Yalta, 1945: the Western betrayal
By Roberto de Mattei | 26 February 2025
Eighty years ago, from 4 to 11 February 1945, the heads of the three powers allied against Nazism — Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin — met in Yalta, in the Crimea, to discuss the post-war future. The three statesmen had met before in Tehran in November 1943, but at that time the Red Army was still far from German soil and the English and American forces had not yet landed in France but were stranded in Italy. Now the great powers they represented — Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union — were on their way to victory, and the talk at Yalta was on the peace that would follow the conclusion of the war.
Yalta was a seaside resort on the Black Sea, one of the few places spared from the fury of the war, where everything had been arranged to impress the Big Three. Roosevelt was put up at the Livadia, a marble building from the Tsarist era, Churchill at the Vorontsov Palace and Stalin at the Koreis Villa, which had once belonged to Prince Yusupov. The three leaders met only at the official meetings and banquets, without the possibility of private conversations.
After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 and the German invasion of Russia in 1941, international alliances had changed, but Stalin’s demands were unaltered. In 1939 and 1940, the head of the Kremlin had obtained from Hitler a vast set of territories in Eastern Europe. At the Tehran summit of 28 November to 1 December 1943, both Churchill and Roosevelt had accepted as Poland’s eastern frontier the so-called “Curzon Line”, a hypothetical border favourable to Russia drawn in 1920 by Lord Curzon to put an end to the Polish-Soviet war. At a subsequent meeting in Moscow on 9 October 1944, Churchill had handed the Soviet dictator a slip of paper with the percentages of their respective zones of influence in Central Europe.
At Yalta in 1945, the head of the Kremlin expressed his intention not only to keep the territories obtained from the Third Reich, but also to expand their borders to the west. Moreover, the Polish and Yugoslav governments in exile in London, until then recognised as legitimate by the Allies, were to be replaced with communist governments. Also at Yalta, the seal was set on the fate of the Russians who had dared to rebel against Stalin. Their story has been documented in many books, including Count Nikolai Tolstoy’s seminal text, Victims of Yalta,1 which denounces the role of Great Britain and the Allies in the forced handover of Soviet prisoners of war and refugees to the USSR. According to the secret Moscow agreement of 1944, confirmed at Yalta in 1945, all citizens of the Soviet Union who had supported the Wehrmacht, including Cossacks, Ukrainians and citizens of the Baltic republics, were to be repatriated without recourse. Death or the gulag awaited them.
Roosevelt also fought for the creation of an international organisation meant to ensure perpetual peace in the world, the future UN, which was born on 24 October of the same year, under the control of “four policemen” that were assured the right of “veto” in decisions: the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the Republic of China. The “fifth policeman”, France, had not been invited to Yalta, angering its new leader, General Charles De Gaulle.
As François Furet observes, in his requests, Stalin encountered fewer difficulties with the leaders of the democracies than he had with the Nazi dictator.2 Yet 1943 had brought the discovery of the pits in Katyn near Smolensk, where the Germans had found the bodies of about 22,000 Polish officers and civilians massacred on Stalin’s order in the spring of 1940. Moreover, when at Yalta Churchill proposed an Allied landing in the Balkans in an attempt to contain Soviet influence there, Stalin was firmly opposed and blocked the plan. “Here we come to the crucial question,” wrote the German historian Joachim Fest, “why didn’t that no from Stalin clarify, in the eyes of the Western powers, the hegemonic plans of the Soviet dictator? The Western leaders were blind.”3
If Churchill was aware of communist Russia’s expansionist intent, Roosevelt was puffed up with illusions. At Yalta, on 8 February 1945, toasting the tripartite alliance, Stalin said: “In an alliance the allies should not deceive each other. Perhaps that is naive? Experienced diplomatists may say, ‘Why should I not deceive my ally?’ But I, as a naive man, think it best not to deceive my ally even if he is a fool”.4 Stalin limited himself to granting his allies a joint declaration on liberated Europe that promised free elections and the establishment of democracy in Eastern Europe, obviously according to the concept he had of democracy. On his return to the United States, Roosevelt expressed to Congress his conviction that the foundations had been laid for an era of “permanent peace” that would definitively surpass the classical diplomatic concept of the balance of power. The American president expressed a benevolent judgment on Stalin, attributing his qualities to the education he had received at the seminary: “I think that something entered into his nature of the way in which a Christian gentleman should behave.”5
From April 1945, two months after Yalta, violations of the declaration became flagrant, especially with regard to Poland. After the war, the Americans admitted that they had been deceived at Yalta, but they were willing to be deceived and the Russians could not do otherwise than deceive them. Yet, as Joachim Fest observes, Washington and London were not obliged by the situation to cede the whole of Eastern Europe to the Kremlin. With the war underway, they still had hold of a formidable instrument of pressure: military supplies, especially American ones, without which the Red Army would not have been able to fight and advance. If only they had threatened to cut off those supplies, history would perhaps have taken a different course. Fest recalls what Peter the Great said when he sent his elite to study in Potsdam, Stockholm or London: Russia had to learn from the West and then turn its back on its values. This lesson should always be kept in mind by those who are too easily seduced by the Tsars of the Kremlin.
The Second World War had erupted for the sake of defending Poland’s freedom and independence, but at Yalta the Allied leaders sacrificed Poland’s borders, its legitimate government and free elections to guarantee an illusory peace with the Soviet Union. The meeting in the Crimea, which was supposed to secure a future of peace for humanity, instead laid the foundations for the Iron Curtain that would divide Europe until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The Yalta agreements consecrated Russia’s imperialist expansion and became, like the Munich treaty of 1938, the symbol of that policy of surrender which Central and Eastern Europeans call “the Western betrayal”. This willingness to be deceived, which combines an outsized optimism with a cynical realism, is a risk that still looms and that must be remembered at a time when American president Donald Trump announces that he is able to impose peace on Ukraine with its Russian aggressor. What will be the conditions of an agreement that does not see those most directly interested, the Ukrainians, at the negotiating table? Peace is a good, but history shows that losing the peace is worse than losing a war.
- Count Nikolai Tolstoy, Victims of Yalta (Hodder and Stoughton, 1977). ↩︎
- François Furet,The Passing of an Illusion (University of Chicago Press, 1999) p 347. ↩︎
- La Repubblica, 28 January 2005. ↩︎
- Winston Churchill, The Second World War. Book XII. Triumph and Tragedy (Heron Books, 1954) p 32. ↩︎
- Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, Simon & Schuster, New York 1994, p 417. ↩︎