Dan Snow's History Hit - The Yalta Conference

Episode Date: July 16, 2020

In the February 1945, the U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin met at an old Romanov palace in Crimea, which had once been enjoyed by Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Over eight days the 'Big Three' discussed and debated issues of vast international importance - such as the endgame of the war against Nazi Germany, the constitution of the United Nations, the price of Soviet entry into the war against Japan and the new borders of Poland. Diana Preston joined me on the podcast to discuss this remarkable event. She gave me an inside picture of eavesdropping amongst the delegates, the dwindling health of Churchill and Roosevelt, the laborious dinners with endless Russian toasts, and whether Yalta was really a turning point in 20th century history. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to As Knows History Hit. 75 years ago, the Second World War came to an end, but just before it's finished, in the very first few weeks of 1945, the great powers got together at Yalta in the Crimea, an old Tsarist palace in the Crimea, then the most temperate corner of the Soviet Union, a place where Soviet citizens used to go for their holidays, and probably the least freezing cold place to go. Stalin refused to travel, so Roosevelt and Churchill and their delegations joined him on the shores of the Black Sea for eight days of conference. Diana Preston has written about the altar,

and it felt like a good time to check in with her to hear all about that conference and this important anniversary, a conference that did so much to lay bare the reality of power politics of 1945 and help to shape the post-war world. If you wish to subscribe to History at TV, we've got a new documentary going out this week on the rise of Adolf Hitler, how Germany, this extraordinarily developed, advanced, in many ways country, tipped over into being a genocidal autocracy. If you want to learn more about that story from two of the world's best historians on the subject, we've got a new documentary on History Hit TV. You can go and check it out by using the code POD1, P-O-D-1.

You get a month for free, so you can watch the documentary for free, and then you get the second month just one pound, euro, or dollar. It's the world's best history channel. You've got to go and check it out, everyone. It's totally brilliant. In the meantime, do have a listen to Diana Preston talking about Yalta. Enjoy. Diana, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Oh, it's an absolute pleasure.

Thank you, Dan. It's the 75th anniversary of the end of the war. You're a great expert on Yalta. Do you feel that Yalta is the most important of the great conferences that we need to understand in order to understand the shape of the world following the Second World War? I think it is. It's certainly the most important of the three conferences which happened, obviously Potsdam in 1943, when the course of the war was still very uncertain. The point about Yalta, the point at which it happened, was that the course of the war was pretty clear. You know, the Allies knew that Nazi Germany would soon be defeated. What was up for grabs now was really the post-Second World War order. So many important things were discussed at Yalta, and in a way Potsdam, which happened several months later

in Berlin after the defeat of Germany, was a little bit of a postscript. I think Yalta was extremely important. It's the 75th anniversary, it was in February of this year. What fascinates me about Yalta is there's two things. One is that the actual substance, what was discussed inside it, but the other is just the sheer drama and the theatre of the occasion, the place, the people. How did they come to choose Yalta? It was deeply inconvenient for very ill Roosevelt and Churchill, wasn't it? Exactly. I mean, I think the fact that the conference met at Yalta tells you an awful lot about what actually happened there, that Stalin controlled a great deal of the events. And the location was all thanks to Stalin. There'd been discussion about other places for a conference, you know, the Mediterranean, maybe to have it on Malta or maybe in Jerusalem.

the Mediterranean, maybe to have it on Malta or maybe in Jerusalem. But Stalin made it very clear that he wasn't prepared to travel that far. And he claimed, although he was probably the healthiest of the three leaders, all quite mature men, he claimed that his doctors wouldn't allow him to travel very much. And eventually he wore down the other two, Churchill and Roosevelt, to agree to one of the Black Sea resorts. And certainly they were very worried about it. Churchill, just a little while before, had been through the Crimea and he remembered the bedbugs and the horrible conditions. He was really quite worried about it, which is why both Roosevelt and Churchill brought ships into the Black Sea so that they would have, if you like, a comfortable retreat if things at Yalta got a little bit too much for them. And of course, poor Roosevelt, it was toughest on him. He was so

very, very frail by this stage. We're talking of a man with just a couple of months left to live, so frail that when one of the Russian chambermaids saw him as he arrived at the palace, you know, she burst into tears. He looked so terrible. We just had a question, and this is the live Zoom podcast for everyone listening. And we had a question from history hit subscriber Ruth Tremlett talking about Stalin. I want to ask this question of you because why was Stalin so determined that it would happen on Soviet soil? Ruth said, is it true that he was afraid of flying? He didn't like flying.

He had very bad memories of a flight he'd done earlier in the war, which had brought on illness for a couple of weeks, nosebleeds, ear pain and things. So it was partly that. He certainly didn't like flying. He was a bit of a hypochondriac and he was also paranoid. I mean, if you read about the security arrangements which happened in Yalta, all controlled, of course, by his NKVD, his secret police. They could check out all the local people in the area. About 10,000 people were interrogated and arrested. The whole area was packed with secret agents. He couldn't be certain that if he went, for example, to Malta or to Jerusalem, that he could have anything like the same degree of personal security. And I think that weighed very, very heavily with him. He was so

worried about assassination, he used to sit on a high-backed sofa so that an assassin couldn't creep up on him from behind. Very paranoid man. What did the physical space and the physical health of the men involved, how did that determine the course of the talks and the agreements that emerged? I think the fact that certainly Roosevelt was in very poor health

had an effect. He got very quickly very tired. You can think all of this happened in just eight days at Yalta. You can think how intensive those meetings were and of course the big three, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill, weren't at all the meetings all of the time but every day they had a big session, a plenary session which would last for four, perhaps five hours, sometimes followed up by a dinner afterwards. And you can just see, if you read the transcripts, the points at which Roosevelt in particular was becoming absolutely exhausted and sometimes losing the thread.

And Churchill, too, would sometimes lose concentration and go rambling off. The person of the three who managed to keep his powers of concentration and control things much better all the way through was Stalin, even though he was not a young man, he was 66 at the time. But I think in spite of his complaining in better health than the others, and had more of a mental grip on what was happening. It's interesting, you know, one of the leading British officials there, Sir Alexander Cadogan, said that he found Stalin, in spite of everything that he knew about him, extremely impressive and really much more robust than the other two. Let's also give people a sense of where the war is at the beginning of 1945.

There's an old saying, isn't there, that if the war had ended in the summer of 1943, when Italy drops out of the war, that Germany is catastrophically defeated at Kursk, then Britain would have been in a much stronger position. Most of the troops engaged against the Axis on the Western Allied side were British. It would have had more of a seat. Where are we in early 1945? And where does the sort of power lie between these three great men, these three great empires?

I think you're absolutely right, because you just raised a big question of timing. And this is one of the things which struck me about Yalta that it was originally supposed to have happened in late summer early autumn 1944 and at that stage you can see the balance of advantage would have been far more with the western powers because by that stage the Soviet armies wouldn't have rolled in right across Eastern Europe. By the time Yalta actually happened, of course, they were in control of one of the countries which would be one of the key issues at Yalta, Poland. And the reason for the delay, to digress for one little moment, was to do with Roosevelt, because he wanted to stand for an unprecedented fourth presidential term. So the Yalta conference was postponed once,

and then it was postponed a second time to enable him to make his inaugural address, etc. That's why it didn't happen until February, by which time, of course, the military balance had changed completely. Soviet troops, as I say, were right over Eastern Europe, and Stalin held most of the cards. And by this stage of the war, as I mentioned earlier, the outcome was not in doubt. Nazi Germany's defeat was very close. The question now was simply who was going to be first to Berlin, who was going to get there first, and who was going to control, dictate what would happen to a conquered Nazi Germany, what would happen about reparations and all those things. So really, the military side, although there were still important military things to be discussed

at Yalta, was really all over. You know, the Allies had won. The military commanders at Yalta complained that they were the only ones at the conference who really didn't have very much to do. They still had discussions about, for instance, Western support bombings in Eastern Europe to assist the Soviet troops in their advance. And we have things to do with the bombing of Dresden coming out of the conference. But the outcome of the war militarily was not in doubt. Did Stalin feel any need to compromise? I mean, he was very reliant on Western help initially after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Did the Western allies have any leverage? Did they have anything that Stalin really wanted? There were certain things that he wanted. I mean, he was

absolutely determined that he was going to establish a buffer zone of compliant states around the Soviet Union to prevent any further invasion as had happened sort of previously in the century. That was a primary concern and he wasn't going to budge on that. But he also was hoping for, because he knew that Roosevelt wanted the Soviets to enter the war against Japan, so he was hoping for concessions in the Far East. He wanted warm water ports, he wanted access to railways, he wanted to be given concessions at the expense of nationalist China as a price for coming into the war,

so he was very keenly interested in discussing that. I think because he held so many of the cards militarily, one of the few levers that Roosevelt in particular still did have over Stalin was the lend-lease arrangement, whereby the Soviet Union, as had Britain, had been able to get its hand on large amounts of supplies and war material on the basis of, you know, have the things now, pay later. And Stalin understood about money and the dollar spoke to him. That's one bit of leverage I think that Roosevelt could have applied and actually didn't in the course of the conference. You see, it was very rarely discussed. Was Churchill frustrated that he wasn't being treated as an equal at Yalta?

I think Churchill was very frustrated, very angry sometimes, and also because he was such an emotional man, sometimes indeed very hurt. You can see this in some of the private correspondence and in comments made by his daughter Sarah, who was with him, and he had realised quite early on how he was being frozen out in a way. He had found it really difficult, impossible even, to get Roosevelt to agree to any common US-UK position on important matters in advance of the conference. Although the two leaders had met first in the Mediterranean on the island of Malta, Roosevelt very consciously and very obviously avoided any discussion of anything substantive.

So Churchill already had an inkling of what Roosevelt's strategy was going to be at Yalta, which was to suggest to Stalin that there was absolutely no way that the UK and the US had a common agenda and had arrived at Yalta intending to gang up on Stalin. And quite often, if you read the transcripts of the conference, you see how Roosevelt started to needle and get at Churchill in ways that he saw pleased Stalin, Stalin sometimes bursting out laughing. And a lot of this was to do with what probably mattered most of all to Churchill at Yalta was the preservation of what remained of the British Empire. That was a real Achilles heel for Churchill and one exploited by Roosevelt.

Why did Roosevelt want to make a good impression to Stalin? Was he hoping that Stalin would allow the return to some form of democracy amongst these Eastern European countries that he was now occupying? He certainly wanted that. I mean, both Churchill and Roosevelt had gone to Yalta to try and fight for the democratic freedoms of countries of Eastern Europe recently liberated from the Nazis. But that wasn't the most important thing on Roosevelt's agenda. He had two things which mattered to him more. One of them was to get agreement at Yalta, Stalin's agreement, to the setting up of his cherished idea of a United Nations. to the setting up of his cherished idea of a United Nations.

As a young man, Roosevelt had been a supporter of President Woodrow Wilson and the idea of a League of Nations, and he wanted a United Nations organisation to be his legacy. So he'd come to Yalta very much wanting to get Stalin's agreement to that, to the membership of it, to the voting arrangements. And then his other big priority was to get agreement to Soviet entry into the war against Japan. I mean, it's odd, one of the elephants in the room was the progress on the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project,

but at this stage, Roosevelt and many of his military commanders simply didn't have faith that a bomb would be available in time to have any effect on the war in the Pacific. And they were terrified that in any invasion of the Japanese home islands, there would be a catastrophic loss of life for American troops. They estimated that something like a million young American lives would be lost. Therefore, Roosevelt came to Yalta, absolutely determined, if he could, to agree terms for the Soviet Union to come into the war against Japan. And what about their attitude towards the British Empire? Did they want to sort of try

a world of three superpowers following 1945? Or actually, was it in both their interest to freeze Churchill and the British Empire out? I think from Stalin's point of view, I think at a personal level, he wasn't probably that much bothered about Britain's far eastern colonies but I think he saw that it was something which mattered to Roosevelt. I think it probably mattered to Roosevelt on two levels. Roosevelt I think genuinely thought that the empire and everything that went with it was pointless and anachronism and everything plus if the empire were to disintegrate looking at it from a hard-nosed commercial point of view there would be commercial opportunities for the United States and Stalin saw that and exploited it and joined in the ganging up, if you like, on Churchill about

the empire. So it sounds like Yalta was a pretty grim experience, both for Churchill and Roosevelt, who was dying. Churchill, who was feeling that all of this work that he thought he'd done to bring about this great anti-Hitler coalition and defeat Hitler, he was being sort of frozen out. Did Stalin make the most gains from this conference? Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan

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I think Stalin was certainly the one who got most of what he wanted. In fact, you can't really see that Stalin conceded anything very much. He managed time and time again to frustrate any attempts to ensure there would be proper free democratic elections, say, in a country like Poland, which really mattered to Churchill. Churchill, throughout the Yalta Conference, repeatedly said, look, I must honour my commitments to the Poles, to Poland, after all this was the country for which Britain went to war in the first place. And Churchill, backed by Roosevelt, tried to get agreement to be able to send ambassadors to Warsaw to observe elections, all sorts of things. And again and

again, Stalin simply said no. And he ensured that although there were a number of documents signed at the end of Yalta full of high-flown principles about guaranteeing future democratic freedoms, there was nothing there which could actually be made to stick. There were no sanctions in those documents, nothing where if he decided to change his mind afterwards, which he did within weeks, the other two could do anything about. In terms of the delegations, all the sort of work behind the scenes, where were the sort of most natural allies? Although Roosevelt was very keen to signal to Stalin that he wasn't working closely with Churchill, there must have been more kinship between the British and American delegations, was there? Oh, there certainly was. Certainly, if you read the accounts of the military, you know, the army and the naval and the air force

people who were there, You could see how closely they had been working together and how good the relationships were. And also you can see between some of the diplomats how good the relationships were. And it's quite interesting, again, to perceive how worried, say, both British and American diplomats were about how Roosevelt and Churchill were reacting to Stalin, because the diplomats were as one in understanding the nature of the man that Stalin was because they'd been in Moscow, some of them during the show trials. They knew how ruthless he was. They knew how many people had perished as a result of his policies. They knew that he wasn't to be trusted. They were extremely worried at seeing Roosevelt

and Churchill perhaps being what they might have called gullible. I suppose what Churchill and Roosevelt were doing were trying to convince themselves, because they had to, that Stalin was somebody that they could trust. But certainly in the teams, there was a sense of a common purpose, if you like, and great worry about the fact that Roosevelt seemed to be turning his back on Churchill. Some of Roosevelt's aides, particularly a man called Harry Hopkins, who had no official position but was a very close personal friend and aide, constantly needled away at Roosevelt, saying you must listen more to what Churchill is saying

and you must back him up more. Some of these personal dynamics I found fascinating when I was reading the background to what happened. The problem is it's hard to see what they could have done about Stalin. I mean, Stalin had 150 divisions marching across Eastern Europe. I mean, as you point out, there was Lend-Lease and other things, but there wasn't much that they could have done about it, really. No, I think that's right, because people often say, oh, Yalta was a failure and Churchill and Roosevelt went there and they gave up far too much, and Eastern Europe was what

paid the price. But it's hard to see, if you look at it realistically, given the military situation at that time, what else they could have done. That's why I go back to the point I was making before and that you raised, that so much of what happened in the tragedy of Yalta was to do with timing. And by February 1945, you could say that if it was a game of poker, the game of poker that Roosevelt loved to play and was very good at, well, he frankly just didn't have the cards. The person who had all the cards was Stalin. And what about spying? Because it's always fun

at these great conferences. I remember hearing stories about the people spying on the British delegation eavesdropping, and it's gone on ever since. Were the Allies quite actively trying to find out what each other were talking about? Well, certainly Stalin knew what the British and the Americans were talking about some of the time, because he, of course, had arranged all the accommodation at Yalta. Three palaces were specially renovated for the three different teams. And he'd been able to send in his secret service people to plant bugging devices. The man in charge of that was no less a figure than the son of his security chief, Lavrentiy Beria.

We all think of Simon Russell Beale playing Lavrentiy Beria in that recent film, Death of Stalin. Well, Beria's son made sure there were bugging devices everywhere. Of course, when the British and the Americans arrived, they knew that this would have happened and they tried to find as many as they could, but they knew that they hadn't found them all. So they started to play sort of games. You know, one day the British Air Force chief, Peter Portal, walked into one of the rooms in the palace

where the British delegation was staying and he commented about an empty fish tank there, which just had a few plants in it, but no fish. What a peculiar thing that was. He said it in a loud voice. And of course, next day, that tank was full of goldfish swimming around. And somebody else said, wouldn't it be nice to have lemons to be able to cut up to put in cocktails? And next day, a magnificent lemon tree had been flown in. So the British and the Americans played these sort of games. And they knew that the only place they could really probably talk

without being overheard was to go out of doors into the gardens of the palaces. Even so, the Russian Secret Service had long range microphone devices. So it was very, very difficult to have any discussion which you thought wouldn't be overheard. and this is a question that Jules Orgley is asking, one of the History Hit subscribers, and it's occurred to me as well, which is we always say, oh, Yalta, the sort of formation of the post-45 order, the birth of the modern world. It sounds to me like if Yalta hadn't happened, not much about 1945 would have gone that differently. No, because there were important discussions about what was going to happen to post-war Germany,

how that was going to be governed. It's quite interesting to hypothesise. For Yalta not to have happened, you can see the relations between the three powers, or between the Western powers and Stalin, would have had to have broken down. There would have been, you could see, a Soviet dash to get to Berlin, and perhaps to control all of Germany, not to agree to it to be partitioned under a controlled commission. It all would have been in Soviet hands. There were also, of course, agreements which were made there,

which meant that the Soviet army, not that it was actually needed by that time, did come into the war against Japan. There were guarantees given to Churchill, which actually Stalin did keep, because he got pretty well everything else he wanted, and he didn't care, about keeping out of parts of Eastern Europe like Greece, which mattered a lot to Churchill. So certain things certainly did come out of it. The United Nations came out of it. Stalin decided in the end, because he was getting everything else he wanted and again, didn't particularly care about the United Nations, so long as he knew that voting arrangements couldn't be used against the Soviet Union, he didn't really care about the United Nations, so long as he knew that voting arrangements couldn't

be used against the Soviet Union. He didn't really care about the detail, hadn't even bothered to read it, and was happy to concede on that. So you have in the aftermath of the Yalta the first meeting of the United Nations. So lots of things did come out of it, but not the big thing which we all think about now, which was the freedom of countries which had recently been liberated from the Nazis in Eastern Europe. And in particular, we think of countries like Poland or Romania. Romania was covered by grand agreements which had been signed at Yalta, but just a couple of weeks after the Yalta conference, you have the Soviets arriving and delivering an ultimatum and putting Romania under Soviet control as a Soviet satellite. This is a question that Mark Vent asked a while ago on the chat.

Now's the time to ask it because you mentioned Stalin was relaxed about the UN. Is that where the veto comes from, this famous veto given to any member of the Security Council? Did they get Stalin on board? Yes, that did bring Stalin on board when he understood it. But it wasn't something which came out of the Yalta Conference. Those voting arrangements had already been discussed by the Allies at earlier meetings, and Roosevelt had written at length to Stalin about how it would all work, because this really didn't matter to Roosevelt. He cared about it so much, and then it became very clear to him at Yalta that Stalin, frankly, hadn't bothered to

read any of the papers. It all had to be re-explained to Stalin, who first of all was very suspicious, couldn't understand what the voting arrangements were, thought it would mean that other countries could gang up against the Soviet Union. But eventually, when he did understand it, he was reassured and was prepared to ride with it because he was getting the other things that he wanted. One thing which mattered to Stalin, which I didn't mention, was he wanted a huge amount of reparations out of Nazi Germany. I mean, this again raised echoes from the First World War because Churchill and Roosevelt tried to remind him where bleeding

Germany dry at the end of the First World War had led and said, you must moderate your demands. You can't try and extract from Germany more than Germany can pay. But Stalin did get written into the agreements that the Soviet Union would get a very, very hefty chunk of whatever was going. Lastly, on a sort of personal level, you hear about the drinking and these extraordinary banquets and churches are getting very upset when some Soviets were boasting about the war crimes they were committing in Germany. Were those as important, those dinners and parties, as what was being discussed during the plenary sessions? I think they were important in trying to sort of smooth the wheels

as things went along. But no, nothing very substantive or important was agreed at those dinners or in the margins of those dinners. People hated being invited. It was an awful lot of wasted time. Endless toasts. You know, the Russian tradition of vodka after vodka, toasting this, that, and everything else.

Nothing really important got talked about. And actually, as the drink flowed, the vodka, the Caucasian champagne, the brandy, everything else, sometimes differences came out between the three leaders. And there were moments of tension and argument which sometimes threatened to derail things at one stage you know Churchill got so angry that he had to stomp out of the room and and Starling got very upset or pretended to be very upset when Roosevelt told him that he and Churchill called him Uncle Joe so in some ways there were sort of

these dinners although they had to happen each of the big three had to host a grand dinner. There was a somewhat double-edged thing. And I think probably most people out there would very much rather they hadn't happened at all and didn't see anything very useful having come out of them, except probably a big hangover in the morning. I was going to say, Diana, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. What's your book called? It's called Eight Days at Yalta.

Thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour,

it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I be very very grateful thank you