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  YALTA: WITNESS TO HISTORY

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  YALTA: WITNESS TO HISTORY

  It was the dream house of a man who had power and money enough to make dreams come true. Livadia Palace stands today almost exactly as he ordered it, with all its modern conveniences of elevators and hot and cold running water, built of white limestone in the fashionable Italian-Renaissance style of its day. It was all put up in a record time of 15 months, with every one of its 116 rooms offering superb views of garden or forest, half-mile-high cliffs just to the north or the endless blue of the Black Sea just to the south or the leafy streets and elegant villas of the fashionable seaside resort of Yalta two miles to the east.. “We don’t find words to express our joy and pleasure we have in such a house built exactly as we wished,” he wrote to his mother.

  He was Nicholas II, czar of all the Russias, a gentle, kindly uninteresting man, passionately devoted to his wife and his five lovely children, and this was a place of sun and quiet, protected by a majestic mountain range from the arctic winds that roamed the rest of Russia at will, a place where he could listen to the fountains splashing among the exotic plants in his immense gardens, walk in the woods with his family, climb mountains with them, play tennis with them, read Sir Walter Scott to them at night, worship in his garishly ornate chapel, play billiards on his English billiard table, give dinners for 120 guests in his dining room, take photos with one of the first Kodak cameras put on the market of his family at play, and forget all the tiresome responsibilities of ruling the second-largest empire in the world. It was all made ready for him in the happy year of 1911, when his country was enjoying a first-class economic boom, just three years before he was to watch it slip into the disastrous folly of World War I, and seven years before he and his wife and all the five children were to be murdered by soldiers of the Revolution in the cellar of a house a thousand dreary miles away from his palace of Livadia.

  The palace and its grounds have been studiously and handsomely restored, and hundreds of people come daily to look at the family photos on the walls, and the charming watercolors of the garden done in their schoolroom by the little princesses Olga and Tatiana, and the czar’s library and his billiard table, and many of them kneel to pray in his Russian Orthodox chapel.

  But, of course, for most of the visitors Nicholas II and his family form only a tangential object of curiosity. They come to Livadia because it was for eight days in February 1945 the meeting place of three men who occupied the center of all the attention and all the hopes of humanity, it was a spot of sunlight shining through the black war clouds that had covered the earth for four and half years.

  They were the Big Three, and their pictures appeared in every newspaper and newsreel in the world, and later in all the history books - bulldog Winston Churchill with his cigar; wan, dying Franklin Delano Roosevelt making heroic efforts to flash his great old glad-hand smile; Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin with his sly Caucasian-bandit grin, the man who had come closest to losing everything and could now bask in the enjoyment of more loot and more power than had ever been dreamed of by all the previous czars of Russia put together - all three beaming with friendship and contentment as they studied the map of the world in the dining room or relaxed outside under the mild sun in the Italian courtyard.

  Attending this conference in the Crimea required a long and potentially hazardous journey for the two leaders of the democratic world. Roosevelt had first had to take a 4,000-mile voyage by Navy cruiser to Malta in the middle of the Mediterranean for a meeting with Churchill, who had flown down from London (one of the British planes carrying part of his staff crashed on the way, killing most of the people of board). After briefly reviewing the world’s military and diplomatic condition, the two leaders flew off with some 700 attendants - diplomats, military staff, technicians, typists, doctors, plus a sightseer or two like Churchill’s daughter - in 25 four-engined planes on a 1,400-mile course that swerved well out of the way of any possible interference by enemy planes, over the eastern Mediterranean and Turkey and the Black Sea to land at Saki airfield in the Crimea, then taking an eight-hour automobile ride, with concerts by military bands and picnic tables laden with champagne, vodka, caviar, and sturgeon along the way, over winding mountain roads to the palaces that had been prepared for them.

  Roosevelt was lodged in the Livadia Palace, which, as a gesture to his infirmity, was also the site of all the meetings between the three leaders. Churchill was put up 10 miles away at the Vorontsov Palace - which was also used as a meeting place for the foreign ministers to whom problems were shunted when the big boys could not come to any conclusion - in the resort town of Alushta. Here an extravagant Russian nobleman had hired an extravagant English architect in the 1830s to build a home in a wild hodge-podge of styles - it was a gothic castle facing the jagged cliffs to the north and a Moorish palace with a giant inscription over its front door proclaiming that there is no God but God facing the sea to the south, its monumental staircase guarded by six stone lions, of which one bears a singular facial resemblance to Winston Churchill.

  Everything had been brought down from Moscow to make a suitably brilliant and luxurious setting for what was clearly meant to be the greatest of all summit conferences. The servants, the silver, the glassware, the vodka, the carpets and hangings, “the gilt furniture,” as Churchill’s physician Lord Moran put it, “the lashings of caviar, the grand air of luxury, nothing left out but cleanliness.” An American pesticide took care of the bedbugs that gnawed the Prime Minister’s feet on the first night, and no complaint however minor was left unattended to. Britain’s Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal remarked casually one evening that there was no lemon peel in his cocktail, and the very next morning a potted lemon tree was brought into the hall of the Vorontsov Palace.

  Churchill once said that they couldn’t have found a worse place for a conference than Yalta if they had spent 10 years looking for it. But he had to make the best of it. It was the only place in Russia both warm enough in February and undamaged enough by the war to be suitable. And the conference had to be in Russia, partly because Stalin’s doctors warned him against long journeys - he is said to have suffered a heart attack on the way back from the previous Big Three meeting in Teheran 15 months earlier - but mostly because Russia was where the action was. Stalin was personally directing the great Russian offensive, which had driven to within 40 miles of Berlin. And though there were now 2 million American and British troops on the European continent, the Russian front remained, as it had been for three and half years, what the western front in France had been in the last world war, the decisive theater, the place where, as Churchill once told the House of Commons, the guts were torn out of the Germany Army. In the two decisive years beginning with Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Russia, 94 percent of German army casualties were on the Russian front, against 6 percent in what the American Secretary of War called “pinpricks” delivered by the British and Americans in North Africa, the Balkans, Italy, and the skies over Europe. Even when they invaded Europe in force in 1944, they were playing second fiddle: In the two months in which they won their greatest victory, the Battle of Normandy, when they could count 530,000 German casualties, the Russians on their front could count 700,000.

  As they sat down for their first joint session in the dining room of the Livadia Palace at 5 P.M. on Sunday, February 4, the three leaders were at the zenith of their power and glory. They were the arbiters of the universe, and they might be pardoned if they felt a certain thrill of pride as they considered what they had done and what they might yet do. They were old men by the standards of the day (they were all over 60), and they had spent their lives clambering up what Benjamin Di
sraeli called the greased pole of politics (in Stalin’s case there was much blood mixed with the grease). They had seen this war begin with sudden catastrophic defeats for their nations - the wiping out of the French army in the spring of 1940, the destruction of half the Russian army in the summer and fall of 1941, Pearl Harbor and Manila in December 1941 - but who had rallied their nations, fought back through grievous disappointments and terrible losses, to turn the tide. They had chased their great enemy Hitler, who only yesterday had seemed invincible, back to his lair, to cower in a cellar in Berlin, while their armies closed in relentlessly across the smoking ruins of Germany.

  They had managed to hold together what Churchill called a grand alliance of totally dissimilar and fundamentally hostile partners. They had moved millions of men, thousands of ships, tens of thousands of airplanes over more immense distances than any previous war in the history of humankind had known. They had faced down all the dangers of untrustworthy allies, opposition and envy at home, bitter losses and disappointments on the battlefields. They had all made mistakes, sometimes catastrophic mistakes - the casualties resulting from Stalin’s panicky order not to retreat an inch when the Germans attacked in the summer of 1941 were numbered in the millions. But unlike Hitler, who lost his head when he began losing battles, they had learned from their mistakes. There has been no end of historians, generals, television commentators, and others who have pointed out that the war could have been won much faster if these historians, generals, and commentators had been in charge. The fact remains that it was these three men who did the job. People who insist that no single individual has any influence at all on the course of history should consider what the world would be like today if the Big Three had all been killed by bomb or assassin’s bullets in 1941, and the Allies had been led through World War II by their seconds-in-command - Henry A. Wallace, Clement Attlee, and Vyacheslav M. Molotov.

  Now was the time for their last hurrah. Their war was thundering toward an early end, and the world was waiting for them not only to wrap it up victoriously but to find the formulas for a new and lasting peace.

  The men of Yalta, whatever else they were, were realists, and they knew that they were not going to do any such thing in eight days. If they needed someone to counsel patience, they had only to look at the plaster statue that still stands at one end of the dining room, a statue of Penelope ordered by Nicholas II. Penelope, in Greek legend, had to sit weaving patiently and repetitiously for 20 years until her husband Odysseus came back to chase away the wicked suitors and save his kingdom.

  Big as they were, the Big Three - who, as the British diplomat Alexander Cadogan noted sadly, were now really the Big Two and a Half, since Churchill’s Britain had no longer the population and the resources to keep up with the pace of a world war - could neither rewrite the past nor foresee, let alone control, the future. They knew that the boundaries of the world were being changed by the armies of the world, Eastern Europe was in the grip of the Red Army and Western Europe of the Western allies, and in summit diplomacy, as in the Old West, possession has always been nine tenths of the law. The only European boundary line they specifically changed at Yalta was the one between Poland and the Soviet Union. Under pressure from Roosevelt, Stalin agreed to give the Poles a tiny sliver of the land he had grabbed from them in 1939 by moving this line five or so kilometers to the east.

  The Russians and the Western powers had two totally contradictory and incompatible ideas of the world, and there was no underlying confidence or trust between them. The Western powers could not forget or forgive that the Soviet Union had sat out the war for two years from 1939 to 1941 while Hitler was chewing them up. The Soviets could not forget or forgive the three years from 1941 to 1944, when the Anglo-Americans methodically marshaled and trained their invasion armies in comparative comfort while the Russians did all the fighting.

  Apart from crushing the Nazi menace that had almost undone them all, there was precious little that they could agree on at Yalta. But they had no choice: They had to make an agreement. For - as the many critics who have denounced them ever since tend to forget - there was a war on, a war they had come close to losing and which, though they were on the verge of winning it, was not yet won.

  Only six weeks before the conference opened, the supposedly shattered German army had stunned the Western allies with a powerful offensive in the Ardennes - the Battle of the Bulge - which until it petered out in a couple of weeks caused panic at headquarters and loud appeals for a Russian offensive in the east to take off the pressure. A few weeks after the Yalta Conference an offensive of similar size held up the Russian advance through Austria and Hungary for a couple of weeks. Day and night bombing had not yet wiped out the German war industry, and Germany had an ominous technical lead of at least several months - which in a total war could be the equivalent of light-years - over the allies in weapons of the future, such as jet aircraft, rockets, and silent submarines.

  Until the last shot was fired, the Big Three were very much in the position of the members of the Continental Congress to whom Benjamin Franklin said in 1776 that they had to hang together or they would hang separately. If they had started to squabble among themselves, they would be repeating the folly of Hitler, who assumed after his sensational victories in the summer of 1941 that the Russian bear was dead and wasted irreplaceable time spinning out plans - one of which was to annex the Crimea, get rid of all its inhabitants, and replace them with brawny brown-shirted Germans - to carve up its skin.

  The military staffs at the conference estimated that it would take from five to 12 more months of fighting to stamp out the last Nazi resistance. It turned out to take only three - three months in which American Lend-Lease kept pouring millions of dollars worth of tanks and trucks and fuel and food into Russia, because without them the Red Army could only advance at the pace of a foot soldier and a million German soldiers might be freed to face the Americans on the Rhine. And the Red Army kept swelling the rivers of blood it had been shedding since June 22, 1941 - some 8 or 9 million dead or missing, little less than the combined size of the American and British armed forces in Europe and Asia and on the seven seas.

  Now the Big Three went to work trying to reconcile their irreconcilable differences, or at least paper them over the way diplomats have done since the beginning of diplomacy, trying to make deals and compromises when they could and to outwit their opponents by beguiling talk. They talked and talked, hundreds of thousands of words of talk, in a generally relaxed atmosphere. They toasted each other, they flattered each other, and though they might make barbed references to past grievances and betrayals, they never raised their voices, as was to occur later that year in the Potsdam Conference when President Harry Truman made a proposal for international supervision of the Danube River, which was almost entirely under Russian control, and Stalin, breaking into the English language for the first time in anyone’s memory, said very firmly, “No. I say no.”

  They were not above using what Churchill liked to call terminological inexactitudes on one another. Roosevelt at Teheran, knowing that invocations of morality would get nowhere with Stalin, had told him that there were 7 million Polish-American voters who might throw him out of office if he didn’t stand up for the interests of their mother country. When he brought them up again at Yalta, Stalin replied that of the 7 million Poles in America only 7,000 voted, “and he made his statement,” says an admiring historian, “with particular emphasis, certain that he was right.” Both statements represented exaggerations, in different directions, of several hundred percent. Later at Yalta, when Roosevelt asked if some members of the Polish government, which Stalin had set up in Lublin, could not be asked to put in an appearance at Yalta to explain their needs and their plans, Stalin - who loved to call factory managers at three in the morning to find out if they were doing their job right - said it was a very good idea, but unfortunately they had left Lublin and he didn’t have their phone numbers.

  They might work out compromises
and make minor concessions on minor matters, such as whether to let the French share in the occupation of Germany (okay, said Stalin, as long as the French share comes out of the American and British zones). Or how many votes the Soviet Union would have in the General Assembly of the United Nations, which was scheduled to meet soon in New York (Stalin wanted 15, but he settled for three.) But on all the major issues - what kinds of governments would take over in all the immense territories liberated from the yoke of Nazi Germany, what would become of Germany itself - they simply postponed making decisions, they shunted them aside to their foreign ministers or other bodies, which never got any further with them than they did. They agreed that the Germans should pay reparations for all the misery and destruction they had caused, but they could not agree on how much. In practice, each of the victors took as much away from vanquished Germany as they felt like. The Russians carted off something like 450 factories complete with all their machinery and equipment. The Americans got a better deal when they made off with Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket scientists, who would help give the United States an insurmountable lead in the race into the technological future. In the end they all decided to heed the common-sense advice Churchill had given at Yalta: “If you want a horse to pull your wagon you must give it some hay.” And they all set to work furiously rebuilding German industry.

  They agreed that the Poles should get a chunk of eastern Germany to make up for losing their eastern provinces, which had been assigned to the Soviet Union at the Teheran Conference 15 months before Yalta. But they could not agree on how much territory. Stalin solved the problem unilaterally by giving the Poles about a third of the occupation zone in Germany, which had been assigned to him by agreement in the fall of 1944.