From Yalta to Moscow: 1945–2025
By Roberto de Mattei | 2 April 2025
The spectre of the Yalta conference hovers over Europe while international observers consider the possibility of an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine and the conditions of a possible ceasefire.
It is still premature to go into the negotiations underway between the United States and Russia, yet the analogy with the Yalta agreements of 1945, more than the geopolitical concerns, seems to characterise the psychological relations between the interlocutors. An old book by the French historian Arthur Conte, Yalta ou le partage du monde : 11 février 1945 (Robert Laffont, 1964), helps us understand a certain similarity between the current negotiations and those that took place eighty years ago on the Black Sea.
Joseph Stalin, Lenin’s old comrade in arms who had become master of all Rus’, was the uncontested lead figure of the meeting that took place in Crimea from 11 to 14 February 1945, between the leaders of the three victorious powers: the United States, Britain and Russia. Stalin was a man who had spent his whole life in either plotting or foiling conspiracies. The revolutionary writer Victor Serge described him as “frightening and banal, like a Caucasian dagger”. The Russian dictator considered the West a sickening world, headed for decline and death, according to Marx’s theories on the evolution of society. But despite its sickliness, the capitalist enemy was capable of final convulsions, and to defend himself, Stalin was convinced of the need to create a chain of buffer states around the borders of his country. The dogma of encirclement obsessed him, hence the goal of obtaining, on the borders of the USSR, as many protective zones as possible, to control, in one way or another, the greater part of Central and Eastern Europe.
Stalin feared Churchill, and had his privileged interlocutor in the American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who arrived sick and weakened in Yalta. Roosevelt had been infirm since being struck by polio at a young age. He was a narcissist who, being from a wealthy family, had never had money troubles, and in his quest for power, had never dealt in depth with the important problems of his time. He had arrived in Yalta dominated by two ideas: to end the war as soon as possible and to organise a lasting peace. Above all else he nurtured the dream of being the “man of peace” and therefore the greatest man of all time. He was convinced that the only way to achieve peace was to establish an organisation of united nations, on which the USSR and the USA would confer the authority that the ill-fated League of Nations had lacked in the 1930s. Roosevelt was ready to pay any price to secure Stalin’s support for his project. His superficial opinion of the Kremlin autocrat is evident in his impatient response to Ambassador William Christian Bullitt, who was trying to put him on his guard:
“Bill, I don’t dispute the logic of your reasoning. I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of a man. Harry [Hopkins] says he’s not and that he doesn’t want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige; he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.”
Harry Hopkins, a high-ranking Freemason, was Roosevelt’s chief adviser, and he maintained, “The Russians undoubtedly like the American people. They like the United States. They trust the United States more than they trust any other power in the world.”
Roosevelt returned from Yalta convinced that he had managed to tame Stalin. Yet Stalin’s intentions were clear: the Baltic countries were already an integral part of the Soviet Empire, he scarcely concealed the fact that he wanted to sovietise Finland and Yugoslavia, he had Bulgaria in his grip and a coup was underway in Romania. At Yalta, international communism realised the naivety of the West. The sovietisation of Eastern Europe, Mao Zedong’s victory in China, the fall of Korea and Indochina, the Berlin Wall, the conquest of Cuba: they all stemmed, according to Arthur Conte, from Stalin’s victory at Yalta. And in the Yalta agreements one must also seek the cause and inspiration of the great post-war Russian campaigns in favour of pacifism.
Trump’s character and his political project are certainly different to Roosevelt’s. But what shall we make of Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer to whom the American president has entrusted the launching of the delicate negotiations between Russia and Ukraine? Witkoff was interviewed by Tucker Carlson on 21 March 2025, to discuss his meeting with the Russian president that had taken place in Moscow the week before. During the interview, Witkoff, in front of an almost moved Carlson, reported that Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of Trump from the best Russian artist and given it to him to take to the president, who was touched by it. Putin also told him that he had gone to church to pray for Trump after the attack in Pennsylvania on 14 July last. According to Trump’s envoy, Putin is not “a bad guy”, and the Russians do not “want to march across Europe”; indeed, he said, he is a “great” leader who is trying to put an end to the conflict underway for three years between Moscow and Kiev. “I liked him. I thought he was straight up with me,” Witkoff reiterated.
Listening to the interview, one is struck by the optimism and inexperience of Trump’s envoy in the face of an old KGB fox like Vladimir Putin. This does not mean that the American president shares his colleague’s views. It is very difficult to get into Trump’s mind, even though he is more talkative and extroverted than Putin. But the Kremlin boss’s strategy has the advantage of being clear, because it has been repeatedly expressed over the past fifteen years. In another of Tucker Carlson’s interviews, on 9 February 2024, after a long history lesson, Putin maintained that, since its origins, Ukraine has been a historical part of “Great Russia”, and will return to being so. On other occasions, he has pointed to his model in Stalin — for him, the patriot who won “the great patriotic war” and restored the unity of Russia, giving it back its role as a great power. To achieve this objective, Stalin needed to allay the fears that the Anglo-Saxons might have been harbouring about his revolutionary intentions. Among other things, he decided that “The Internationale” would no longer be the national anthem. The new anthem, with music by Alexander Alexandrov and words by Sergei Mikhalkov and Gabriel El-Registan, first broadcast on Russian radio on 1 January 1944, featured the refrain: “Glory to you, our free fatherland / sure stronghold of friendship between peoples / from victory to victory, let the Soviet flag, the national flag, soar!” Abolished when the Soviet regime collapsed in 1991, the melody was readopted by Putin in 2000 as the national anthem of the Russian Federation and expresses his will to power.
In an interview on 25 March with Corriere della Sera, the former head of the KGB in Moscow, General Yevgeny Savostyanov, now in exile, explained:
“Putin will accept a complete truce only when he is sure he can achieve his grand designs. He absolutely wants to go down in history as ‘The Great Collector of Russian Lands’, the one who reversed the disintegration of the Empire that began in 1867 with the sale of Alaska to the United States. It is not just for himself. The inclusion of Ukraine and Belarus in a single state would allow him to increase ‘his’ population to about 188 million, with an expansion of mobilisation resources, of the domestic consumer market and of the labour pool. It was a theory dear to the old KGB: the smaller Russia is, the more ungovernable it becomes. His main goal has a foundation both practical and ideological.”
“Europe must wake up,” Savostyanov concludes. But the warning also applies to the Americans.