Yalta
and the Polish Question:
Why
the West Lost
Part II: Roosevelt
In terms
of counterfactual histories of the Second World War, there are few questions
more interesting than Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s health. A strong
leader both at home and abroad, Roosevelt’s character and powers of persuasion
were forces to be reckoned with in the early years of the war.
By the
time he made the arduous journey by sea and air to the Livadia Palace,
though, Roosevelt was a frail shell. He was being treated for congestive
heart failure, and nearly every observer at the conference remarked on
his weakened state. Churchill noticed as soon as he got off his plane
at the Saki airfield. “When he was carried down the lift from the Sacred
Cow [Roosevelt’s airplane], he looked frail and ill.” His illness,
brought on by the long trip to Yalta, the long journey to Teheran months
before and a long, hard-fought election campaign all combined to make him
the least effective participant in the conference.
That his
illness had an impact on the conference is indisputable. “I suppose
that if FDR had been in better health, he might have held out longer and
got his way on a number of detailed points,” Averell Harriman writes in
his memoir. When it came to Poland, though, Roosevelt’s illness may
have been a peripheral factor. Harriman goes on to say “I can’t believe
[Roosevelt’s illness] would have made a great difference on, say, the Polish
question. At the time of Yalta, the Red Army was in full control of the
country and no amount of careful drafting was going to change that.”
Still,
there was undeniably something missing from the American negotiating party.
For Poland, this would have disastrous consequences. In both the
negotiations leading up to Yalta and the conference itself, the American
position was uncertain, and there seems to have been a fear of taking responsibility
for such a difficult problem. Making the situation even more complex,
the official U.S. position was “that questions relating to boundaries should
be left in abeyance until the termination of hostilities.”
In a discussion of the Polish government’s failure to reach any sort of
compromise prior to the Yalta conference, Secretary of State Cordell Hull
summed up the U.S. position: “The policy of the President and me was to
refrain from stretching the United States upon a bed of nettles.”
At the
most basic level, Poland was simply not a U.S. priority. Even before
the pressure of Yalta, Roosevelt “did not regard this Polish question as
vital or clear enough to risk the impact of dramatic action ... upon his
campaign for reelection. ... He could not take an active interest in Poland
until after the election.” This attitude did not evolve much
after the election. Hull – who was too ill to attend the Yalta conference
– saw involvement in the Polish question as a threat to U.S. policy overall.
Dealing with the obstinate Polish government in exile in mid-1944, Hull
formulated what was to remain the basis of U.S. dealings with the Polish
question – not dealing at all. “We made it repeatedly clear that we wanted
a strong, free Poland; but we were not going to say at that point that
Poland’s frontiers should be such-and-such a line, for to have done so
would have sprung a Pandora’s box of other frontier questions.”
In the
months after Hull’s dealings with the Polish government in exile, the U.S.
position on territorial negotiations evolved somewhat, and at Yalta the
American delegation did negotiate vigorously with the Soviets over frontier
issues -- just not over Poland’s frontier issues. “In contrast to
his bold willingness to face the remaining territorial questions in the
Far East, the President at Yalta was careful to avoid responsibility for
what might be done about Poland,” writes one historian.
By the
time the U.S. delegation arrived at Yalta, it had formulated a policy of
sorts regarding Poland’s post-war shape and rule. The policy, summarized
in the pre-conference policy briefing, would have dismayed any members
of the government in exile:
We should support a frontier
settlement which in the east would take the Curzon line as a basis but
would, if possible, include the Province of Lwow in Poland ... we should
resist the exaggerated claims now being advanced by the Provisional Government
of Lublin for “compensation” from Germany which would include the cities
of Stettin and Breslau and make necessary the transfer of from eight to
ten million Germans. ... Moreover, in order to assure ... that the Polish
people shall be permitted eventually to express their preference as to
the permanent government they desire ... we should continue during the
interim period to exert our influence to assure that the Polish people
have the full possibility at a later date freely to express their will
in the choice of government...
The U.S.
delegation’s position on elections was typically out of touch with their
British allies and played directly into Stalin’s hands. Roosevelt
made it clear several times during the plenary sessions that he wasn’t
particularly well acquainted with the Polish government in exile.
Officially, both Britain and the U.S. recognized the London Poles the legitimate
representatives of the Polish nation, one of the major points of contention
between them and Stalin. On the third day of the conference, though,
Roosevelt opened the discussion by giving away the store.
I am not so concerned
with frontiers. I am likewise not so concerned on the question of
the continuity of the government. There hasn’t really been any Polish
government since 1939. It is entirely in the province of the three
of us to help set up a government – something to last until the Polish
people can choose. I discard the idea of continuity. I think
we want something new and drastic – like breath of fresh air."
Stalin
surely saw this gust as blowing in from the east. By the end of the
conference, the Soviet delegation had whittled down the proposals for free
elections to a vague promise. Meeting on February 8, the foreign
ministers of Britain and the U.S. brought a clause to the table which would
have insisted on some sort of monitoring, the idea being that if they were
going to shift recognition away from the London Poles they needed some
guarantee to assuage the public outrage tha was sure to follow. The
sentence read: “The ambassadors of the three powers in Warsaw, following
such recognition, would be charged with the responsibility of observing
and reporting to their respective governments on the carrying out of the
pledge in regard to free and unfettered elections.” Soviet Foreign
Minister Vyacheslav Molotov managed to get even this modified, and the
final agreement read:
The Provisional
Government which is now functioning in Poland [the so-called Lublin government]
should therefore be reorganized on a broader democratic basis ... This
new government should then be called the Polish Provisional Government
of National Unity. ... This [government] shall be pledged to the holding
of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal
suffrage and secret ballot. ... When a [government] has been properly formed
in conformity with the above, the [USSR, Britain and the U.S.] will establish
diplomatic relations with the new Polish Provisional Government of National
Unity, and will exchange Ambassadors by whose reports the respective governments
will be kept informed about the situation in Poland."
This left
the Lublin Poles -- and hence the Soviets -- in a position of power; it
was up to them to decide how they would work with the government in exile,
if at all. It also left no real means of enforcement. The final
clause is almost a joke – first, part of an ambassador’s job is to keep
his respective government informed of the situation in whatever country
he is posted, and second, the recognition of ambassadors was to come after
the provisional government had been formed. The Yalta agreement took
away the legitimacy of the London Poles without pressing Stalin for concrete
guarantees on the Polish question.
Instead
of starting out from an extreme position and conceding towards moderation,
the U.S. was starting out practically in Stalin’s lap. Under the
U.S. plan, Poland would have ended up even smaller than it did; the U.S.
was ready to give away the territory behind the Curzon line without giving
Poland any additional territory in the west. Roosevelt further weakened
the bargaining position of the western allies by announcing his intention
to pull the U.S. military out of Europe within two years of war’s end at
the first plenary session. The announcement came as a surprise to
Churchill, and set a tone of uncoordinated effort that plagued the rest
of the conference and made pushing Stalin hard for concessions difficult.
What could
have
prompted Roosevelt to arrive in the Crimea so prepared to compromise fully
with Stalin? The unrelenting optimism of the American diplomats regarding
Stalin’s character is the most likely culprit. In retrospect, their
opinions of his personality seem almost delusional. According to
Henry Kissinger, “Roosevelt’s emphasis on Stalin’s goodwill was not a personal
idiosyncrasy, but vented the attitude of a people with more faith in the
inherent goodwill of man than in geopolitical analysis. They preferred
to see Stalin as an avuncular friend than as a totalitarian dictator.”
Roosevelt and Churchill, famously, refer to Stalin in their personal correspondence
as “Uncle Joe”; the American delegation in particular viewed Stalin as
a straightforward bargaining partner. Henry Kissinger quotes one
member of the delegation, Harry Hopkins, who was completely under Stalin’s
spell:
The Russians had proved
that they could be reasonable ... there wasn’t any doubt in the minds of
the President or any of us that we could live with them and get along with
them peacefully ... we all had in our minds the reservation that we could
not foretell what the results would be if anything should happen to Stalin.
We felt sure we could count on him to be reasonable and sensible and understanding
– but we could never be sure who or what might be in back of him there
in the Kremlin."
This consistent
misjudgement of Stalin’s character would prove costly, on the Polish question
in particular. Any pushes for concessions during the negotiations
on Poland were answered with vague promises from Stalin. A more cynical
delegation might have pressed harder for guarantees, especially in terms
of the free elections question. But the delegation was resolute in
seeing the Soviets in the most forgiving light possible.
U.S. Secretary
of State Edward Stettinius Jr., responsible for hammering out many of the
fine details agreed to by Roosevelt, even considered the result of the
conference a qualified victory for the western allies. “The agreement
on Poland was, under the circumstances, a concession by Marshal Stalin
... It was not exactly what we wanted, but on the other hand it was not
exactly what the Soviet Union wanted,” he explains in his memoirs of the
Yalta conference. “It was not a sellout of democratic Poland ...
but a pledge from Stalin that he would allow a new government to be organized
and that free elections would be held in a country which was entirely at
his mercy. The trouble was not the Yalta formula but the fact that
the Soviet Union later failed to live up to the terms of the agreement.”
That Stettinius,
writing in 1949, failed to see any continuity between Stalin’s negotiating
and his later actions is surprising, but illustrative of the Pollyanna-ish
attitude of the delegation.
There
were exceptions to the American delegation’s self-deluding optimism, and
they should have been heeded. Included in the documents relating
to the Yalta conference is a letter from U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet
Union Averell Harriman, a participant in the conference, which was sent
to Stettinius January 11, 1945. Harriman’s analysis is penetrating:
The lull in military activities
on the Eastern Front has in effect given the Soviet Union a chance to pursue
its political objectives in areas liberated by the Russian Army. ... It
has become apparent that the Soviets ... are ... employing the wide variety
of means at their disposal ... to assure the establishment of regimes which,
while maintaining an outward appearance of independence and of broad popular
support, actually depend for their existence on groups responsive to all
suggestions emanating from the Kremlin.'
Considering
Harriman’s advance warning, Roosevelt’s willingness to leave the specifics
of the post-war Polish government undecided is hard to justify. It
should have been clear that Stalin would take every opportunity to subvert
elections to satisfy the Soviet notion of a “friendly” Poland.
In the
end, the American delegation’s final concessions on Poland may have been
their only option. Having given away so much bargaining power in
the months leading up to the conference and even in the first few days
of the conference itself, they were hardly in a position to press Stalin
at the very end. More importantly, the pressure of reaching some
agreement must have been acute in the conference’s final days. Historian
Herbert Feis characterizes the concession on free elections discussed above
as forced by Roosevelt’s haste.
The only effective guarantee
[of free elections] would have been a provision for international supervision
of the elections from start to finish. But it was taken as obvious
that Stalin would reject any such plan as unnecessary and offensive. ...
Roosevelt apparently decided that it was useless or almost so to protract
the argument over possible supervision of the elections, meaning as it
might have, a prolongation if his stay at Yalta."
For the
British and the American delegations, public opinion was also of vital
importance, and added to the pressure to reach an accord. Hammering
out an agreement on the United Nations (or, as Churchill terms the nascent
organization, the World Instrument for Peace) was crucial for Roosevelt.
He knew popular sentiment in the U.S. was expecting results on the issue,
and knew that without an agreement America risked withdrawing into isolationism
again. He was willing to make sacrifices to reach this goal,
and Gallup polls after Yalta showed that most Americans considered the
negotiations a limited success. But on the Polish issue, opinion
was more mixed: only 33 percent said they thought the agreement was fair
to the Poles, even though 56 percent “believed that the agreement on Poland
was about the best that could be worked out under the circumstances.”
<<Back Next>>
Part I: Prologue
Part III: Churchill
Part IV: Stalin
Part V: The
London Poles
Part VI: Aftermath
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