The event that took place on 4-11 February 1945 in the Crimea allowed humanity to live for almost half a century without the threat of a new world war
By Kirill Privalov
“History is politics that can no longer be corrected. Politics is history that can still be corrected,” the wise German Sigmund Graff, a famous writer, argued in the last century. The Yalta Conference of the leaders of the USSR, the USA and the UK is politics in its purest form, which really became history. The very big History that is written only with a capital H and teaches us not to make mistakes. And all the attempts sometimes made by some politicians and historians to evaluate what happened yesterday in some other way or belittle its significance today are vain. For the event that took place on 4-11 February 1945 in the Crimea allowed humanity to live for almost half a century without the threat of a new world war.
Precursors
There are milestones in history that mark the course of civilization. I am not talking about the Flood or the Ice Age, but about human affairs, man-made things, as it were. That is, about what directly depends on us, ordinary people. Not only on the powers that be, ambitious politicians and cunning diplomats, but on all people who are tired of wars and do not want them again.
“The art of foreign policy is to direct the inevitable in the right direction,” the American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger asserted. And perhaps the “inevitable” in the world of the most “foreign” of policies is that sooner or later all wars end. Of course, this is a very bleak consolation against the background of the troubles that befall millions of people during disasters, but nevertheless…
The Peace of Westphalia after the terrible Thirty Years’ War, the Congress of Vienna after Napoleon’s aggression against, without exaggeration, the whole of Europe… the Yalta Conference after the Second World War stands out among these key events of History with a capital H.
Westphalia, Vienna, Yalta – three “world systems”. The first two, formed after two global wars, remained effective for a long time until they were replaced by a new system – the Yalta one. And again, after a widespread and total war. How, when and under what circumstances did the world order collapse? Why did it take place?… Either of these systems has its own parameters of survival and its own reasons for collapsing. And either of these systems – the Westphalian and the Vienna ones– then became a stage of the epoch-making diplomatic rise that took place in the Soviet Yalta, which had just been liberated from the Nazi occupiers.
Some experts in history reckon the Thirty Years’ War as almost the first of the world wars. You can agree with this judgement or not. However, almost all the European countries were affected to one degree or another by the hostilities and their consequences (the final peace treaty was signed by the Russian Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich). Not to mention the Germans, whose lands were at the epicentre of most of the battles. The population of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation shrank from 16 million to four million. In 1650 the following law was even passed in Nuremberg: “Since the needs of the Holy Roman Empire require the restoration of our population decimated by the sword, disease and famine, every man is allowed to marry two women within the next ten years.” Is it possible? Official polygamy in the very heart of the Christian continent!
The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, marked the beginning of a new order in multi–confessional Europe, which proclaimed the principle of religious tolerance and equalized the rights of the Catholics and the Protestants – an order that abolished the principle of “Cuius regio, eius religio” (whose realm, their religion) and was now based on the concept of State sovereignty. According to the norms established by the Peace of Westphalia, the main role in international relations that had previously belonged to monarchs passed to sovereign States. We could list the results of the meeting of politicians in the cities of Münster and Osnabrück for a long time. The main thing about them is that the old hierarchical order of international relations collapsed. In addition, this event in German lands, which became the first diplomatic congress of the modern age, was over the next centuries the beginning of a series of multinational conferences of politicians who determined the fates of Europe and the whole world at different stages.
The Westphalian system lasted for a century and a half – that is, for a long time. And it was broken by the French Revolution of 1789 and the perturbations that followed it, including, above all, the Napoleonic Wars.
A new system of international relations was born in Vienna at the Congress of 1814-1815, where the concept of a “concert of nations” appeared. The “concert ideology”, which referred to the political philosophy of the so-called “harmony of the universe”, a fashionable utopian theory of the Pythagorean type at that time, concerned not only the abundant musical entertainment in Vienna of monarchs and illustrious officials, but also their political relations. In between soirees with champagne and noisy balls with Viennese waltzes, those who had defeated Napoleon were enthusiastically dividing his empire and agreeing to restore the status quo that had once existed after the Peace of Westphalia.
“They understood nothing and learned nothing,” Charles Maurice de Talleyrand–Perigord, a noted French intriguer from big politics, said of the Bourbons who had returned from emigration to the Louvre. Curiously enough, all the main participants of the Congress were overcome by the same Bourbon nostalgia for the years that seemed irrevocably past. Alas, it must be admitted that many politicians, including modern ones, often suffer from the same passion.
However, it was just the tip of the European diplomatic “iceberg”. The main task of the “concertmasters” in Vienna was to agree on a new world “system” and establish rules of relations between countries different from the Westphalian ones. After all, other leading players had appeared in the arena of the early nineteenth century, the countries that had defeated Napoleon: Russia, Prussia, Austria and the UK. All the decisions of the Vienna Congress were collected in the Final Act. It also announced the creation of the Holy Alliance of European States, which was supposed to guarantee the inviolability of European monarchies. For the first time the task of “forestalling the aggressor” was discussed. In other words, the sad end of Napoleon, who had encroached on the sacred right of the “anointed of God” to the throne, was supposed to become a lesson for potential usurpers of all stripes… But was it really so? It is enough to recall Napoleon’s nephew Louis Bonaparte, who eliminated the constituent power in 1851 in France with the help of bayonets.
Well, a global continental catastrophe was avoided for exactly a century. The “concert of nations” developed into an extensive aristocratic family of people with “blue” blood, where all the monarchs of Europe (apart from the Ottoman Sultan) were interrelated. The Old Continent had never experienced such dynastic splendour in the style of a refined Gothic anthology. It seemed that soon the long–awaited Golden Age, glorified in myths, without bloodshed and annexations of territories, would come! But all the plans were frustrated by the First World War unleashed by Germany and Austria.
High game
I remember one day my Parisian friend decided to show me the “armistice wagon” in a suburban forest near Paris – this is what the French call the railway carriage in which the First Armistice of Compiegne (that is, the surrender of Germany) was signed in 1918. (For some reason my comrade from the Fifth Republic did not tell me anything about the Second Armistice of Compiegne – in other words, about the surrender of France in 1940). After the First World War, a new international order, called the Versailles Order by most historians, began with a humiliating ceremony for the Germans in Compiegne.
“Politics is more difficult than physics,” Albert Einstein once admitted. The author of the general relativity theory knew what he was speaking about, because he saw the events that befell the world after the First World War. At that time the global security system was created solely in the interests of the victorious countries: the UK, France, the USA and Japan. The interests of the defeated and newly emerged countries on the ruins of empires were frankly ignored. What kind of balanced system could we talk about in such a context when the United States immediately refused to participate in it, when the anti-German orientation of the structure and the demonstrative isolation of Soviet Russia in no way ensured stability in the world? Naturally, there could be no question of any universality of the newly formed system. On the contrary, the so–called “insulted bloc” (Germany, Russia, Austria) was formed, and the potential for a possible global conflict grew by leaps and bounds.
The League of Nations, established on the “Versailles” wave, claimed to create a new tool of world order, but the organization where the UK and France set the tone proved to be unrepresentative, ineffective, and even helpless. Eurocentrism had exhausted itself: the world needed a truly global system. And it was born in Yalta.
The Conference would never have taken place in the Crimea if it hadn’t been for Joseph Stalin’s insistence. He didn’t like flying on airplanes. He had tried it once when he travelled by air to the summit in Tehran – and that was enough… Therefore, when American President Franklin Roosevelt officially proposed to the USSR leader in July 1944 to arrange a new summit, the painful question arose as to where to hold the Conference. The Allies initially suggested meeting in Scotland, at about equal distance from the United States and the USSR. The symbolism was in the Anglo-Saxon style, however… Stalin did not like the idea, and he made an excuse in the spirit of a truly Caucasian: He said he didn’t want to go to men in skirts. Of course, it sounded like another peculiar joke of the “Father of Nations”. In fact, Moscow rejected this idea, seeing the activity at the front: the Red Army was crushing the Nazis. Stalin decided to buy time so that later he could speak with the Allies with more convincing arguments – based on the results of the victorious military campaign of 1944.
Then Roosevelt, who did not hide his irritation, suggested holding the Conference in Rome, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Athens or in Malta, the unsinkable “British aircraft carrier”. Stalin refused everything, saying that the doctors allegedly did not recommend him to make such long journeys, but Roosevelt, who moved only in a wheelchair, could find a climate favourable for his poor health in the Crimea. On hearing about Stalin’s proposal, Winston Churchill flew into a rage, saying that they would not have found a worse place than the Crimea, “even if they had been looking for ten years.” The Soviet leader stood his ground and used a variety of tricks. Thus, he promised Churchill a visit to the grave of his grandfather, the Duke of Marlborough, who was killed during the Crimean War at Balaklava. And at the end of December Stalin said he would send Vyacheslav Molotov, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and Deputy Chairman of the USSR State Defence Committee, to the summit instead of himself. The Allies could not lower the level of the Conference, and in a few days they decided in favour of Yalta.
“Roosevelt presided over the Conference and headed all the meetings, but Stalin, whose troops were already fifty kilometres away from Berlin, remained the informal leader in Yalta,” the journalist and historian Henri Amour, a member of the Académie Française , told me (his works were published by Robert Laffont publishing house, in which my first French book was published, and we would often meet on the Place Saint-Sulpice, where the publishing house was situated at that time). “It is significant that in Yalta, as earlier at the meeting in Tehran where the three world leaders had met for the first time, there was no agenda. The communication remained informal, with each participant raising the question that seemed the most pressing to him. A rare case for summits of this kind…
“There were no strict regulations, despite the fact that the delegations had prepared for this just in case. I was able to work in the British archives, and I saw the Yalta documents of Churchill’s team. His personal notes, made for some reason in piercing green ink, have survived as well. With the same pen the British Bulldog – this is Churchill’s nickname – also drew a map of Europe, divided into spheres of influence with Stalin… It is usually said about such diplomacy that it remains ‘in ties’, but with ‘unbuttoned jackets’. The fate of the planet was being decided based on the superleaders’ personal relations.”
Stalin had the ability to charm. A room was prepared for Roosevelt, taking into account his preferences. Since the American’s favourite colour was blue, everything in his room – curtains, tiles on the floor, and even the telephone – was made in sky-blue tones, which went well together with the view of the Black Sea in the windows. To achieve the desired effect, his bathroom was repainted seven times! Roosevelt’s gourmet tastes were taken into account as well. He was captivated by the collection of wines in the basements of Massandra, which the Nazis had so recklessly left. Stalin even presented Roosevelt with shoots of Crimean vines at parting. The legend later appeared that the famous California wines are actually “descendants” of the Massandra shoots… And there are many legends associated with good relations between Stalin and Roosevelt that were established in Yalta. One of them is that the Marshall Plan, conceived by Roosevelt, was initially worked out as a project for the economic reconstruction in the USSR, which had suffered from the war – this is why its financing was so impressive and extensive. Only Roosevelt’s death in 1945 and the subsequent presidency of Harry Truman, an ardent anti-Soviet, thwarted all the prospects, and millions of dollars during the Cold War went to other purposes – to enslave Europe.
Diplomacy, politics and history all rolled into one! It is interesting to look at the photos of the “Big Three”: Roosevelt is always in the centre. Stalin did a clever thing: the American President, accommodated in the Livadia Palace where the Conference was held, acted as if he were the host, so he is shown in the centre. But the tone of the high game in Yalta was still dictated by the Soviet leader. Stalin subtly made this clear to his eminent partners. Now he did not show up at the airfield in Saki to meet Churchill and Roosevelt, who took off from Malta on different planes; now he violated protocol by being late for the opening of the Conference (Stalin quipped at the reproach of his partners: “How can a fifteen-minute delay be compared with two years of delay in the opening of the second front by the Allies?”); and now he almost left the negotiations in an emphatic manner on learning that the Americans called him “Uncle Joe” among themselves…
Stalin knew Churchill better – he had repeatedly communicated with the Englishman before – but contacts with him were more difficult to build. However, the Armenian cognac helped: the British Prime Minister, a great lover of strong drinks, appreciated it so highly in Yalta that he even took a small barrel of it (a gift from Stalin) on his plane. Nevertheless, this did not negate the feelings that were running high during the negotiations. When discussing the size of reparations, Stalin began to insist on $10 billion from Germany. On hearing this, Churchill was indignant and jumped up from his armchair. However, Stalin quickly put the Briton in his place, shouting at him as if he were a naughty boy and asking him not to forget in the future: he was talking to the victorious country! The confused Churchill could only keep silent… However, this incident did not spoil the Prime Minister’s mood. He stayed in the Crimea the longest and, departing on 14 February, he said: “Leaving the resurrected Crimea, cleansed of the Huns thanks to Russian valour, I express my gratitude and admiration to all the valiant people and their army.”
The contours of the future Europe were painted in Yalta and remained so for almost half a century. In the “bipolar world” the rules of the game were dictated by the USSR and the USA.
The leaders of the three Allied Powers also agreed to convene a United Nations Conference on 25 April 1945 in San Francisco. How successful was this project? We can discuss this subject for a long time. However, no one will dare dispute the viability of the UN. It was in Yalta that the foundations of such a universal forum with its unique legitimacy, the supporting structure of the international system of collective security, were laid. So far, this has been effective. Yalta showed the States on either side of the Atlantic how to live in a world of systemic confrontation, and imposed its powerful projection on the future, including our days.
