small birds, Churchill probably knew his quote wasn’t what Shakespeare actually wrote. Tamora, the wife of the Roman emperor Saturninus in the play, tells her husband who fears a revolt, “the eagle suffers little birds to sing and is not careful what they mean thereby, knowing that with the shadow of his wings he can at pleasures stint their melody.” In other words, let them sing because you can snuff out their song anytime you want.
For Stalin, to put it simply, the core concern about the United Nations was preventing it from becoming an anti-Soviet gang up. First, there was the question of entry. There were obviously more countries influenced by the West than by the Soviet Union.
Then, on the proposed Security Council, the Soviet Union would be in a minority of one. Remember, China had not yet had its revolution and its government was closely allied to the United States through the Second World War. Among other things, Stalin proposed giving membership to two Soviet republics to balance things out.
This idea surprisingly won support from Churchill. There was no moral way, he argued, “to take in small countries who had done so little simply by the expedient of their declaring war and to exclude the two Soviet republics from the meeting”. Then came the question of why countries such as Argentina and Turkey, which had never declared war on Germany or fought in the Second World War, ought to have a seat at the table in the first place.
For days, the leaders went back and forth on these questions. Finally, the scholar Irène Couzigou records, the Soviets agreed to join the United Nations because of a secret understanding of a voting formula that we have become very familiar with. This formula gave a veto power for permanent members of the Security Council, ensuring that any great power could block any unwanted decision. The Soviets might be alone, but one in this setup was good enough.
The pieces of Yalta
Little imagination is needed in retrospect to see how ineffective Yalta was in willing a new world order into existence. Yes, the United Nations did emerge, but it became a stage for Cold War tensions, completely unable to maintain the peace.
The institution remains paralysed even today by the superpower veto. And more important, Yalta did nothing to stop the splintering of Europe into two Cold War blocks. The Berlin crisis of 1958-1961 led the two superpowers to the edge of war.
Even by 1950, the two superpowers were fighting through proxies in the Koreas, an issue, by the way, they brushed over at Yalta and left aside as not very important. There are many hypotheses for why things happened the way they did. The scholar Russel Buhite argues that heads of state make for poor diplomatic negotiators with neither the patience nor breadth of knowledge needed for effective engagement.
Slightly, the truth is that history is not very amenable to management by negotiators and efforts to make it fit into neat boxes. There is no tidy diplomatic way to contain power, and there was no tidy way to reconcile the competing interests of the West and the Soviet Union over Poland. There wasn’t some clever solution which could have created a United Nations power structure that was acceptable to all.
Yes, some kind of peace was maintained during the Cold War, but that wasn’t by Yalta, it was by the terrifying power of nuclear weapons and the risk that both powers would annihilate themselves if they chose to go to war. Lacking economic resources and bankrupted by its arms race with the West, the Soviet Union eventually imploded, something that couldn’t have been foreseen in Yalta. So perhaps, Stalin was an idiot for choosing rivalry with the West over making a concession over Poland.
Then again, today, a proud independent Poland is Russia’s principal adversary in Europe and its tormentor over Ukraine. So perhaps, Stalin wasn’t an idiot, just clear-sighted about the real nature of threats to his country. Even hindsight isn’t helpful sometimes, you see, but I think it’s clear that Donald Trump’s hopes that the superpowers can collaborate to run the world together is a fantasy, not a policy.
The truth is, the superpowers never ran the world in concert, nor respected any red lines they thought they could get away with crossing. They certainly didn’t work together for mutual benefit. There’s no reason to believe that if that is what Trump believes, that a new Yalta will be any more successful than the old one.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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