Yalta: Witness To History Read online

  Stalin had, while talking with British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden three years previously in Moscow, explained pithily what he thought of the decisions of international conferences: “Declarations - that is like algebra; treaties or agreements - that is practical arithmetic. We prefer arithmetic to algebra.”

  He, however, had no qualms about putting his signature, along with Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s, to the nine agreements and one declaration that were triumphantly issued on the last day of the Yalta Conference, all of them representing a triumph of algebra, full of x’s and y’s that could stand for anything any of the signatories wanted them to. They promised the world that, once the evils of Nazism and Fascism had been totally wiped out, they would help the liberated peoples in “the earliest possible establishment through free election of governments responsive to the will of the people,” and would go on “to build in cooperation with other peace-loving nations a world order under law, dedicated to peace, security, freedom and the general well-being of all mankind.” A separate document pledged that Poland would hold “free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot.”

  Of this last promise Admiral William D. Leahy, who was a member of the American delegation, commented to his boss that it was so elastic that the Russians could “stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without ever technically breaking it.” “I know, Bill - I know it,” said Roosevelt. “But that’s the best I can do for Poland at this time.”

  There was, in fact, one major arithmetical agreement made on the last day of the Yalta Conference, but it turned out to be as illusory as a barrel of x’s and y’s. In an agreement kept secret for obvious military reasons. Stalin promised to declare war against Japan within three months of the end of the war in Europe. As payment he asked, and got, a promise of the return of territory and commercial privileges, which czarist Russia had lost in its war with Japan 40 years before. This was considered a diplomatic triumph for Roosevelt, who for three years had been under intense pressure from strong voices in the American military and the American press to get the Russians into the war in Asia, in the hope of reducing the million or more American casualties that an attack on the Japanese Islands was expected to claim. Stalin was always happy to keep his word when it suited him: He declared war on Japan three months to the day after the surrender of Germany, one day after the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had made Russian involvement in this particular war not only unnecessary but undesirable from the U.S. point of view. However, there was nothing anyone could do about it, and Stalin quietly occupied all the territory he wanted.

  When the Yalta agreements were made public on February 12, 1945, the world was ecstatic. Walter Lippmann, the reigning sage of the American press, wrote, “Not since the unity of the ancient world disrupted has there been so good a prospect of a settled peace.”

  It did not take the world long to discover that whatever Yalta had done, it had not produced a “settled peace.” Barely a week after the conference ended, Stalin would show how he interpreted the algebraic words “free and unfettered elections” when he sent one of his hatchet-men, Andrei Vyshinsky, to Bucharest to present King Michael with a list of the good communists with whom he was to constitute the democratic government of liberated Romania, or else. And as it became clear that none of the other problems postponed at Yalta was going to find an amicable settlement, the world opinion of the conference changed drastically. In the United States a chorus of criticism, which would go on for half a century, accused Roosevelt of having betrayed freedom by giving Eastern Europe away to the communists. In Russia, after Stalin was safely dead, Russian generals wrote books to say that Stalin had betrayed his people at Yalta by calling off an offensive headed for Berlin that was scheduled to begin in early February and might have scooped up all of Germany and its industrial assets before the Western Allies had recovered from the shock of the Battle of the Bulge.

  In the blinding clarity of hindsight, both reactions seem like emotional explosions with little or no connection to the facts. Indeed it might be said that in the 800-year-old chronicles of summit conferences since Richard the Lion Heart made a deal with Saladin in the twelfth century, only the sixteenth-century Field of the Cloth of Gold, where the Kings of England and France showed off their magnificence to each other for several weeks without talking about anything serious, had less effect on the actual course of events than Yalta.

  Still, the images remain, and the Yalta Conference is still generally regarded as marking the end of the hot-war alliance and the beginning of the Cold War.

  The great men signed their documents, posed for photographs, and departed to go back to directing the fighting and the jockeying for position in the postwar world. The Crimea, in general, and the town of Yalta, in particular, could slowly resume its peace-time role of Russian vacationland.

  The buildings that had been blown up or vandalized by the Germans were rebuilt, and new Soviet-style housing projects, referred to by their inhabitants as chicken-coops, were put up. Yalta again became a center for sanatoria for tubercular patients, a center for regimented vacations for deserving miners and factory workers, above all a place where the new czars, from Stalin to Mikhail Gorbachev, with their ranking aides and advisers, could come to pass quiet days in palaces like Livadia or in luxurious seaside dachas, and get some temporary relief from the burdens of international crises and a slowly collapsing economy. Nikita Khrushchev was vacationing in one of those dachas when he learned he had been booted on to the ash-heap of history by his friends on the Politburo in Moscow. Gorbachev was here in an even more elegant dacha when he was arrested by agents of the hardline Stalinists, who seized power for a few hours in 1991.

  The Crimean Tartars, descendants of the warriors brought from Central Asia by Genghis Khan, who formed about 30 percent of the population, had shown insufficient enthusiasm for the Great Patriotic War against the Nazi invaders - in fact, many of them had collaborated with the invaders. Shortly after the end of the war, they were all rounded up, every last man, woman, and child, and flogged into exile in Central Asia. The other inhabitants went back to the institutionalized absurdities of life in a Soviet socialist system, where all decisions were made in Moscow and ordinary people had to work out their individual lives with barter and black-market buying and private deals and scrounging and finagling and petty peculations.

  “I was 10 years old,” a witness of those days told me, “going to a girls’ school which was up in the hills near the Livadia Palace. One day we saw Stalin being driven up the road. He was a funny-looking little man with red hair and freckles, and he stuck his chest out to show off his medals. Of course, we all adored him. He was the savior of our country. When his car had taken the next turn, along came some sinister men in black running as hard as they could, and we all assumed they were imperialist spies who were always plotting against the fatherland, and we threw stones at them. Then it turned out they were KGB men who were Stalin’s bodyguards. Fortunately, my father, who was director of the school, had relatives in the KGB, and the only result was that they moved the school a few miles away.”

  One consequence for Yalta of having these distinguished visitors was that the road leading to and from the Simferopol airport was – as I remarked to the driver taking me through the beautiful mountain scenery to my hotel on my first visit after the disintegration of the Soviet Union - as well designed and as well kept a highway as I had ever seen. “It is,” he told me proudly, “the only one built in the Soviet Union up to the standards of the superhighways in the West.”

  When I got to Yalta, I found a quiet, reasonably comfortable little community with all the usual absurdities, anomalies, and malfunctioning plumbing characteristic of a socialist society. People seemed eager to tell me about some of the absurdities, such as the incident at a recent conference in Alushta of some of the great names in the field of mathematical physics. As the first distinguished guest got up to start unlocking the secrets of the universe, he discovered that the chalk that had been provided by one far-off government bureau was incompatible with the blackboard provided by another, and he had to read his equations aloud so they could be copied by his fellow attendees. When I repeated this story to a charming school teacher who was showing me around, she showed neither surprise nor interest. Things like that happen in our school all the time, she said.

  Details like this give a certain sense of the odd and bizarre to life in the Crimea, which is only natural considering the odd and bizarre nature of its recent history. It had been an integral part of Russia for 200 years, when in 1954 it was abruptly handed over to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine by a decree signed by Nikita Khrushchev, either to simplify administrative work or, in the version favored by most of the people I spoke to, he was dead drunk after an all-night party in the Kremlin. No one paid the slightest attention to this action in 1954. But when Ukraine suddenly became an independent republic in 1991, it almost led to a war because the battleships and submarines of the Black Sea Fleet were based in the Crimean port of Sebastopol. The Russians – at the behest of the Ukrainian government – are now making preparations to abandon the port by 2017.

  In Yalta, as in most of the Crimea, most people think of themselves as Russians (or Tartars, returned from the exile to which Stalin had condemned them in Siberia). There are no Ukrainian newspapers in the newsstands, where the most popular items are Russian translations of John Grisham and the Russian editions of Playboy and Cosmopolitan magazines.

  No one in the throngs of bronzed and healthy-looking people, who swarm up and down the promenade at Yalta, finds anything unusual about this situation, any more than the continued presence of the statue of Vladimir Lenin, which stands staring vacantly out to sea. (It would co
st too much to replace it, say people when asked.) There is after all a long tradition in this part of the world of living under the control of distant foreigners - Viking pirates or Tartar Khans or Polish pans or Muscovite czars or Bolshevik commissars - whose decisions and decrees are not necessarily expected to make sense.

  Like their ancestors, today’s inhabitants of Yalta manage to scrape along. The Ukraine, with its immense agricultural, mineral, and industrial resources, is potentially one of the wealthiest countries in Europe. In the meantime, the people dream of a better future and tell funny stories about their rulers. Did you know that the most prosperous group of working people in the republic is the traffic cops? Indeed, you can see them at regular intervals on all the leafy boulevards of Kiev and other cities, opening up the hoods and trunks of cars and holding animated discussions with the drivers over how much cash they can produce to keep from getting a ticket. At the curb, the BMW limousines of the élite stand in silent pride in front of the No Parking signs.

  No one seems to care as they parade along the waterfront holding hands or pushing baby carriages through the deafening blasts of American rock music. In the handful of elegant, 1911-style restaurants with their fine linen you may see the staff clustered at the entrance listening to the music while all the tables are empty except for an occasional German tourist or a pair of Moscow Mafiosi washing down their dinner with bottles of fine Alushta wines.

  You would think that a place like this would be awash in money. Yalta and the whole Crimean south coast has everything that the Italian and French Riviera and the Malaga Coast have in the way of blue sky and gentle climate, beaches, mountains and deep blue sea, ancient ruins and romantic chasms - everything but the overcrowding and the pollution - and they have a friendly, well-educated, hard-working population and the Livadia Palace besides. Few foreign tourists come here, because no one knows what to do with them. The United Nations sent a mission a few years back to teach the local authorities something about the business of luring tourists and keeping them satisfied, but a former member of mission has told me the task is hopeless. The Ukraine is run by people, he said, who were brought up in a system where private tourists were regarded much as were private businessmen, germs capable of spreading dreadful infections. So they miss no opportunity for making life uncomfortable for both categories today, even in the rare cases where they may genuinely want to encourage them. It will take 50 years for the mentalities to change, he said.

  Not necessarily. Sometimes things can happen fast in this part of the world. They are generally calamities, it is true, like Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s, which killed millions, or the Nazi invasion and occupation of 1942 to 1943, which aimed, said Heinrich Himmler, who was the Fuhrer’s most powerful subordinate, at exterminating 30 million Slavs and came a good way toward its goal.

  But less unpleasant things can happen. It was some 30 years ago that a Ukrainian nationalist carrying his message to Washington was told by a U.S. Secretary of State that the very idea of an independent Ukraine was as phony as a three-dollar bill. And anyone who at that time had predicted that Poland would, before the end of the millennium, have a democratic government chosen in free and unfettered elections or have a prosperous capitalist economy today would have been considered hopelessly naive. Nevertheless, it happened, just as the Big Three at Yalta had said it would, though presumably they would have been as surprised as everyone else by the way it happened.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Salvador Dali once called him the stupidest man in the world; Cary Grant described him as the smartest. New York Times bestselling author Robert Wernick is certainly talented. He has penned more than a dozen books and has contributed to a host of magazines, ranging from Vanity Fair to Life. His topics are as varied as the birth of town planning in the Mesolithic Age to a soul-baring Ferris-wheel ride with Marilyn Monroe to a climb up Mount Sinai. He has made his in Manhattan, Algiers, a ranch in the Nevada desert, San Francisco, the Basque coast, the Golden Isles of Georgia, and, most recently, the 14th Arrondissement of Paris. He has made his home in Manhattan . . .

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by New Word City, Inc., 2011

  www.NewWordCity.com

  © Robert Wernick

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-61230-580-6

  Ebook Conversion: Reality Premedia Services Pvt. Ltd., Pune, India.

  Table of Contents

  YALTA: WITNESS TO HISTORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

 

 

  Robert Wernick, Yalta: Witness To History

 

 

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