Stalin: A Biography

At 8 a.m. Stalin, who had changed his habits for the occasion (usually he worked at night and got up at 11 a.m.), received me and the others. He prepared himself carefully for each of our sessions, having at hand files on every question that interested him. He even went so far as to ask for details of the tone of the conversations: ‘Did he say that with conviction or without enthusiasm? How did Roosevelt react? Did he say that resolutely?’ Sometimes he was surprised: ‘They know that we can hear them and yet they speak openly!’ One day he even asked me: ‘What do you think, do they know that we are listening to them?’

Even though the Western delegations worked from the premise that Soviet intelligence agencies might be listening to them, Stalin may have been less baffled about Roosevelt and Churchill than they were by him.

On Churchill’s trip to Moscow in October 1944 there was an acute need to talk further about the future of Europe. Churchill broached the matter deftly: ‘The moment was apt for business, so I said: “Let us settle our affairs in the Balkans.”’ Churchill took the bull by the horns and scribbled out his proposal on a blank sheet of paper. He suggested an arithmetical apportionment of zones of influence between the USSR on one side and the United Kingdom and the USA on the other. This was the notorious ‘percentages agreement’:¹⁶

-	%	-
Rumania	90	Russia
	10	The others
Greece	90	Great Britain (in accord with USA)
	10	Russia
Yugoslavia	50–50	-
Hungary	50–50	-
Bulgaria	75	Russia
	25	The others

Stalin waited for the translation, glanced at the paper and then took his blue pencil from a bronze pot and inscribed a large tick. There followed a long pause: both men sensed they were deciding something of historic importance. Churchill broke the silence: ‘Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper.’ But Stalin was untroubled, and said: ‘No, you keep it.’¹⁷

Churchill, talking later to the British ambassador, referred to his proposal as the ‘naughty document’. Stalin had second thoughts about details and asked for greater influence in Bulgaria and Hungary. In both cases he demanded 80 per cent for the USSR. British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, with Churchill’s consent, agreed to this amendment in a session with Molotov.¹⁸ Mythology has descended upon the agreement on percentages. The legend grew, for example, that Stalin and Churchill had carved up all Europe between them and that their conversation predetermined all the territorial and political decisions subsequently taken by the Allies. In reality the ‘naughty document’ was a provisional bilateral accord for action in the immediate future. It left much undiscussed. No mention was made of Germany, Poland or Czechoslovakia. Nothing was said about the political and economic system to be installed in any country after the war. The intended post-war order in Europe and Asia had yet to be clarified, and the percentages agreement did not bind the hands of the USA. Unconsulted, President Roosevelt could accept or reject it as he wished. Yet such in fact was his desire to keep the USSR sweet until Germany’s defeat that he welcomed the ‘naughty document’ without demur.

By the time the Big Three met at Yalta on 4 February 1945 it was urgent for them to grasp the nettle of planning post-war Europe and Asia. For Stalin it was also an occasion for the Soviet authorities to show off their savoir faire. Each delegation stayed in a palace built for the tsars. This cut no mustard with the aristocratic British Prime Minister. Churchill said that ‘a worse place in the world’ would not have been discovered even with a decade’s exploration. The length of the journey can hardly have annoyed this inveterate traveller. Yalta is on the Crimean peninsula. Before 1917 it was one of the favourite spots for holidaying dignitaries of the Imperial state. Stalin loved the entire shore from Crimea down to Abkhazia — and it is hard to resist the observation that Churchill was indulging in English snobbery.