At the final dinner at the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt’s toast talked of a ‘family atmosphere’ that had developed between himself, Churchill and Stalin. Roosevelt had based his wartime relationship with Stalin on trust (he felt that Stalin had proven to be a straight-talking but resolute ally) and he thought this could continue into the immediate post-war order. Roosevelt was hopeful for a post-war world that would see America and the Soviet Union reach an accommodation with each other. He would be disillusioned before his death but at Tehran and Yalta, this was how Roosevelt felt.
Roosevelt’s position was not so different to that of Woodrow Wilson’s at Versailles. He held a more detached view than the Europeans, he sought a lasting peace and was prepared to work with the Russians to achieve it. He even advocated the United Nations (just as Woodrow Wilson had advocated the League of Nations) as the best means to ensure it. One thing that was different though: America wouldn’t revert to a policy of isolationism as it had after WW1.
Already at Tehran, Roosevelt seemed closer to Stalin than he was with Churchill. His relationship with Churchill was already becoming more strained as the war reached an end. The two allies had disagreed over opening a second front in France, and with the war coming to an end, he wasn’t about to have America prop up the British and French empires.
Though Churchill was an imperialist, he had a European perspective and was focused on the post-war world as it affected Europe more than anything else. Churchill hated Communism yet was also a realist. He was aware of Britain’s weak position vis-à-vis both his natural ally, America and the ally fate had forced upon him: the Soviet Union. He was pragmatic and knew he had to work with the Soviet Union, hence the ‘percentages’ agreement and his acceptance of a Soviet ‘sphere of influence’, but he didn’t like it and he certainly didn’t trust them. He wanted to minimise Soviet influence as much as possible. If we continue our comparison with the Big Three at Versailles, Churchill could be seen as being in a similar position to Lloyd George who knew he had to balance his response vis-à-vis Germany.
As for Stalin, though Roosevelt might have trusted him to begin with, Stalin, suspicious by nature, trusted no one. He had been suspicious of Western intentions before as well as during the war, and would not trust them in the negotiations for a post-war world. Speaking to Milovan Djilas, a Yugoslav Communist, in 1945 he labelled both Roosevelt and Churchill as thieves though he distinguished between Churchill who would ‘pick your pocket for a kopeck’ (a low-value Soviet coin) and Roosevelt who at least ‘dips in his hand only for bigger coins.’ Stalin was actually very much in Clemenceau’s position at Versailles. Security was his overriding concern and, just like Clemenceau in 1919, he wanted Germany weakened, and he wanted government’s friendly to the Soviet Union at its borders.
But Roosevelt was sadly to die in 1945 and Churchill, much to his surprise, was to lose the 1945 British general election. And into the mix came, Harry Truman, Roosevelt’s vice-President who would go on to win the 1948 presidential election, and he didn’t trust Stalin (or any other communist) at all. Whereas when Hitler had invaded Russia, Churchill had said, ‘If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons, Truman had infamously declared ‘If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.’ A very different approach from Roosevelt’s, Truman would agree to using nuclear bombs to bring an end to the war with Japan, and would preside over the Berlin blockade as well as the Korean War.
So it was that, on March 5th, 1946, Churchill, in what became a famous speech made in Fulton, Missouri (with President Truman in the audience – it was his home town), talked of an ‘Iron Curtain’ being drawn across Europe:
‘From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest and Sofia. All these famous cities lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow…. The Russian-dominated Polish government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans are now taking place. The Communist Parties, which were very small in all of these Eastern states, are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control.’
Churchill’s speech, which had been shown to President Truman beforehand, wasn’t a declaration of the Cold War. That wasn’t in Churchill’s power to make, and though no formal declaration was ever made, it needed a decisive, epoch-making, act (which wouldn’t be long in coming). But it did draw the lines of the Cold War, both physically or territorially, as well as ideologically.
Stalin gave his reply in an interview with the Soviet newspaper, Pravda, published on March 13th, 1946, making his thoughts very clear:
[Churchill’s speech was] ‘a dangerous move, calculated to sow the seeds of dissension among the Allied states…. Mr Churchill sets out to unleash a war with a racial theory. The English race theory leads Mr Churchill and his friends to the conclusion that the English-speaking nations, as the only superior countries, should rule over the rest of the nations of the world…. What can there be surprising about the fact that the Soviet Union, anxious for its future safety, is trying to see to it that governments loyal in their attitude to the Soviet Union should exist in these countries?’
This was the Soviet Union’s ‘buffer zone’.
In both speeches there is traditional strategic power-politics, there is also ideology, but there is also personality.
