Empire: World History - 257. Churchill, FDR, & Mind Games at Yalta (Ep 2)

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

How did FDR become the mediator between Stalin and Churchill at the 1945 conference? Why did Churchill call Yalta the “Hades Riviera”? What was Mussolini’s rude nickname for FDR? Anita and William dive into the backstories of Churchill and FDR ahead of their arrival in Yalta, and explore the meetings that led up to the eight days that changed the world, including Churchill’s “naughty document” that signed away Eastern Europe to the Soviets... Love History? Get our exclusive History Today deal! You can get started with a 3-month trial for only £5 at https://historytoday.com/empire  ----------------- Empire Club: Become a member of the Empire Club to receive early access to miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to live show tickets, bonus episodes, book discounts, our exclusive newsletter, and access to our members’ chatroom on Discord! Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com.  ----------------- Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk  Blue Sky: @empirepoduk  X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnhen. And me, William Durhampool. Can I just ask you a question? You can ask any questions as long as it's not inappropriate. No, we're saving that one for later.

want to know why it is that in the middle of Britain's greatest heat wave, you're wrapped up like a baton truck driver in layers. What is wrong with you? It's hot. I've been up since six o'clock this morning preparing for this epic broadcast and reading and reading with huge pleasure, Sirhi Plothey's Yalta book, which is sitting beside me. And it's actually quite cold in the garden of six. I've got to be of a chill. So although it's a heat wave, I've got my northwest front. frontier Kaiba Pak Dunn. Yes. Sholon.

There's a wonderful thing that they do. We are going to get on with this. And actually, you've mentioned the plucky book. Also, can I commend to you, the daughters of Yalta, Catherine Grace Katz, and also huge laudits to Diana Preston, who's written eight days at Yalta. They're all fantastic, fantastic books. I should remind you, in the last episode, we were doing the kind of Marvel origin stories of Stalin, co-bber, bank robber, poet.

difficult to imagine anyone having a more unpredictable background. I know, right? To be both orthodox seminarian and bank robber. It seems to be two bed diagrams that have probably never, ever met again or before in history. I was trying to think who else I could think of, and it's only sort of fry a tuck. That's very good. Literally, that's it. But we're going to talk about the other two because this is a meeting.

Dr. Tuck and Stalin is the same. All top history insights on Empire. Let me tell you would not get this on our history podcast. Kind of laser-like, laser-like discernment. But we're going to talk about the other two of the big three, and that is Roosevelt and Churchill. So can I start telling you a little bit about Roosevelt, who was otherwise known as the Sphinx, because he was so difficult to read. But he was also called, I mean, at school when he was younger, the feather duster,

because he was flimsy, let's say. What is his robust boy school? A bit of a city. That's what they called him. And we'll go into that in a bit more detail. But my favourite nickname, because it's just so rude, was Mussolini, who used to call him of the anus. Can I explain why? It doesn't work if you just know him as Franklin Roosevelt, but if you add the middle name, it becomes...

Delano. So Delano means, in Italian, of the anus. And Mussolini delighted in his middle name and insisted on referring to him as the anus. or out of the anus, any possibility. The genitive of anus, of the anus. Of the anus. Oh, genitive. Public school education, everybody, gives himself away every single time.

We know our genitives, us pusboys. FDR was born into a wealthy family. So his parents, James and Sarah, were very well off. James was a landowner. He was a businessman. They were like New York old money is what he was brought up in. And this place that he lived in Hyde Park, because nobody has original. names at this time in history. Everything's named after somewhere in England. He lived on a huge

estate, even though it was sort of on the outskirts of New York. And then he had, I mean, like, literally hundreds of workers worked for land. So this is a man of means. As so many American presidents were and are. But FDR grew up pretty much in the, in the lap of luxury. And he had parents who sort of doted on him. They loved him. He was largely schooled at home. And he sort of had this very closeted environment for most of his young life. But then when he's 14, he has to go. to school. And they send him, it's sort of like a bit like the Prince Charles story, they send him to a school called Rotten School, which is a little bit like, you know, it's going to make a man of you. And this is a private school where the boys are praised for being rumbunctious,

for being naughty, for being sporty. I mean, sporty is a really big thing. What school doesn't have boys praised for being sporty and naughty? But for him, you know, he's a bookish boy. He's kind of like, you know, narrow-faced, blonde, pale, rather have his head in a book than, you know, in a scrum. He looks a bit like Scott Fitzgerald in the pictures. He does. Actually, he does. Yeah, I didn't think that. And he's got the same sort of suit and the same centre parting. And that's slightly sort of Gatsbyish sort of style to him.

Yeah. And he also grows up in the shadow of a family member. So, I mean, you know, they're named Roosevelt. Often when people just say Roosevelt, they don't mean FDR. They don't mean the man behind the New Deal. They mean Theodore Roosevelt, who we've talked. about before in our Philippines episode. And he is related, so, you know, a distant cousin of FDR. They are in the same sort of food group and family. And he grows up in that kind of shadow, you know, the lesser Roosevelt, if you like. And I don't know whether it is initially out of political

conviction, but, you know, he joins the Democrats rather than the Republicans to forge his own way. And he sort of rises through the ranks. As you quite rightly said, there's a certain class of American Politico, who sort of is carried on the slipstream of Wall Street wealth, big houses, big dinners, all of that kind of thing. I've just come back from an American book tour where I was giving talks in Dallas, in that sort of family. And they had this extraordinary shrine to the Bushets, who they had given their money to and supported in the election campaign.

And you have these dynasties of politicians who are supported by these enormous big money folk. So look, FDR is kind of one of those people who sort of born into one of those born to rural families and he becomes a lawyer and he's quite successful and he then gets involved in politics with the Democrats and he's quite a good campaigner, you know, he sort of gets a following in the Democratic Party. But then something terrible happens in August 1921 at the age of 39 and this is, I know we've sort of gone through his childhood, but it's pretty dull apart from, you know, at a hard time at school. But it's at 39 that the real life-changing, if you want, origin story thing happens. He's stricken with an illness while he's on vacation. And it ends up with him

being paralysed from the waist down. He won't be able to use his legs again. People said immediately it was polio is what they thought it was. Well, there was a big polio epidemic in the 1920s. I lost an aunt. I thought enough, my father's sister died of polio in 1947. It was a fact of life, as was typhoid, even these things that thankfully most of this don't ever have to see. I think what's really interesting about his illness is that, you know, people called it Peolia. He was diagnosed with it. But now there are doctors who've had a look at what actually happened to him and they think it might have been something else. And weirdly, the same condition that we said Alexander the Great might have had.

You know, when he was sort of a statue, the living statue, this rising paralysis. and it's called Gilein-Barray syndrome. So what happened to Roosevelt is, you know, he had a fever, then he had this ascending paralysis that sort of started in his legs and then went all the way through. They had numbness everywhere. And it sort of rose ascended, paralysed him, and then subsided, but he never got use of his legs back.

And people have said, actually, you know what? That diagnosis sounds a lot like Gillain-Barray syndrome, actually. In all the books I've read, people just say polio. I know, I know, but I've said, and it's not widely. It's sort of I've seen, you know, me in medical documents, Dr. Quack is in the house. Dr. Quack is in the house. This unexpected side of you. Those that haven't followed previous episode, Anita's father was a doctor.

He was a doctor. And she used to entertain herself as a child by reading medical encyclopedias. I did. So, whenever you have some strange symptoms, just phone Anita. You'll be... Got an interesting rush. I'm your girl. Do you know,

Actually, I have to say that if my dear departed father was still around, I can actually feel him taking off a flip-flop to throw at me. Stop diagnosing people. You have no qualification. I should try that. Anyway, so look, that's interesting about him. It also leads to something which is going to define him and lead to this sphinx-like character. He doesn't want people to pity him, and he doesn't want people to know. and he hates all of the accoutrement on the go with, you know, his paralysis. And he will always kind of compensate, keep his medical history an enormous secret and more on that later,

because there's some really strange stuff on that. I have said until I started researching this series, I had no idea because we have all those pictures of him and he's always seated. Because he can't. Yalta, stand up, all these images. There are also photos which he did not like of him in a wheelchair with a blanket over his legs, because that is not the image of a man who is president. Anita, what I'd love you to tell me, though, is this complicated marriage of his, which is interesting. Because Eleanor Roosevelt is an extraordinary figure in her own right, isn't she?

But by the stage we're talking now, things are not good at the ranch. So she had married FDR 15 years before his paralysis. So she knew the man before and she was with the man afterwards. And she was a fifth cousin once removed of the Roosevelt's. And she is an extraordinary creature. If you look her up now, people know Eleanor Roosevelt really well because she fought the good fight. You know, she fought for women's rights. She fought for civil rights.

Your kind of girl? Completely. She joined the women's trade union at a young age and then becomes actively involved in putting it on the table in front of her husband and saying, you know what? Workers need rights. Women need protection. And this civil rights thing, no more lip service, you're going to have to do something. And she spoke in public. She was a very, very strong character.

But the really interesting thing is their marriage. There's a social secretary that gets in the way, Lucy Mercer. That's it, Lucy Mercer. So there's a lot of revision about this. And, you know, who knows what goes on behind a closed door. But there's a biography by a woman called Hazel Rowley. And she says that they have something of, well, she doesn't use the phrase open marriage, but she says they gave each other space to cultivate romantic friendships outside the marriage.

I think there was definitely an affair with the social secretary, Lucy Mercer, because correspondence was found by Eleanor. And after that, there's a period where Lucy is sacked and disappears from life. But again, just in the run-up to Yalta, the period we're talking about, by this time, Lucy is married and she is one of the people that sees FDR off to Yelta. So that's FDR's love interest. But Eleanor's love interest is said to be a woman. It's a journalist called Lorena Hickok.

Eleanor and her are so sort of friendly. She calls her Hicke. She was a lesbian openly. And Eleanor and her do seem to be sort of, you know, very, very close. And who knows whether it's sexual or not. But Eleanor writes to Hick about their open secret. And this is just a few months after FDR's inauguration. You think they gossip about us? I'm always so much more optimistic than you are, I suppose, because I care so little about what they say. And Laura Hickok preserved almost all of the three and a half thousand. and letters that she and Eleanor wrote to each other. So that is love. I don't know if it's sex, but it is certainly love. This impacts on our story about Yelta because it means that Eleanor Roosevelt does not come to Yelta. And instead, FDR brings his daughter, Anna, who he has a very good relationship with. And it's Anna Roosevelt who's going to be appearing in this episode. And we'll talk about her because another extraordinary, extraordinary woman.

Okay, why don't you take us away with Churchill? because we've done Roosevelt. I live between India and Britain, and I can't think of any other character who has left a more varying impression, depending on which side of those two countries you're in. In India, of course, Churchill is looked upon as the worst of all the British imperialists,

as the man responsible for the Bengal famine. And there's a widespread belief in India that Churchill was a racist who was responsible for the death of six million Bengalis. In Britain, he is our most. most revered historical character. And in polls of great British figures from history, Churchill quite often comes top. And in the sense, both sides of Churchill are true. He is the figure whose speeches during the First World War rallied the nation and led to the British putting together to help defeat

Nazism. But equally, his writings on Indians and India, and incidentally, Palestinians, are so racist by our standards today, that they are completely beyond the pale. So both these characters are contained in this man. He comes from money as well, old money. Well, more than money, he comes from one of the kind of grandest families in Britain. And he's born in Blenheim Palace, outside Oxford. If you go there today, there's a whole sort of Churchill wing of Churchill memorabilia and a whole exhibition about his life. His distant ancestor was the Duke of Morbara who won the Battle of Blenheim. And Blenden Palace is built as a a thank you from the nation for him.

And so Churchill is born into, you know, one of the grandest palaces in the country. And he has beauty and glamour too. I mean, his mother is an American heiress, Jenny Jerome, daughter of a New York stockbroker. So she comes from her own wealth and class, basically sort of New York royalty. And at some point, there is actually a common ancestor between FDR and Churchill. There's a Spencer ancestor who they both share in a distant. mists of time. So he's actually a distant cousin of FDR, which is extraordinary that these two figures negotiating the future of the world. Everything's connected. Not that they brings them any

particular closeness. They're also very, very different at school. So, you know, Churchill like FDR is sent to a school that's meant to sort of toughen him up and he actually ends up being tougher than the school. So he's a right-hair-away at school. Boarding schools in Ascot and Brighton before going to Harrow. And the reports about him just describe a willful rebellious pain in the ass of a child, you know, just who does not look kindly on discipline at all. There's one report that has him, it's sort of like that's seen in dead poet society where they jump up on the desks and things, you know, just, and in that sort of very sort of understated way, you know, this is not the way we expect our young men to behave. But he's a

character right from the start, right from the get-go. He goes to Sandhurst, which is the officer training court here in Britain. Where my father went. Your father went. And he gains his commission. He goes and joins the fourth Hazars in February 1895. And this is the thing that will make him because his adventures, I mean, he's a man with an appetite, a young man with an appetite for adventure. He goes off first to Cuba, where he gets into all sorts of adventures and then to the Northwest Frontier.

And I have wandered around the hills of Swat, looking at some of the forts that he attacked. in my 20s. When you drive up from Peshawar into the Swat Valley, there are a whole chain of forts. Today called Churchill's Pickett. And I remember climbing up a hill 20 years ago, looking at this place where famously Churchill ostentatiously rode a grey pony along the top of the hill

in full view of the Pashtun enemy. Foolish, perhaps, he told his mother, but I play for high stakes. I'm given an audience. is no act too daring and too noble. So that sort of sense of playing to the audience is something that is very much with him. And he writes this book called the story of the Malacan field force that becomes, I think, his first publication. And then he goes to the Boer War where he is captured and escapes from the camp where he's being captured. And again, to talk about my

American host, in that shrine to Churchill in Dallas, where I was last week, They have the gun that he was given. When he had to get across, is it a thousand miles or 200 miles of occupied enemy territory from his prison camp to get to British lines? And at some point he comes across a man. He's not sure whether he's a friend or a foe. And the character sees this lone boy. And although I think he's a bore, he takes pity on this lone escape prisoner and gives him his revolver.

Wow. And that's the revolver you've seen. And that revolver I saw last week in Dallas, of all places. I mean, it has to be said, not many were sympathetic to him because they put a bounty on his out. There's a 25 pound bounty on his head, wanted dead or alive, you know, just like in a Western. And he is becoming a creature of daring to do. He also starts, you know, writing the newspapers.

You know, he becomes a war correspondent. And he writes very well. I mean, he's a compelling writer even then. So the journey from that to being a politician, once you've got that name recognition, is not so hard. but he does find it hard to get elected. He first gets elected in 1900, shortly before the death of Queen Victoria.

He takes his seat in the House of Commons as a conservative for Oldham in the north of England. And in 1901 he makes his maiden speech. But, but, but he then crosses the floor. Which makes him deeply unpopular for a long period of time. Hated, absolutely hated. But he goes and he does this sort of very ostentatious. I'm crossing the floor.

I'm going to sit with David, Lloyd, George. Who was regarded as a sort of class enemy by the Conservatives. because he'd introduced death duties. It was a very ingenious way of Lloyd George to undermine the aristocracy because it meant that every time one of them died that the states would be divided, 50% would have to go to the government. And so in a generation, many of the greater states get wiped out. And for Churchill, born in Bledon Palace, to sit beside Lloyd George

was the equivalent of, I don't know, Boris Johnson is sitting beside Jeremy Corbyn. Yeah, it was a big deal. Do you know, talking about Lloyd George, it's just suddenly, I remember there was a poem or kind of one of these dog raw verses that they used to scream at Lloyd George. They hated it in the Conservatives. Lloyd George, no doubt, when his life runs out, will ride on a golden chariot, seated in state on a red hot plate, to it's Satan and Judas Ascariot. Iscariot.

I can see that right. That's it. It's funny the things that lodge in your head. I think that's from school. He's a liberal, but he's also, when he's sitting with the liberals, an enemy of the suffragettes. Because the suffragettes hate him with a passion. because he's not very sympathetic towards the cause of women's votes.

He comes into your Sapphire biography, isn't he? He's very prominent in Sapphire because he's home secretary at the time of, you know, the bloody march that takes place, Black Friday March on Parliament. As Orban would call himself a very liberal, liberal. Indeed. And so what happens is there is one suffragette who attacks him at a train station and he's only saved by his Homburg hat. You know, she brings a riding cop crashing down on his head. And it's his hat that saves him. But he does have sort of rather a nasty welt on his head. Theresa Garnett was her name.

So Temple Mead Station as well in Bristol, in case you're interested. But then he married... Is there a plaque to Churchill getting horsewipped? Anyone who knows anything about Suffragette history knows that is a big chapter. But his marriage to Clemmy, tell us about Clemmy, because Clemmy's such a central big part of his life. And then we'll take a break and actually get you to Yalta. Now, I think you've been acquainted with, but let's talk a little bit about Clemmy and him.

Perhaps improbably for a man that was quite a difficult man, Churchill has a fantastically good marriage to Clementine. They meet in 1904, love at first sight, that marriage lasts 56 years, five children together. And she's a blue blood. She's an aristocrat to her bone marrow as well. But also importantly, comes from money. Doesn't necessarily at this period go with being an aristocrat. They're a fantastic double act. Churchill, despite being this sort of bulldog with the cigar, has, like all of us, his weaknesses, and his insecurities. Clemy is there by his side

when he has wobbly moments as he does surprisingly often. The black dog moments. And he has depression, of course. She's there right to the end. So we have now gone through the backstories of these three extraordinary

and utterly different characters. The two very rich men from extremely privileged backgrounds who are distant cousins lined up against a man who was the son of a cobbler who had been an orthodox seminarian. Yeah.

Gone to God, left God. So it's not an obvious party this one. They're not obviously going to get on. And the way you'd imagine it to be is that Roosevelt and Churchill will be on the same side with everything. And Stalin will be on a different side. That's what you'd imagine. That's what you'd imagine. But it doesn't actually turn out to be quite as simple as that.

Join us after the break and fight out. how they get on. Welcome back. So these are the big three who are meeting at Yalta. And can I just say Yalta is none of their first preference apart from Stalin. The others just don't want to go. They absolutely don't want to be there. Roosevelt hates the idea. It's a long way away from America. And Churchill has the best line ever he calls it. He says it's the Riviera of Hades. If we had spent 10 years in research, we couldn't have found a worse place. That's it. Is that great? So none too enthusiastic.

They wanted to meet in Cyprus or somewhere sunny with like, you know, good Mediterranean fair. The Mediterranean? Yeah. Somewhere, anywhere like that. But Stalin is adamant. It's got to be Yarta. And there is a reason for that because Yarta, as we kind of touched on in the first episode, has been brutalized by the war.

It's in his backyard. He wants them to see. He wants them to also know this is a place that they took back from the Nars. So there's a lot of symbolism in choosing Arta for Stalin. What though is not immediately apparent, as we'll see, when Roosevelt and Churchill land, they come to this devastated Riviera that looks like, you know, can, except can, if a bomb had gone off in the middle of everything. And when Roosevelt and Churchill see this, they are appalled at the level of devastation. But what they don't know is that the Nazis are only

responsible for about three quarters of it, that a quarter of the devastation, that a quarter of the devastation is Stalin's own secret police and under barrier who we'll meet at the conference, who's the astonishingly ruthless and violent and rapey, awful, beast of a man. But they, prior to the conference, have gone around, A, weeding out any potential enemies of the state because they don't want anyone who's even remotely hostile to Stalin to be in the same region as him when he comes in a conference. But we've also had this sort of mass deportation. the indigenous people of the Crimea, who are the Crimean Tartas, 200,000 of them have been deported by the Soviets in the run up to this conference. It's one of the great deportations and war crimes

of history. And so a lot of the stuff, the devastation and the empty villages and the destroyed houses that Churchill and Roosevelt see and imagine must be the Nazis. I mean, many of the devastations are Nazi devastations, but some of them are due to barrier and the NKVD, just getting rid of the local people who had been accused of supporting the Nazis during the occupation. And being complicit in the occupation. I'm just going to very quickly, though, recap before we get to Yata, because although we're concentrating on Yata, it's not the first time that the big three have met.

And sometimes the big two meet behind the third's back. So, you know, in Casablanca, Roosevelt and Churchill met without Stalin. In Moscow in 1940, this is all in 1943, 1993, in 2014. In Moscow, there is a meet. meeting of foreign ministers. They're talking, but Tehran is the really big one, which is in December 1943, that the Big Three come face to face for the very first time. In the British Embassy. Now, I have a little story.

Not for me. I don't normally go on rabbit holes away from the main. No, especially when we've been told by the producer to stay on target in the West of Star Wars Day or Day or day. But go on. But if you look at pictures of the Big Three in the Tehran Conference, if you look at their feet, there is a tortoise. And the tortoise was present in the photograph because he was a kind of mascot of the British Embassy in Tehran.

And I met the same tortoise in my visit to the British Embassy in Tehran in 1986. You met the same tortoise. The tortoise is there forever. How do you know it's the same tortoise? Because it was introduced to me very formally as the tortoise. How do you do? How do you do?

I'm the tortoise from Tehran in the photograph. Nice to meet you. I've read all your books. And he was still going strong. Not very fast. but he was going strong in 1986 when I was there. That is an extraordinary. Was he a Dalrymple?

I mean, I just want to round off this story with the usual. Was he just a relative? He was very friendly to Durunpools. Oh, I see. An enormous affection for them, clearly. But no, he was his own tortoise. Not cousin tortoise. Okay, well, that's good.

It's a good story. I don't mind it. But the Tehran conference is important. The reason I want to flag it is because a lot of what is then rubber stamped or will go on to be rubber stamped in Iata. It's first kind of a hashed out. the very first time in Tehran. So they talk together about committing to a second front in Western Europe, the D-Day invasion, Stalin agreeing that the Soviet Union probably will enter the war

against Japan once Germany is defeated. But, you know, things are starting to build. A plan is starting to be made, but they need to meet again. And Yata is going to be the rubber stamp on that. There is also something else that's really interesting going on in Tehran. early as Tehran, Roosevelt, from the moment he meets Stalin, or Uncle Joe, as he calls him, behind his bag. But anyway, look, the thing about Roosevelt is he thinks he can be the puppet master to Stalin. It is going to prove to be an enormous miscalculation, but he's sort of like this kind of weird sort of charm offensive goes on, you know, that he's a man, I can do business with. And you see, even in Tehran, Churchill being slightly on the outside, you know, as you said, their backgrounds would suggest that they would be in the same boys club. But the boys club that is developing in Tehran is Stalin and Roosevelt.

Versus little Churchill who now controls less of the globe and has fewer resources. This is the first moment in a sense when the the shrinking of the British Empire becomes very, very apparent. The British have borrowed massively from the Americans. They're no longer the power that strode the world. The British in the first half of the war haven't done very well. They've lost Singapore without a shot being fired, evacuated from Dunkirk. And during the invasion of Normandy, the British divisions, is it numbered up, only one in five are British? Is it four-fifths of the invasion force is actually American? Something like that. There's far more American troops. There's a disparity. And Britain appears diminished in their eyes, but they also diminish Churchill. And there's a bit of a sort of a boys club bullying thing.

I mean, that's how I see it. So there's a really good story that Churchill tells. Can I just tell the story that Churchill tells about this? So Stalin, and he has got a dark sense of humour, but this is not even a joke, right? Stalin is saying he wants to punish the Germans for everything that they have visited upon the Soviets. And he says, in sort of quite a serious way, that he wants to. wants 50,000 German officers to be executed. That's what he would like to see. And Churchill is pretty appalled by this. Churchill is, you know, thinking future planning, you don't do this to people who are

fighting for their country, number one. And number two, he's always got it in his mind that actually, if you have a Germany with its legs cut out from under it, the rest of you, what is the rest of Europe going to do? You need to rebuild Germany and just make sure it never builds in the same image as Hitler. And he sort of like is really offended. And then, Roosevelt steps in and Churchill must think, okay, he must be with me. This is kind of barbaric, executing 50,000 soldiers. And he says, it's okay. It's sort of like does this patronizing pat on Churchill. It says, maybe, you know, we just might compromise Churchill, don't get so angry, by shooting only 49,000. And they, oh, and then Stalin has the chance. Churchill gets up and leaves because he's so, you know, horrified,

what the hell is wrong with you, Roosevelt? This is not okay. And Stalin sort of goes after him, as as, you know, I was only joking. I was just joking. It was just a joke. But you see a weird dynamic right from Tehran that will become even more weird. Roosevelt and Stalin on one side and Churchill on the other, which is, I mean, it's unclear whether it's partly Roosevelt compensating in order to make Stalin feel that it isn't, you know, the two capitalists against the communist.

And whether he's trying to win Stalin's trust. This is the thing, right? Everybody comes to Yata or will come to Yata with their own things that they need. And Roosevelt wants two things, more than anything else. He wants the Soviets to come in and deal with Japan. Because if the war with Japan goes on and on, there are projections of loss of American life that he will not countenance. He's like, this is just we can't do this on our own. We can't do it without Uncle Joe. So he's on a charm offensive for that. And also, he has this idea, which we'll go into in greater detail, about an organization that will involve the world and stop the world from going to war in the future, a sort of united nations, if you will. And he needs the Soviet sign off on that. But they all want different things. So there are backroom deals that are going on before they, you know, set foot in the Crimea. Churchill and Stalin have a correspondence between them, you know, throughout 1944.

They're talking behind sort of Roosevelt's back. and they come up with this idea of something called a percentages agreement. You know, you've got Churchill flying to Moscow himself to meet Stalin directly and say, look, after the war, what we'll do? Because I know the Soviets, you've done great things in taking territory in Eastern Europe, and we need to talk about how that's going to be divided afterwards. Let's just do a little scribble on a piece of paper about the percentages agreement that we might reach. So they come up with this list.

It's like a laundry list. The Soviet Union, 90% predominance in Romania, 75% predominance in Bulgaria. Britain would have 90% predominance in Greece, Yugoslavia, and Hungary would all be split 50.50. I think you're letting Churchill slightly off the hook there. It's not they come up together with. Churchill writes that document. He does. You're right. And Stalin puts a blue tick on it.

And you can see the document. I sent you the picture of the document. It's called the naughty document. Oh, Churchill calls him his naughty document. and it actually did go on display at the National Archives. You can see the little blue tick that Stalin has put at the top of the page. And so Churchill thinks he's got a deal, that they'll go into Yatter and this is a deal, and then he can move on and do what he wants to do, which is safeguard the interests of the British Empire

and push the Nazis once and for all out of Germany. And we should highlight what Churchill's biggest red line is. for Churchill, the British entered the Second World War in order to save it from invasion by Poland. And Churchill is determined that he doesn't want to end the Second World War by just handing over Poland to the Soviet. On a plate. And so this is the single biggest sticking point. But, and this is something which will haunt the whole of the Yelta conference, and it's absolutely crucial that it's understood. You can't understand what happens to Yelta unless you understand this.

is that by the time Yelta happens, the Soviets have swept over the whole of Eastern Europe and are now just 50 miles from Berlin. At unprecedented speed, nobody guessed they would move as fast as they did, but they have it. There were two hitches in the Allied invasion of Western Europe after D-Day. D-Day goes very well that the Germans don't realize that the Normandy landings are the main thrust, and it takes two weeks for the Panzer divisions to be sent down there. But then you get two hold-ups. There is the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes that nearly breaks the Allied line

and is only ended when you have the famous Battle of the Bulge with the film that I remember was always being shared in my Pretz School 10 times for that tank battle. So that holds the Americans and the British up. And then there's a second hitch, which is also a film of my youth, which was a bridge too far, which is Arnhem, when the Allies try to capture all the bridge. and parachute beyond Nazi lines and it all goes horribly wrong. Now, while all this sort of hitches

is happening on the Western Front, the Red Army is seamlessly moving through Eastern Europe at speed, far faster than anyone had realised. And so by the time that this conference actually opens, the Soviet Red Army is very close to Berlin and it's too late in a sense to negotiate something about what you're going to do because they're there already. Possession is nine-tenths of the law.

There's one other thing. There's one other thing, another weakness, which actually, you know, you flagged to me, is that the Soviets have been given top secret, compromising, devastating information by one British spy, Guy Burgess, who has taken shopping bags full of secrets and handed them over to Uncle Joe Stalin. Go on, I'll tell your story. It's so good. It's so good. It's so good. It's very good. So the famous Cambridge spies, Burgess, Maclean, Thurface. Bill B, Blunt and Carecross are all working at high levels of British intelligence and all are passing documents to the Soviets because they are all Marxists. They believe that Britain is a

class-ridden society and they are sympathetic to the egalitarian, as they see it, communist ideal that they believe in in the 1930s on through now into the 1940s. And at this point in the story, the person with the most access is Guy Burgess, who is in the Foreign Office Press Department and has unprecedented access to all the important documents. And so the briefing papers, which contain all the position papers, worked out between the Americans and the British, what their red lines are, the tactics they'll use to stall the Soviets and check them up. The things you really want to keep secret in a negotiation. The whole lot have been handed over by Burgess to his, NKDV handler in London.

And there's this extraordinary moment that DePlochie writes about. I'll just read it. It's a wonderful moment. Burgess had stolen documents by the hundreds and gone undetected for years. But one day in 1944, London police officers noticed two suspicious-looking men, one of whom I was holding a carry-all. The police patrol asked the man to open the bag, which they thought might contain stolen goods. There were no valuables or household items in the bag,

Instead, it was just full of papers that the police found of no interest. So they allowed the men to continue their meeting. And the man with a carry-all was Guy Burgess, an employee of the Foreign Office Press Department. His companion was Boris Krotov, an NKGB officer working under Soviet diplomatic cover. The papers were the secret foreign office documents that Burgess had borrowed from other departments and was now delivering to the NKGB for photo reproduction. And in the first half of 1945, he supplied hundreds of such. documents to his handlers. And of these 389 were classified as top secret. So you have this intriguing

situation where Roosevelt thinks he's got a handle on Stalin. Stalin's got all of their secret positions. Churchill has his naughty list, which he thinks he's agreed with Stalin. They're basically turning up to these full and frank talks, but they all have enormous secrets. Join us for the next episode where we'll see how that plays out. If you can't wait, if one of those people who can't wait. You can listen to the whole Yalta mini-series. Eight days that changed the world. Just go to EmpirePodUK.com, EmpirePodUK.com and join our club and you get one big slathering heap. Plus, you get all sorts of other things. Don't forget the other benefits of joining our club, Anita. This is a very exciting magazine that arrives with you each week. Sell, baby, sell. What else do we get?

All sorts of other wonderful benefits. And I'm proposing, we haven't got this through yet, I am proposing that we do. an evening with our club members once a year in London. Anyway, we'll see how this goes. Anyway. Even if you don't want to come and have a drink with us, join the club, you don't have to. It's not mandatory. You don't have to come out first of an evening. I have to.

Do you know, I once won a newspaper competition when I was a student. And I was telling somebody about it. I think it was my second job interview. And I said, oh, yes, you know, I got this nursery. And I won this award. First prize was an evening out with the editor. He said, was the second price two evenings up with the editors? It's just, you don't have to come, but you can.

Anyway, till the next time we meet is goodbye from me, Anita Arnum. And goodbye from me, William Duremple.