Yalta Redux -- renewing the debate

Speaking in the capital of Latvia, President Bush declared:

"For much of Eastern and Central Europe, victory brought the iron rule of another empire. V-E Day marked the end of fascism, but it did not end oppression. The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history."

For the full text of the President's remarks see here.

This statement stepped on a lot of toes, especially in Democrat circles and among admirers of the late Soviet Empire and of Josef Stalin. It set the commentariat atwitter.

Over at the incredibly aggravating Arianna Huffington's new blog, FDR idolator and JFK lapdog, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. [emphasize the Junior -- his father was one of the nation's leading progressive historians, a pioneer in urban and associational history, and a far better scholar than his sycophant son ever became.] issues a condemnation of Bush's statement.

The American president is under the delusion that tougher diplomacy might have preserved the freedom of small East European nations. He forgets the presence of the Red Army. No conceivable diplomacy could have saved Eastern Europe from Soviet occupation. And military action against the Soviet Union was inconceivable so long as the Pacific War was still going on. Our military planners, in order to reduce American casualties, counted on the Red Army to enter the war against Japan . At Yalta Stalin promised a firm date in August. And in February the atom bomb seemed a fantasy dreamed up by nuclear physicists.

As for Eastern Europe, Stalin "held all the cards" in the words of Charles E. Bohlen, the Russian expert. But FDR managed to extract an astonishing document – the Declaration on Liberated Europe, an eloquent affirmation of "the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live." Molotov warned Stalin against signing it, but he signed it anyway. It was a grave diplomatic blunder. In order to consolidate Soviet control, Stalin had to break the Yalta agreements – which therefore could not have been in his favor.

The Declaration stands as the refutation of the myth, given new currency by the president of the United States , that Yalta caused or ratified the division of Europe . It was the deployment of armies, not negotiating concessions, that caused the division of Europe.

Read it here.

Schlesinger is certainly right to note that the Red Army could not have been dislodged from Eastern Europe, but he grossly exaggerates the importance of the Declaration on Liberated Europe. Even in his debilitated state FDR could not realistically have expected that Stalin's signature counted for anything and the declaration was nothing more than a cynical face-saving cover for a brutally realistic deal. The US was willing to trade Eastern Europe for Soviet cooperation in the final assault on Japan.

Jacob Heilbrunn, over at the LA Times goes a bit farther. He writes:

During his visit to the Baltics over the weekend, President Bush infuriated Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin by declaring the obvious: that the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was "one of the greatest wrongs of history." But it was what he said next — comparing the Yalta accord among Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin in 1945 to the Hitler-Stalin pact — that should cause outrage here at home.

The claim that Roosevelt betrayed Eastern Europe at Yalta, and that he set the stage for 40 years of Soviet domination, is an old right-wing canard. By repeating it, and by publicly charging that the Yalta agreement was in the "unjust tradition" of Hitler's deal with Stalin, Bush was simply engaging in cheap historical revisionism. His glib comments belong to the Ann Coulter school of history.

Heilbrun repeats Schlesinger's points that it would have been impossible to dislodge the USSR from Eastern Europe at that time, and that the US needed Soviet cooperation for the endgame against Japan.But then implicates Eisenhower:

Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower was happy to let the Soviets bear the brunt of the fighting as they marched toward Berlin, and he was unwilling to expend American troops on storming the German capital.

This is an attempt to answer the obvious objection that US forces could have driven much farther eastward than they did after Yalta, thus allowing the Red Army to occupy a lot of territory that would otherwise have been denied to them.

He further absolves FDR by observing that the American people wanted the war to end and engagement with the USSR was politically unfeasible.

So it was Eisenhower who, unwilling to take casualties, allowed the Soviets to take control of Eastern Europe, and the American people who prevented FDR from doing the right thing. Thus he exhonerates a Democrat hero and shifts the blame to a Republican hero and the American people.

And as far as the charges against FDR? -- he ties them to Sen. Joseph McCarthy and implies that this was just part of the anti-communist paranoia of the 1950's, being regurgitated today by Bush. He also takes a gratuitous dig at the right arguing that their criticism was hypocritical because before the war they had been isolationist. He also tosses in the whole Alger Hiss controversy to boot, thus implicating Richard Nixon by extension. So he has sketched out a line of deceit, starting with McCarthy, running through Nixon to Bush.

Heilbronn does admit that FDR was perhaps a bit "naive" concerning Stalin's intentions, but that was all right because Churchill OK'd the agreement and later FDR "went on to recognize Stalin's perfidy shortly before he died." He thus absolves Roosevelt of any cynical motives in pursuing the course he did at Yalta.

See folks, nothing here..., move along... ignore those crazy Republicans and that idiot President who mouths their "canards." Note that Heilbronn is not so much defending FDR as attacking his critics.

Read the whole thing here.

But then look at this statement from Mikheil Saakashvili, President of the Republic of Georgia. He has no doubts regarding the meaning of Yalta. In a piece published in the WaPo he states:

For 60 years the word "Yalta" has meant betrayal and abandonment. The diplomatic accord reached between Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States in that sleepy Black Sea resort relegated millions of people to a ruthless tyranny.

He calls for a "return to Yalta."

It is time to return to Yalta. This time we will not engage in a secret diplomacy in which our values are compromised and innocent peoples are enslaved. In this new association of democracies, our diplomacy will be open and our focus will be the possibilities of our future. And, we will begin to make Yalta a symbol of hope.

Read it here.

RELATED:

A posting by Alan Allport, equally hostile to Bush, over at Cliopatria has stimulated a discussion of Allied strategy during WWII and whether or not the US and Britain consciously decided to allow the Soviets to bear the brunt of the war effort. Read the discourse here.

It is clear from all of this that Democrats no less than Republicans have built up a mythic account of the closing phases of WWII. In the Republican model FDR is a naive, sick, and often incompetent leader who acquiesces in the imposition of an unjust settlement on the innocent people of Eastern Europe. In the Democrat model FDR is, if not heroic, at least a hard-headed realist who sought the best possible outcome to a difficult situation. Neither account is satisfactory to a serious scholar, but the Democrat version has become the standard account in most textbooks. That is what allows people like Jacob Heilbronn to get away with charging that President Bush is engaging in "revisionist" history.