Russia at war 1941-1945

to Yalta as Roosevelt's personal chambermaid and who commented on her return, almost with tears in her eyes: "Such a sweet and kind man, but so terribly, terribly ill." When Roosevelt suddenly died soon afterwards, not only Fenya, but thousands of other Russian women wept.

On the other hand, Stettinius has argued in his book that the Russians made more

concessions at Yalta than they obtained from the Western Allies.

[ Roosevelt and The Russians (London, 1950).]

His list of "Soviet concessions" includes the following:

The Soviet Union accepted the US formula for voting on the Security Council, thus

putting an end to the Dumbarton Oaks impasse.

The Soviet Union abandoned her request for all the sixteen Soviet Republics being

represented at the UN Assembly, and contented herself with votes for the USSR, the

Ukraine and Belorussia only.

The Soviet Union agreed to the Associated Nations, who declared war on Germany by

March 1, participating at San Francisco as original members.

The Soviet Union agreed to closer military co-ordination.

She agreed, despite earlier objections, to the French not only having an occupation zone in Germany, but also to their being represented on the Control Commission.

She accepted that the western border of Poland be left for the Peace Conference to settle.

She agreed to a compromise formula on the constitution of the future Polish Government and to "free elections" in Poland.

She bowed to the US view that the figure of twenty billion dollars should be treated by the Reparations Commission in its initial studies merely as a basis of discussion.

In the case of the Declaration on Liberated Europe the Russians withdrew their two

amendments, including that giving a special status to people who had "actively opposed the Nazis".

On the other hand, while appealing to Stalin's "generosity" to Poland, the Western Powers had not felt able to insist on Lwow and the oil areas of Galicia being given to Poland. They had also given way on one or two questions concerning the strict allied supervision of the Polish election but, as Stettinius said in an italicised passage: As a result of the military situation [in February 1945] it was not a question of what Great Britain and the United States would permit Russia to do in Poland, but what the two countries could persuade the Soviet Union to accept...

[Our troops] had just recovered ground lost by the Battle of the Bulge and had not yet bridged the Rhine. In Italy our advance was bogged down in the Appennines.

The Soviet troops, on the other hand, had swept through almost all Poland and East Prussia and had reached at some points the river Oder... Poland and most of eastern Europe, except for most of Czechoslovakia, was in the hands of the Red Army.

[Stettinius, op. cit., p. 266. ]

For all that, Stettinius claims that "the Yalta Agreements were, on the whole, a diplomatic triumph for the United States and Great Britain. The real difficulties with the Soviet Union came after Yalta when the agreements were not respected."

[Ibid., p. 261.]

It is clear that Britain and the United States were not negotiating with the Soviet Union from "positions of strength". No doubt both Roosevelt and, especially, Churchill felt very strongly about a number of questions; in the first place Poland. "Poland," Churchill said,

"is the most important question before the Conference, and I don't want to leave without its being settled." Eden argued that "the presence of Mikolajczyk in the Polish Government would do more than anything else to add to its authority and convince the British people of its representative nature". Churchill declared himself horrified by the reports that "the Lublin Government had announced its intention of trying members of the Home Army and underground forces as traitors";

[This is precisely what the Soviet authorities were going to do only a few months later.]