A constructed Peace The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963

[Put Figure One and Figure Two about here]

But this does not mean that Roosevelt had come to view the whole region as an area in which the Russians could exercise a free hand. The one country which Roosevelt, and Churchill as well, were particularly interested in was Poland, or more precisely Poland west of the Curzon Line. Rumania and Bulgaria had not been on the allied side during the war, but Poland was different. It was to defend Polish independence that Britain had gone to war in the first place in 1939; the Poles had fought bravely against Germany; and a Polish army was still fighting side by side with the western allies in the war. Moreover, while there were not many Americans of Bulgarian or Rumanian descent, there was a fairly large Polish-American community, concentrated in some key industrial states in the midwest.

Both sides therefore had a great interest in Poland, and by the beginning of 1945, the problem had become a serious threat to allied unity--and the maintenance of unity was one of Roosevelt's fundamental goals. What was to be done? The allied leaders met at Yalta in February, and the main purpose of the Yalta Conference was to deal with the Polish problem.

The agreement worked out at Yalta called for the Communist-dominated provisional government in Poland to be "reorganized on a broader democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad." Soviet foreign minister Molotov and the American and British ambassadors in Moscow were to help bring this new government into being, and that government would be "pledged to the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot."⁶ The agreement, as Roosevelt later wrote, represented a compromise between the western view that an "entirely new" Polish government be formed, and the initial Soviet view that the Lublin government "should merely be 'enlarged.'" As such, it clearly placed "more emphasis on the Lublin Poles than on the other two groups from which the new government is to be drawn."⁷

Did this mean, however, that the western powers had agreed to give the USSR a free hand in Poland, and implicitly in all of eastern Europe? It is often argued that all the talk about free elections and non-Communist representation in the provisional government was mere window-dressing, designed essentially for domestic consumption. Roosevelt, the argument goes, knew that "the Russians had the power in eastern Europe," that the West's bargaining position was therefore weak, and that the best he could hope for was a deal that would save appearances while conceding to the Soviets effective control of the area.⁸

But does this interpretation really hold up to analysis? Roosevelt certainly knew that the Soviets had the power to impose a Communist regime on Poland, but this fact did not in itself oblige him to put an official seal of approval on such an arrangement. There would be no point to an agreement if it did not provide benefits for both sides. If all the Americans could hope for was a façade of democratic respectability, then this would be no gain at all. It would be worse than useless. The truth could not long be hidden; as soon as the real situation became clear, there was bound to be a sense of betrayal. The makers of the agreement would be revealed as fools, or worse.

And the simple fact that the Soviets controlled Poland militarily did not mean that the U.S. government was totally powerless on this issue. If Roosevelt had felt that he had no chance of getting anything real out of Stalin, why would he have opposed him on the issue in the first place, and why--especially given his physical condition--would he travel halfway around the world to try to work the problem out? The Americans, after all, had certain obvious sources of leverage in the dispute. Above all, American power might well play a key role in the postwar world, and especially in keeping Germany under control. This fact alone meant that the Soviets had a strong interest in staying on good terms with the United States. Moreover, the Soviets would very much want to receive economic help from America, and from other sources under U.S. control, given the enormous devastation they had suffered and the consequent priority they would have to place on reconstruction. This was another major source of leverage: the top American leadership took it for granted that the Russians knew they had a great interest in not antagonizing American opinion.⁹

So the Americans had reason to hope for something of substance at Yalta. And in fact they came back with more than they had expected, for why else would they have been so pleased with the results of the conference, even in private?¹⁰ British officials from Churchill on down, including even the top professionals in the Foreign Office, were also quite satisfied with what had been achieved at Yalta.¹¹ If Poland had indeed been written off, it is scarcely conceivable that the leaders of either government would have left the conference in this mood. And Roosevelt's attitude after Yalta--his refusal to accept a "whitewash" of the Lublin regime, his "anxiety and concern" over the Soviet attitude on the Polish issue at that time--is incomprehensible if one believes that his goal at Yalta had merely been to provide "face-saving formulas for the West."¹²

What Roosevelt and his chief advisers were aiming at was a Poland closely aligned with Russia on matters of foreign and military policy, but with a large measure of autonomy on domestic issues. This, in fact, was the American dream for eastern Europe as a whole, a dream which persisted throughout the entire Cold War period.¹³ And it was not absurd to think that arrangements of this sort could be worked out. Poland herself could not be much of an obstacle: even a free and democratically governed Poland would have little choice but to accept this kind of relationship. Power realities were bound to dominate the situation, and no matter how they felt about the Russians, the Poles had little room for maneuver. If they were obstinate and refused to accommodate the Soviets on matters relating to vital Soviet security interests, the western powers would wash their hands of any responsibility and leave Poland to her fate. But faced with that prospect, the Poles could almost certainly be brought to heel. The attitude of the three great allies, acting as a bloc, would in the final analysis be controlling. This was especially true since Poland was about to be compensated for her losses in the east with a good deal of German territory; this, it was assumed, would inevitably lead to German resentment, and thus to increased Polish dependence on the allies.¹⁴

So there was some hope after Yalta that a satisfactory settlement of the Polish problem could be worked out. But the Soviet government had no intention of taking the Yalta texts as binding. When Molotov, for example, pointed out that an American draft of one of the main Yalta documents went too far, Stalin dismissed his concerns: "Never mind. . . we'll work on it . . .do it our own way later."¹⁵ And in the Moscow negotiations on the reorganization of the provisional Polish government, the Soviets took a hard line and sought to give the Communist authorities in Warsaw, what was still called the Lublin government, a veto over which Poles would even be invited in for consultations.¹⁶ Soviet intransigence looked particularly ominous in the light of what was going on inside Poland. The Russians, by all indications, were in the process of imposing a Communist police state on Poland, and to Roosevelt this meant that the Soviets were not living up to the Yalta agreement. "Neither the Government nor the people of this country," he wrote Churchill, "will support participation in a fraud or a mere whitewash of the Lublin government, and the solution must be as we envisaged it at Yalta."¹⁷

Churchill wanted to confront the Soviets directly on the issue, but Roosevelt disagreed.¹⁸ If he really had to, the president was prepared to "bring the matter to a head" with Stalin.¹⁹ But he preferred to deal with the problem in a more indirect way. American opinion was manipulated so as to generate public expectations that would place considerable pressure on the Soviets. James F. Byrnes, "assistant President" during the war and one of the leading figures in American political life at the time, was the chief vehicle Roosevelt used for this purpose. Byrnes had been brought along to Yalta, and upon his return from Russia, he gave the American public its first authoritative account of what the Yalta agreement meant. The Declaration on Liberated Europe adopted at the conference, a document full of Wilsonian pieties about democracy and self-determination, had not been meant to be taken at face value.²⁰ But Byrnes--although his real view was rather different--declared this to be a document "of the greatest importance": it marked the end of spheres of influence. With regard to Poland, he said, the three main allies would run things there "until the provisional government is established and elections held." This was highly misleading, but Roosevelt fully approved of what he called Byrnes's "magnificent" performance, and he himself went on to report to the nation on Yalta in a similar vein.²¹

But Roosevelt's tactics did not have the desired effect, and relations between the Soviet Union and the western allies now quickly deteriorated. In the Moscow talks, Soviet intransigence was met by a toughening of the western line. Even before Roosevelt's death in April, the American representative in the Moscow talks sought to place the non-Communist Poles on a "par" with the Lublin regime, leading Stalin to complain that the western powers were trying to undo the Yalta agreement.²² When Harry Truman succeeded to the presidency after Roosevelt's death in April, the American government took a yet tougher line on the issue. The demand now was for a provisional government "genuinely representative of the democratic elements of the Polish people."²³ This corresponded to America's initial position at Yalta, but the final agreement had merely called, in less categorical terms, for the existing regime to be "reorganized on a broader democratic basis." For Truman at this point, the simple fact was that the Soviets, in violation of the Yalta agreement, were imposing a communist regime on Poland. This breach of faith was intolerable. He immediately decided to deal with the issue head on.

On April 23, barely a week after succeeding to the presidency, Truman met with his top military and foreign policy advisers. "Our agreements with the Soviet Union so far," he said, "had been a one-way street and that could not continue; it was now or never." The Soviets had to keep their side of the Yalta bargain. It was clear to him from the meeting "that from a military point of view there was no reason why" America should not insist on its understanding of the agreement on Poland.²⁴ He confronted Molotov that very evening and demanded in extremely blunt terms that the Soviets keep their promises. "I have never been talked to like that in my life," Truman later reported Molotov as saying. "Carry out your agreements," the president quoted himself as replying, "and you won't get talked to like that."²⁵

But this belligerent tone was quickly abandoned. Neither Truman nor Byrnes really wanted to break with the Russians, and the Yalta agreement, the new president soon realized, was not as unambiguous as he had initially thought.²⁶ Truman was willing to "have another go" at Stalin, and in May sent Roosevelt's close advisor, Harry Hopkins, a man known to be sympathetic to the USSR, to work things out with the Soviet leader. An agreement was quickly reached on the shape of the Polish provisional government, and the reconstructed but still Communist-dominated government was then recognized by the United States.

This decision marked a turning point. The American government more or less gave up on trying to save democracy in Poland. Free elections had been repeatedly promised, and Stalin, in his meetings with Hopkins and on other occasions, had explicitly denied any "intention to Sovietize Poland." The goal, he said, was to set up a western-style parliamentary democracy like Holland.²⁷ But the U.S. government made little attempt to get the Communists to honor these commitments. At the Potsdam conference in July 1945, it was the British delegation that carried the ball on Poland. The Americans were passive. Diplomatic recognition had been extended after the Communists had made definite promises about free elections, but when those elections were not held, there was no thought, for example, of withdrawing recognition. In late 1945, the U.S. government was no longer very interested in what was going on in Poland. That country had come to be accepted, in fact if not in words, as an integral part of the Soviet sphere of influence.²⁸

With Poland effectively written off in mid-1945, it was hardly likely that the United States would take a stand over democracy elsewhere in eastern Europe. The Poles were allies and had fought hard for their freedom against enormous odds. But Rumania, for example, had fought on the Nazi side, and Bulgaria had cooperated with Germany is lesser ways; both countries, moreover, had been consigned to the Soviet sphere by the percentage agreement. In late 1945, there was some half-hearted wrangling over the fate of those countries. But Byrnes, who had been made Secretary of State just before Potsdam, disapproved of the tough line U.S. diplomatic representatives in Bulgaria and Rumania wanted to take.²⁹ Indeed, he quickly reached the conclusion that the time had come to settle with the Soviets on the basis of the status quo. During the London foreign ministers' meeting in September he met with John Foster Dulles, the top Republican in the U.S. delegation, to discuss the talks, which so far were getting nowhere. "Well, pardner," he said, "I think we pushed these babies about as far as they will go and I think that we better start thinking about a compromise."³⁰ By December the evolution of American policy was complete. Byrnes agreed at the Moscow foreign ministers' meeting that month to recognize the Communist regimes in Bulgaria and Rumania in exchange for cosmetic changes in the composition of those governments and what he certainly now knew were empty promises about free elections.³¹

The United States continued to pay occasional lip service to the ideal of democratic governments in eastern Europe, but in practice the entire region had by December 1945 been accepted as an area where the Soviets would run the show. The American government certainly did not like what the Russians were doing there. The gradual setting up of Communist police states--the intimidation, the arrests, the "liquidations"--had offended American sensibilities, and control had been imposed in a way that had left the Americans feeling cheated. Stalin's lies about not wanting to communize Poland, the many broken promises about free elections, the general contempt shown for American wishes--all this left a residue of bitterness that was not without political importance. The Soviet sphere in eastern Europe was nonetheless something the Americans felt they could live with. It was not just that, short of going to war, the United States had no choice but to accept Soviet control of the area. The American policy was more positive than that. The key indicator was diplomatic recognition, which was something the U.S. government was by no means forced to bestow. Conferring recognition meant that the division of Europe was accepted as the basis of the postwar international order.

And by late 1945 an arrangement of this sort had become the real goal of Byrnes's policy. After the Moscow conference, the Secretary of State was accused of being an appeaser, of striving for agreement as an end in itself, of being overly accommodationist and too ready to make concessions. But Byrnes was not trying to buy Soviet goodwill in the hope of propping up a regime of great power cooperation. He had come to the conclusion very early on that Russia and America were too far apart on basics for the two sides to work hand in hand with each other.³² The key to getting along with the Soviets was for each side to accept what the other was doing in the area it controlled, the area most vital to its security. And Byrnes was willing to accept eastern Europe as an area where Soviet interests were predominant. In exchange, he expected the USSR to accept the predominance of the western powers in the areas they considered vital--above all western Europe and Japan, but also the Mediterranean and the Middle East. It was for this reason that he was ready even in late 1945--that is, well before the president and the rest of the administration adopted a tough anti-Soviet policy--to defend the Turkish Straits, something which certain later Cold Warriors (like Dulles) were at the time rather wary about doing.³³ And one of the things he got during this period was Soviet acceptance of American preeminence in Japan.³⁴

There was nothing particularly arcane or subtle about such an approach. The term "spheres of influence" might evoke images of the highly professional diplomacy of the late nineteenth century, but the basic concept is quite familiar from everyday life. Two boys are fighting in a schoolyard: the natural solution is to pull them apart. Or a husband and wife are always quarreling: an obvious answer is for them to get divorced and to lead separate lives. This approach ran against the grain of the Wilsonian tradition, certainly one of the basic traditions in American foreign policy, above all at the level of public rhetoric, and for that reason, a certain amount of discretion was always necessary. But the force of that tradition--the emphasis on democracy and self-determination, the distaste for thinking in terms of power, strategic interest and especially spheres of influence--is not to be exaggerated. The makers of American policy, it has become increasingly clear from recent historical work, were not starry-eyed idealists, but rather by and large understood that Wilsonian principles could not be applied dogmatically, and that political realities had to be taken into account.³⁵ Byrnes in particular did not care much for abstract principles in any case and had no problem basing his policy on those power realities. The division of Europe was a fact, and if both sides accepted it, an end could be put to the quarreling and the allies could go their separate ways in peace.
Potsdam and the German Question

The same philosophy lay at the heart of Byrnes's policy on the German question, and indeed his policy on this issue provides the most striking example of his general approach in 1945 to international problems. Real cooperation with the Soviet Union in his view was just not in the cards. "There is too much difference in the ideologies of the U.S. and Russia," he noted on July 24, "to work out a long term program of cooperation."³⁶ The way to get along was for each side to run things in the area it occupied. This simple idea was the basis of Byrnes's policy at the Potsdam conference in late July and early August 1945, and it was an idea which Stalin was quite happy to accept.

How did an arrangement based on this concept come to be worked out? During the war, the allies had not agreed on a common policy for Germany, but this had been no mere oversight.³⁷ The simple fact was that there had been no obvious policy to pursue. A punitive policy might over the long run lead to such bitterness and hatred that the Germans would once again revolt against the status quo, but a soft peace seemed entirely inappropriate given the extraordinary crimes they had committed.

The Americans in particular were sharply divided on this issue during the war.³⁸ The State Department tended to think in terms of building democracy in Germany, and was thus inclined to favor a relatively mild peace. Treasury Secretary Morgenthau was enraged by this policy and pressed instead for a plan for "pastoralizing" Germany. "I don't care what happens to the population," he told his chief assistant. He would "take every mine, every mill and factory and wreck it."³⁹ Roosevelt embraced the Morgenthau Plan in late 1944. At one point he even remarked that he was unwilling "to say that we do not intend to destroy the German nation."⁴⁰ But no firm decision was ever made to implement the Morgenthau policy, nor was any alternative policy ever adopted. Instead, the president put off all but the most urgent decisions. In 1918, at the end of the First World War, the Germans had entered into an agreement with their enemies before laying down their arms; the Germans later claimed that the allies had reneged on their part of the bargain, and that they therefore had the moral right to resist the peace settlement the western powers had so deceitfully imposed. So this time there would be no pre-armistice agreement. Germany was to surrender unconditionally; the allies' hands would not be tied.⁴¹

The basic question of the nature of the settlement with Germany thus remained in limbo until the very end of the war. The question, for example, of whether Germany would be dismembered was of fundamental importance. But on this issue Roosevelt laid down the line that "our attitude should be one of study and postponement of final decision"--and this was in April 1945, with the surrender of Germany just a month away.⁴²

So only the most minimal agreements had been reached by the time the war in Europe was over. The allies had worked out terms of surrender for Germany (although through a foul-up on the American end, these were not the terms actually used).⁴³ There had also been an accord dividing Germany up into zones of occupation; zones were assigned not just to Britain, America and Russia, but eventually to France as well. The zonal arrangement left greater Berlin, itself divided into four sectors, well within the Soviet zone.⁴⁴ And finally an agreement on control machinery for Germany was signed in November 1944, and ratified just before the Yalta Conference in early 1945. An Allied Control Council would be set up, composed of the allied commanders-in-chief, each of whom would exercise supreme authority in his own zone of occupation. The Control Council was to take action on "matters affecting Germany as a whole," but only when all four zonal commanders agreed on specific measures. This plan did not lay out how Germany was to be treated. It simply set up machinery through which a common policy could be implemented, assuming the allies were able to agree on one.⁴⁵

[Put Figure 3 here]

The assumption, however, was that the allies really would be able to cooperate on German questions. For Roosevelt, the essential thing was to build a relationship of trust with Stalin. If this were done, he was confident, at least until the very end of his life, that the two countries would be able to work together. He and other key officials were therefore reluctant to do anything that would provoke Russian distrust. It was essentially for this reason, for example, that in drafting the agreement on occupation zones, the Americans did not insist on an explicit guarantee of free access to Berlin.⁴⁶

But by the time the Potsdam conference met in July, many top American and British officials had reached the conclusion that real cooperation with the Soviet Union was just not possible. The Soviets seemed to be pushing outward wherever they could, in northern Norway, in the Mediterranean, in the Middle East and the Far East as well.⁴⁷ The most menacing of the new claims was the demand for military bases on the Turkish Straits. This demand was backed up by troop movements in the Balkans and a strident press and radio campaign directed against the Turkish government.⁴⁸