Many decisions of the Yalta Conference had been prepared long before February 1945
By Evgeny Spitsyn
The Yalta Conference was held at the Livadia Palace and attended by delegations from the three Great Powers of the Anti-Hitler Coalition, which included: from the Soviet Union – the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, Marshal I.V. Stalin, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs V.M. Molotov, the People’s Commissar of the Navy, Admiral N.G. Kuznetsov, the First Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, Army General A.I. Antonov, the Ambassadors to the UK and the USA F.T. Gusev and A.A. Gromyko; from the UK – the Prime Minister W. Churchill, the then Foreign Secretary A. Eden and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General A. Brooke; from the United States – President F. D. Roosevelt, the Secretary of State E. Stettinius and the Army Chief of Staff, General G. Marshall.
The leaders of the “Big Three” focused on an extensive list of problems and issues – from current and “everyday” ones to truly global ones. Let’s dwell on only two subjects of great relevance. These are the fate of Germany, which was the key to the new territorial restructuring of Europe, and the establishment of real institutions and mechanisms to prevent a new global war. It should be said that not only in the public consciousness at large, but even among professional historians there is a persistent myth that it was at this conference that the fate of Germany became one of the main subjects. However, it is not the case. Now it is no secret that the future of the Third Reich was discussed in the silence of high offices as early as November to December 1941, including in conversations between the Soviet Ambassador to the UK Ivan Maisky and Winston Churchill, during which the British Prime Minister for the first time openly raised the question of the division of Germany, placing special emphasis on the separation of Prussia from the other German states.
A little later, in January 1942, on the instructions of President Roosevelt a special “Advisory Committee on Postwar Problems” was set up, which soon presented him with several plans for the postwar division of Germany into three, five and even seven parts.
Judging by the archives, similar plans were being developed by the Soviet Government too, though its official position on the German issue, first defined by Stalin in the Order of the People’s Commissariat of Defence of the USSR No. 55 in February 1942, was as follows: “It would be ridiculous to identify Hitler’s clique with the German people and the German State. The experience of history shows that Hitlers come and go, but the German people and the German State remain.”
For the first time the question of the future of Germany was publicly discussed at the Tripartite Conference of Foreign Ministers held in October 1943 in Moscow, during which C. Hull and A. Eden declared the inevitability of the division of Germany. However, V. Molotov avoided expressing the Soviet position, saying that this “issue is in the process of being studied.” Indeed, it was then being studied carefully and recently declassified documents show that a month before the conference three members of the Institute of World Economy and International Politics – V.A. Karra, S.M. Vishnev and A.m. Gurevich – presented to the upper echelon a note, “Options for the division of Germany and their economic and military consequences”, where they proposed three options for its division into three, four or seven states.
Thus, by the time of the first meeting of the leaders of the “Big Three” in Tehran, the fate of Germany was being thought out in detail. At the Tehran Conference, held in November to December 1943, a concrete discussion on this issue took place on the final day of the Conference, when Roosevelt proposed a plan for the division of Germany into five states, with Prussia “rendered as weak and small as possible”. Having supported this idea, Churchill nevertheless proposed that all the southern German lands, above all Bavaria, be included in the Confederation of the Danube. However, Stalin, rejecting the UK Prime Minister’s “Danube dreams” and partially supporting his American counterpart, again refused to reveal the Soviet plans.
As a result, having failed to achieve unity on the German issue, the leaders of the “Big Three” decided to assign its studying to the European Advisory Commission (EAC), established in October of that year.
In 1944, the Allies continued to work on projects for the surrender of Germany and plans for its postwar restructuring, of which the “Morgenthau Plan”, worked out by the long-term US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, became particularly famous. It suggested ruralising the Third Reich – that is, transforming Germany into a “country of pastures and fields”, transferring the Saarland to France, transforming the Ruhr Basin, the Rhineland and the Kiel Canal area into an international zone, dismembering the rest of Germany into two autonomous states, destroying its large industry, etc.
In addition, according to declassified archival documents, at the same time such work was being carried out by the working groups of K.V. Voroshilov, A.Ya. Vyshinsky, V.G. Dekanozov, M.M. Litvinov and Ya. Z. Surits, which were not much milder than the “Morgenthau Plan”. For example, in January 1945, Litvinov’s Commission submitted its plan to the Politburo, which proposed dividing Germany into Prussia, Hanover, Westphalia, Württemberg, Baden, Bavaria and Saxony.
Moreover, similar plans were being developed in other high offices – in particular, of General Ch. de Gaulle, who headed the Provisional Government of France from early July 1944. He vigorously advocated the division of Germany and the transfer to France of the Saarland, the Rhineland and the Ruhr Basin, or at least the establishment of international control over them.
Thus, by early February 1945, when the leaders of the “Big Three” arrived in Yalta, the solution of the German issue, despite all the differences, supposed: the complete military defeat of Germany and its unconditional surrender; the liquidation of Hitler’s regime; the occupation of German territory for an unspecified period; the change of German borders in favour of the USSR and Poland; the division of Germany in the name of its closest neighbours’ security, the prevention of the threat of another aggression from the German side, etc.
The development of all recommendations for resolving the German issue was assigned to the EAC in London, headed, among others, by the Soviet and American Ambassadors Fyodor Gusev and John Winant, the head of the Central European Department of the Foreign Office William Strang, and the Commissioner for Foreign Affairs of the French Committee for National Liberation Rene Massigli.
By the beginning of the conference, several versions of the “Act on the Unconditional Surrender of Germany”, the “Declaration of the Defeat of Germany and the Assumption of Supreme Authority Over It by the Allied Powers”, the “Agreement on the Zones of Occupation” and other documents had been prepared.
Contrary to the statements of a number of modern authors, none of the leaders of the “Big Three” opposed the plans for the division of Germany at that time, and all further discussion basically boiled down to “how to inform the Germans about this”. A special committee consisting of Eden (chairman), Winant and Gusev was set up to study the procedure for the division of Germany.
Thus, three months before the surrender of Germany the Allies were fully prepared to resort to the most severe measures to solve the German issue – to the point of the country’s dismemberment.
However, when the Committee for Dismemberment began concrete work in March 1945, the Soviet representative unexpectedly handed Eden an official letter stating that the Soviet Government did not interpret the decision of the Yalta Conference on the division of Germany “as a mandatory plan”, but as a possible means “to put pressure” on it, and in the end the question of the dismemberment of Germany was de facto removed from the agenda. Moreover, already in April, the provision on the dismemberment of the defeated enemy was withdrawn from the “Act on the Unconditional Surrender of Germany” and from the “Declaration of the Defeat of Germany”. The new official position of the Soviet Government on this was announced by Stalin on 9 May in his “Speech to the Soviet People on the Occasion of the End of the War”, when he stated pointblank that “The Soviet Union is celebrating its victory, though it is not going to dismember or destroy Germany.”
The reason for such a radical change in Moscow’s position on this issue is still a matter of dispute among historians. However, in our judgement, the answer lies on the surface, as all the steps of the Soviet Government clearly demonstrated up to the ratification by the Western powers of the 1954 Paris Treaties on the remilitarization of West Germany and its admission to NATO and the establishment of the Warsaw Pact. By the time the war was over Stalin realised that dismembering Germany did not meet the fundamental interests of the USSR. It was vital for Moscow to turn its territory into one demilitarised zone, which would become the centre of the USSR’s “second security belt” in Central and Northern Europe, consisting of the neutral states of Germany, Austria and Finland.
Clearly, Stalin’s plan did not meet the interests of his yesterday’s allies, especially Washington, at all, as the new Secretary of State James Byrnes openly stated in September 1946 during a speech in Stuttgart. Then he emphasised that thenceforth American troops would never leave the German territory, even if Soviet troops left it. Therefore, the Americans deliberately divided Germany, a process that de jure ended in May 1949 with the establishment of West Germany on the basis of the three Western occupation zones (the so-called “Trizonia”).
Clearly, all these steps laid the foundation of permanent crises in the centre of Europe, which were ended only by the “new Eastern policy” of Chancellor Willy Brandt. The result of this policy was the signing in August 1970 – December 1973 of the Treaty of Moscow with the USSR, which fully settled the acute border dispute, similar agreements in Bonn with the People’s Republic of Poland, East Germany and the Czechoslovak Republic, along with the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin.
It was these agreements that dramatically advanced the “pan-European process”, creating the required legal framework to sign the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. Only thirty years after the establishment of the Yalta-Potsdam system of international relations did it de jure consolidate all the postwar borders in Europe.
However, the policy of Gorbachev and Co., which in 1989-1991 led to the collapse of East Germany and its absorption by West Germany, the collapse of united Yugoslavia and the death of the Soviet Union, de facto put an end to the Yalta-Potsdam system, which all its creators did not agree to admit in any way. Until recently, the main member countries of the Yalta-Potsdam agreements of 1945 pretended that this system was alive and still functioning… Self-deception? Anyway, the question of a new Yalta will inevitably appear on the agenda sooner or later.
It will happen not only because it will have to legitimise new borders in today’s postwar Europe, but also because with the collapse of the Yalta–Potsdam system the crisis of the main institution of this system, the UN, will be visibly marked. According to the plans of its founding fathers, the UN was supposed to become a real instrument of political regulation of the new world order, since the decision-making procedure at the UN was in two stages. The lower level of this organization, the General Assembly, which united all the member countries, had the right to make only advisory decisions. And the upper level of the UN – the Security Council (SC) – had much broader powers and had the exclusive right to resolve all international issues, including the application of sanctions against all states that grossly violated the generally accepted norms of the then-existing “international law”.
However, it was very difficult to make such resolutions, since only five nuclear powers played a decisive role in the UN Security Council – the USSR, the USA, the UK, France and China, each of which became its permanent member. In addition, all decisions were not made by a majority vote of the Security Council’s fifteen members, but only by consensus – with the obligatory consent of all its permanent members. That is, each of them received the “right of absolute veto” on any decisions, even if all the other fourteen members voted in favour of them.
Thus, the relations between the two superpowers – the USSR and the USA – were, in fact, incorporated into a multilateral international structure, which became the main platform of their dialogue. Moreover, this structure turned out to be the only political and legal mechanism for their cooperation on issues of world politics. However, since almost immediately the UN was faced with the impossibility of ensuring the compatibility of the interests of its leading members, according to many experts, this organization’s main function was not to improve the system of international relations, but to prevent a military conflict between the USSR and the USA, the stability of interaction between which was the main condition for preserving the international world order.
Unfortunately, now this role of the UN and its Security Council has become a thing of the past. And the admission of other countries into the Security Council, for instance, India or Germany, is unlikely to save the situation. It means only one thing: the world is moving towards Yalta-2.
