YALTA
Spa-towns are not, as a rule, much connected with warfare. Their main visitors, traditionally, have been the idle rich, seeking to lose weight; so their only conflict has been metaphorical, the battle of the bulge. Carlsbad and Bath are two well-known examples of this optimism, of the hope that taking the waters will offset the failure to eat healthily and take exercise.
What is true of spa-towns is also generally true of holiday resorts. In Britain, two well-known such places are Blackpool and Brighton, respectively favoured by working-class and upper-class vacationers, and correspondingly chosen by the Labour Party and the Conservative Party as venues for party conferences. Again, the only battles staged there have been political, not military.
In Russia, the Crimea was home to several vacation spots, during both Czarist and Soviet years. The last of the Czars, Nicholas II, had his winter resort there, the Livadia Palace in Yalta. And many such places, mostly on a more modest scale, were subsequently taken over by the Communists, to serve as holiday resorts for Party members in good standing.
Historically, though, the Crimea resonates with the ring of warfare. In the mid-nineteenth century, a vicious war was fought there, for no good reason, between the Russians and the British. In the English-speaking world it became famous for two reasons: for the balaclava helmet, popularized there and later adopted by bank-robbers; and for the Battle of Balaklava, immortalized in a piece of heroic doggerel by Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”.
In the twentieth century, the Crimea was once again the scene of fierce fighting, during the second world war, between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht. War damage was severe; and when the Yalta Conference was held, in February 1945, accommodation for the visiting statesmen was primitive. Roosevelt stayed in the Livadia Palace, where most of the fine furniture and art from the old days had been either badly damaged or looted: makeshift improvements were hastily improvised; but there was an acute shortage of bathrooms. Conditions were no better for Stalin and Churchill, who stayed in the Yusupov Palace and the Vorontsov Villa. People had to manage as best they could, and put a good face on it.
Physical inconvenience, of course, was the least of the problems. The three leaders, and their assistants, cultivated an atmosphere of cordiality, to try and bridge their real differences of attitude. What they eventually hammered out, in their final communiqué, had all the appearance of mutual agreement. But it proved to be, in many respects, a hollow document: its fine-sounding sentiments were not echoed in subsequent realities. Stalin had promised, at Yalta, with cheerful bonhomie, to install freely elected democratic governments in the Eastern European countries which the Red Army was liberating. In exchange, he agreed to some of the Western requests: for instance, the inclusion of a French sector in the post-war partition of Germany. But it is hard to believe that either Churchill or Roosevelt was taken in by Stalin’s commitment to democracy, despite his ability to charm the birds off the trees: he had no record of democratic behaviour in his own Russia; and it was a good bet that he would want to gobble up all of Eastern Europe, to serve as a wall of defence against the hated West. Furthermore, even if he had been willing to allow free elections in those countries, most of them had no experience of parliamentary democracy: places like Hungary and Romania had a recent past of Fascist dictatorship; and Poland was not much better, with its pre-war dictatorial government and its tradition of vicious anti-Semitism.
The one exception was Czechoslovakia. Between the wars it was a shining example of parliamentary democracy at its enlightened best. Chamberlain and Daladier sold it out to Hitler in 1938, in a fit of cynical cowardice. Churchill and Roosevelt did no better in 1945. What Prague deserved, from London and Washington, was the full embrace and support of the West, if not on its own merits, then at least out of guilt over Munich. But what Prague got was abandonment to Stalin, as though Czechoslovakia belonged in the same category of states easily dispensed with as Hungary and Romania, which both had had pro-Nazi regimes. The treatment accorded the Czechs and Slovaks, at Yalta, was just as shabby as the furniture in the Livadia Palace.
Even so, there might yet have been hope for Bohemia and Moravia at least, if not Slovakia, to escape the clutches of the Russian bear. The American forces, moving towards Central Europe in their victorious progress on the Western Front, had arrived at the Czech border, and were all set to carry on to Prague and help the local patriotic rising to eject the Germans. Had they done so, the future of the region might have been very different. However, the Red Army was rapidly approaching Prague from the East; and if the U.S. Army also moved on the capital, the two armies might well meet in a manner more confrontational than comradely, with unforeseeable consequences. Accordingly General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the West, under advisement from President Truman, who had succeeded Roosevelt, ordered his troops to go no further. This sealed the fate of the Czechs. As the war ended, they enjoyed a brief spell of liberation and political freedom. But Stalin wasted little time in engineering a coup and locking them behind the Iron Curtain for over forty years.
The Czechs have resented Yalta ever since. And many other critics have blamed Churchill and Roosevelt for not doing more to prevent Stalin from carrying out his sinister intentions. Either they did not grasp what those intentions were, which in hindsight is astoundingly stupid. Or else they did see through his affable mask, but were willing to sacrifice whole nations to the East for the sake of securing some minor advantages for themselves in the West. Whatever the truth of that, Yalta has to stand as one of the more wretched transactions in modern history.
The saddest result of that transaction is that while the so-called Great Powers benefited from it, in terms of mutual security maintained by a stalemated arms-race, many smaller nations paid the price, in terms of freedom lost and tyranny inflicted. This ran through whole societies, from top to bottom: it was not just a case of political sovereignty denied; at the level of the ordinary citizen, daily life was lived in an atmosphere of fear, paranoia, and impotence. People got by on meagre earnings in humdrum jobs, held on sufferance, and had to settle for a world that robbed them of any meaningful choices. But the ones who perhaps suffered most were the intellectuals: freedom of opinion, their raison d’être, was everywhere proscribed; they must either conform to a system of official lies or else forgo their vocation and work as labourers. Typical of their predicament was the case of Boris Riegler in Prague: a young radio documentarist, mentored by a distinguished historian-philosopher, he flourished briefly during the Prague Spring, but thereafter was denied access to the air, and spent years in the wilderness. In a sense, he was a true victim of Yalta; and the following poem about Yalta is therefore dedicated to him.
YALTA
and genial toasts, engulfed whole nations
as satrapies of empire, and condemned millions to outright
slavery.
Not here, in these premises
of leisure, hut far away in other habitations,
other tongues, men watched the light
fade, watched their hopes all drown
in a sea of grief; and the night came down.
