Yalta and the Polish
Question:
Why the West Lost
Part I: Prologue
In February
1945, representatives of the three allied nations met at Yalta. With
the end of the Second World War just months away, the leaders of the most
powerful nations in the world -- Marshal Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union,
Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain and American President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- sat down to decide the shape of the post-war
world in a week of negotiations.
What they
decided in those secret sessions left many feeling baffled at best and
betrayed at worst. Eight days of closed negotiations between three
great powers ran contrary to the ideals of self-determination that the
western allies had been preaching since the Atlantic Charter was proclaimed
in 1941 -- not to mention the spirit of internationalism that Roosevelt
held so dear and pushed so hard for at the talks.
The decisions
made about the fate of Poland, in particular, left a lasting sense of betrayal.
In a letter delivered to the U.S. Secretary of State and the British Foreign
Minister a week after the conference’s last session, the Polish government
in exile expressed its deep dissatisfaction with the results of the Yalta
conference. Even 55 years later, the sense of outrage and shock is
palpable:
"The
resolutions of the Conference concerning Poland have been made without
the participation, knowledge and consent of the Polish government, which
is recognized by the British Government and the Government of the United
States as also by all the United Nations except Soviet Russia, as the legal
government of the Polish Republic. From the very beginning of the war the
British Government cooperated with the Polish Government, without ever
questioning its authority, in all matters concerning the Polish State.
Nevertheless, at a moment decisive for the independence of Poland, the
British Government have not considered it necessary to consult with the
Allied Polish Government on matters concerning Poland. The Resolutions
of the Crimean Conference entirely ignored the fact of the existence of
the Polish State ...
Today,
decades after the Polish government in exile was handed a fait accompli
by the Allies on their return from Yalta, the question still rings: How
could they have sold Poland out? Where were the ideals of self-determination
that the Atlantic Charter had promised?
The decisions
at Yalta shaped the fate of the Polish nation to an extent unmatched by
any other nation save, perhaps, Germany. Under pressure to come home
with decisive-sounding results, the western allies made agreements with
the USSR that could easily by circumvented or thwarted in spirit.
Though they signed with the best of intentions, Churchill and Roosevelt’s
hurried concessions on the Polish question were destructive in the end.
As Churchill writes in his memoirs of the war, “Poland had indeed been
the most urgent reason for the Yalta conference and was to prove the first
of the great causes which led to the breakdown of the Grand Alliance.”
Yalta
also represented one of the last times the workings of the international
system would come down to the decisions and personalities of just a few
leaders. In retrospect, the results are unsurprising. All three
leaders went in to the conference with a different set of goals and expectations;
more importantly, all three went in with wildly different philosophies
of the international system and the role of their respective nations in
it. Even more personal factors also played a role -- Roosevelt’s
weak physical condition in particular.
Understanding
the Yalta conference and its impact on Poland is important for several
reasons. Yalta is a snapshot of a now-defunct way of making international
policy, with three leaders making compromises and decisions based on their
own judgements on a tight timetable. Moreover, the Churchill and
Roosevelt arrived largely unprepared; their only effort to coordinate their
negotiation strategy was a brief meeting at Malta en route. As the
negotiations revealed, neither had accurate information about the political
and military situation inside Poland at the time of the conference, and
so were reliant on Stalin’s word.
The second
reason Yalta is so important is that it, and the position in which it left
Poland, were significant contributing factors in the post-war atmosphere
of mistrust and suspicion that led quickly to the onset of the Cold War.
As such, these discussions were pivotal in shaping the history of the twentieth
century’s second half.
Understanding the results
of Yalta and its impact on Poland requires an examination of the players
who influenced the course of the negotiations – namely, the mindsets of
the three leaders who led the talks and the Poles who tried to influence
them before they sat down at the table. It also requires a look at
the context the three nations were working within. Once these factors
are laid out, the events of the conference begin to seem almost inevitable.
The “Big
Three” arrived at the Livadia Palace overlooking the Black Sea February
3, 1945. They had a lot to discuss. In the course of three
years, the tide of the war had shifted dramatically. The Soviets
had pushed the Germans back past their pre-war borders and were fighting
their way through to Berlin. In the west, Britain and the U.S. had
largely liberated France and Belgium; the German counteroffensive in the
Ardennes forest had been broken; and the second front that had been opened
in June on the beaches of Normandy was rolling steadily towards the German
heartland. In Asia, the Japanese were mounting an increasingly desperate
defensive war against the U.S. Navy.
In the light of these successes, the Allied powers felt secure in meeting
to discuss post-war plans. At the top of the list for all three participants
was the fate of the defeated Germany. A close second was the nascent
United Nations, which was Roosevelt’s top priority. In addition to
these large issues, there were a number of other negotiations going on
simultaneously, each of which impacted the larger issues and required delicate
agreements of their own. Chief among these were military cooperation,
the disposition of China, and the fate of Poland. The minutes of
the Yalta discussions show that the plenary sessions of each day touched
on all these issues, with compromises on one being used as leverage to
extract gains on another.
Because
the many issues discussed at the conference were so interlinked, the Livadia
Palace during the Yalta conference was in essence the international system
in microcosm. For the duration, all the decision makers who mattered
-- that is, all the decision makers in a position to control world events
-- were sitting at a round table in the Crimea. This was a reality
the Polish government in exile never seemed to grasp. Both before
and after the conference, their public and private statements and correspondence
treated the negotiations over Poland as if they were occurring in a vacuum,
divorced from the greater geopolitical realities as well as from the strategic
and military realities the Soviets were unafraid to use as bargaining points.
But Poland had suddenly became an integral part of the international system.
The conference’s
structure matched the chaos implicit in the international system in microcosm
idea. No formal agenda was set. Roosevelt even cabled Stalin
at one point to say “You and I understand each other’s problems and, as
you know, I like to keep these discussions informal, and I have no reason
for formal agenda.” Churchill’s memoirs describe the three
leaders accompanied by their advisers and translators -- a group of 23,
relatively intimate considering the weight of the matters to be discussed
-- arrayed at a round table in the Livadia Palace.
All three
brought baggage with them, as years of wartime diplomacy, observation and
negotiation came to a climax. For Stalin, the massive destruction
the Soviet Union had suffered at the hands of the Germans made security
guarantees his paramount priority. Churchill brought both a deep
sense of pragmatism and the realization that Britain’s primacy on the world
scene was a thing of the past. Roosevelt brought a distinctly American
inheritance, namely the vision of an international organization that had
inspired Woodrow Wilson more than two and a half decades earlier.
Waiting anxiously at home, the Polish government in exile rested its hopes
on the years of diplomacy it had carried out. All four had a stake
in how Poland emerged from the war.
Next >>
Part II: Roosevelt
Part III: Churchill
Part IV: Stalin
Part V: The
London Poles
Part VI: Aftermath
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