Bush concedes U.S. role in ‘wrong’
President singles out FDR and Yalta
accord.
Published Sunday, May 8, 2005
RIGA, Latvia (AP) - Second-guessing Franklin Roosevelt, President George W.
Bush said yesterday that the United States played a role in Europe’s painful
division after World War II - a decision that helped cause "one of the
greatest wrongs of history" when the Soviet Union imposed its harsh rule
across central and Eastern Europe.
Bush said the lessons of the past will not be forgotten as the United States tries to spread freedom in the Middle East.
"We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or
excusing tyranny and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of
stability," the president said. "We have learned our lesson; no one’s
liberty is expendable. In the long run, our security and true stability depend
on the freedom of others."
Bush singled out the 1945 Yalta agreement
signed by Roosevelt in a speech opening a four-day trip focused on today’s
celebration in Moscow
of the 60th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat.
In recent days, Bush has urged Russia to own up to its wartime
past. It appeared that he decided to do the same to set an example for Vladimir
Putin, the Russian president.
Bush also used his address to lecture Putin about
his handling of the emergence of democratic countries on Russia’s
borders.
"No good purpose is served by stirring up fears and exploiting old
rivalries in this region," Bush said. "The interests of Russia and all
nations are served by the growth of freedom that leads to prosperity and
peace."
Bush spent the day with the leaders of three Baltic republics: Estonia, Latvia
and Lithuania.
Many in the Baltic countries are still bitter about the Soviet annexation of
their countries and the harsh occupation that existed for nearly 50 years after
the war.
Acknowledging that anger and frustration still linger, Bush said, "We
have a great opportunity to move beyond the past." His message here - and
throughout his trip - is that the world is entering a new phase of freedom and
that all countries should get on board.
Although history does not hide the U.S.
role in Europe’s division, American presidents
had found little reason to discuss it before Bush’s speech.
"Certainly it goes further than any president has gone," historian
Alan Brinkley said from the United
States. "This has been a very common
view of the far right for many years - that Yalta
was a betrayal of freedom, that Roosevelt
betrayed the hopes of generations."
Bush said the Yalta agreement, also signed by
Britain’s Winston Churchill
and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, followed
in the "unjust tradition" of other infamous war pacts that carved up
the continent and left millions in oppression. The Yalta
accord gave Stalin control of the whole of Eastern Europe, leading to criticism
that Roosevelt had delivered millions of
people to communist domination.
"Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small
nations was somehow expendable," the president said. "Yet this
attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided
and unstable."
Bush said the United States
and its allies eventually recognized they could not be satisfied with the
liberation of half of Europe and decided
"we would not forget our friends behind an iron curtain."
The United States never
forgot the Baltic people, Bush said, and flew the flags of free Latvia, Estonia
and Lithuania over
diplomatic missions in Washington.
"And when you joined hands in protest and the empire fell away,"
the president said, "the legacy of Yalta
was finally buried, once and for all."
Putin, writing in a French newspaper yesterday,
said that the Soviet Union already made amends in 1989 and that his country
will not answer the demands of Baltic states
for further repentance.
"Such pretensions are useless," Putin
wrote in Le Figaro.
Bush reminded Baltic countries that democracy brings obligations along with
elections and independence. He said minority rights and equal justice must be
protected, a nod to Moscow’s
concerns about the treatment of Russian speakers in the three ex-Soviet
republics.
history
lesson
Know Thy Allies
What Bush got wrong about Yalta.
By David Greenberg
Posted Tuesday, May 10,
2005, at 1:23 PM ET
After World War I, the political right in Germany
developed a myth called the "stab in the back" theory to explain its people's
defeat. Though military leaders had helped negotiate the war's end, they fixed
blame on civilian leaders—especially Jews, socialists, and liberals—for
"betraying" the brave German fighting men. This nasty piece of
propaganda was later picked up by Hitler and the Nazis to stoke the populist
resentment that fueled their rise to power.
America
has had its own "stab in the back" myths. Last year, George W. Bush endorsed a revanchist view of the Vietnam War: that our political
leaders undermined our military and denied us victory. Now, on his Baltic tour,
he has endorsed a similar view of the Yalta
accords, that great bugaboo of the old right.
Bush stopped short of accusing Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill
of outright perfidy, but his words recalled those of hardcore FDR- and Truman-haters
circa 1945. "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."
Bush's cavalier invocations of history for political purposes are not
surprising. But for an American president to dredge up ugly old canards about Yalta stretches the
boundaries of decency and should draw reprimands (and not only from Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.).
As every schoolchild should know, Roosevelt and Churchill had formed an
alliance of necessity with Josef Stalin during World War II. Hardly blind to
Stalin's evil, they nonetheless knew that Soviet forces were indispensable in
defeating the Axis powers. "It is permitted in time of grave danger to
walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge," FDR said, quoting
an old Bulgarian proverb. He and Churchill understood
that Stalin would be helping to set war aims and to plan for its aftermath.
Victory, after all, carried a price.
In February 1945, the "Big Three" met at a czarist resort near Yalta, in the Soviet Crimea, to continue the work begun at
other summits, notably in Tehran
in 1943. (Many of the alleged "betrayals" of Yalta,
at least in rough form, were actually first sketched out in Tehran.) By this time, Soviet troops had
conquered much of Eastern Europe from the Germans, including Romania, Bulgaria,
Hungary, Poland, East Prussia,
and Eastern Germany. The Western allies,
meanwhile, remained on the far side of the Rhine River.
Having made terrible military sacrifices to gain these positions, Stalin
resolved to convert them into political payoffs.
Many of the agreements the Big Three reached at Yalta
were relatively uncontroversial: The Allies decided to demand unconditional
surrender from Germany,
to carve up the country into four zones for its postwar occupation, and to
proceed with plans to set up the United Nations.
But other issues were contentious. Asia was
one. FDR wanted Stalin to enter the war against Japan, so as to obviate any need
for an American invasion. In return, Stalin demanded that Russia regain dominion over various lands,
notably Sakhalin
and the Kurile Islands, then under Japanese control. He
forswore any designs on Manchuria, which would be returned to China.
By far the knottiest problem—and the source of lingering rage among the far
right afterwards—was the fate of Poland and other liberated Eastern European
countries. Over several months, the Allies had been divvying up Europe according to on-the-ground military realities and
their own individual national interests. The United
States and Britain
had denied Stalin any role in postwar Italy. Churchill and Stalin had
agreed (without Roosevelt's participation) that Britain
would essentially control Greece,
and Russia would essentially
control Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary.
Poland
was another matter. In Lublin, Poland,
the Soviets had set up a government of pro-Communist Poles. Back in London, however, a
pro-Western group claimed to be the true government-in-exile. Throughout the
war, Stalin had acted with customary barbarity in seeking an advantage. In 1940
he ordered the slaughter of thousands of Polish army officers in the Katyn
Forest, fearing their
potential allegiance to the London Poles. In 1944, he stalled his own army's
march into Poland
to let the Germans put down the Warsaw Uprising, again to strengthen the
Communists' hand.
At Yalta, Stalin wanted FDR and Churchill to
recognize the Lublin
government. They refused. Instead, all agreed to accept a provisional
government, with a pledge to hold "free and unfettered elections"
soon. For other liberated European countries, the Big Three also pledged to
establish "interim governmental authorities broadly representative of all
democratic elements in the population" and committed to free elections.
Roosevelt knew that Stalin might renege,
and it was perhaps cynical for him to trumpet elections that might never take
place. But as the historian David M. Kennedy has written, he had little choice,
"unless Roosevelt was prepared to order Eisenhower to fight his way across
the breadth of Germany, take
on the Red Army, and drive it out of Poland at gunpoint."
Stalin, of course, never allowed elections in Poland or anywhere else. "Our
hopeful assumptions were soon to be falsified," Churchill wrote.
"Still, they were the only ones possible at the time." Short of
starting a hot war, the West was powerless to intervene, just as it was in Hungary in 1956 or Prague in 1968.
Because FDR kept many details of the Yalta
agreements under wraps, people in Washington
began whispering conspiratorially about "secret agreements." Soon, critics, especially on the far right, were charging that FDR and
Churchill had sold out the people of Eastern Europe—charges
that Bush's recent comments echo. They asserted that the ailing Roosevelt—he would die only weeks later—had come under
the malign influence of pro-Communist advisers who gave Stalin the store.
But Yalta
did not give Stalin control of the Eastern European countries. He was already
there. Moreover, as Lloyd C. Gardner has argued, it's possible that postwar Europe could have turned out worse than it did.
For all its evident failings, Yalta did lead to
a revived Western Europe, a lessening of open
warfare on the continent, and, notwithstanding Bush's remarks, relative
stability. Without Yalta, Gardner notes, "the uneasy equilibrium
of the Cold War might have deteriorated into something much worse—a series of
civil wars or possibly an even darker Orwellian condition of localized wars
along an uncertain border." Such "what if" games are generally
pointless, but they can remind us that the harmonious Europe that Yalta's critics tout as a
counter-scenario wasn't the only alternative to the superpower standoff.
Along with the myth of FDR's treachery in leading America into war, the
"stab in the back" interpretation of Yalta became a cudgel with which
the old right and their McCarthyite heirs tried to
discredit a president they had long despised. Renouncing Yalta even became a plank in the 1952
Republican platform, although Eisenhower did not support it. In time, however,
these hoary myths receded into the shadows, dimly remembered except as a
historical curiosity, where, alas, they should have remained undisturbed.
David Greenberg writes the "History Lesson" column and teaches
at Rutgers University. He is the author of Nixon's Shadow: The History of an
Image.