Amerikai Magyar Értesítő, 1982 (18. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1982-02-01 / 2. szám

1982. február

A. M. E.

9

Yalta

The 1945 deal split Europe

Those who would renounce the agreement are too late .... Stalin did so long ago

The Yalta agreement nears its final stage

if inston Churchill, Franklin l). Roosevelt and Josef Stalin at the Yalta conference

By Hal Piper * •

Bonn.

There are two kinds people in the world —pro-Yalta people and anti-Yalta people.

Helmut Schmidt and Leonid I. Brezhnev are pro-Yalta. The Pope and Francois Mitterrand are anti-Yalta. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Carter’s chief foreign policy adviser, thinks it is high time the United States switched from respecting Yalta to repudiating it.

But they all agree on the meaning of the word “Yalta.” It was at Yalta that the deal was done that split Europe. Since Yalta, there have been two kinds of Europeans in the world—“theirs” and “ours,” communist Europeans and capitalist Europeans, a Soviet sphere of influence and an American sphere of influence.

That, at least, is what the word “Yalta” has come to mean. And it has given each group its own myth:

• Yalta means stability to the pro- Yalta crowd. The political map is settled. The two sides will taunt each other, arm against each other, spy on each other, but in the long run they will not contest each others’ sphere of influence. This realism has given Europe its longest period in this century of peace and prosperity.

• But to the anti-Yalta crowd the word means sell-out. Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt “gave away” 100 million East Europeans to Josef Stalin. After this betrayal, the West was unable or unwilling to tear down the Berlin Wall (1961) or to help anti-communist rebellions in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).

And now there is Poland, and Yalta is back in the news again. Soviet propagandists complain that the Solidarity trade union and its western sympathizers were “trying to change the results of World War II”—in particular that result that left Poland oriented toward the Soviet Union.

Chancellor Schmidt was, if anything, more blunt. In justifying West Germany’s initially mild response to the military takeover in Poland he warned that Yalta represented western recognition of Soviet security interests in Poland and that any challenge to these interests now “would mean war.”

On the other side, Pope John Paul II, who is a Pole, declared that spheres of influence should not be sanctioned because they deprive peoples of the freedom to make their own choices. And France’s President Mitterand, blaming the East-West division of Europe for the crushing of Solidarity, hoped that the continent would “escape” from the spirit of Yalta.

Mr. Brzezinski said that if the Soviet Union meddled too shamelessly in Poland the U.S. ought to “symbolically renounce” the Yalta agreement.

As these comments show, the two competing myths of Yalta are alive and well, 37 years after the wartime meeting. But actually, there is a lot less to Yalta itself than meets the eye.

Yalta is a popular Soviet beach resort on the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea. There Roosevelt, Churchill arid Stalin met in February, 1945, to coordinate

allied plans for wrapping up the war and setting Europe’s postwar course.

Roosevelt got his prime objective— Stalin’s agreement to bring the Soviet Union into the Pacific war against Japan. He also won Soviet support for the idea of setting up a new world organization, to be called the United Nations.

With specific respect to Poland, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to Stalin’s plan to take a chunk of Poland and compensate it with a chunk of Germany but demurred from Stalin’s intention to recognize a pro-Soviet committee as Poland's new government. They got him to agree to include representatives of partisan fighters on Polish soil and the Lon- don-based government-in-exile in a tripartite government that would supervise free elections.

If this is the Yalta agreement that Mr Brzezinski wants to renounce, he is too late Stalin already renounced it.

For the rest of Eastern Europe, the plan was the same—interim governments “broadly representative of all the elements of the population,” leading to “free election” of permanent governments.

No sell-out visible here. No grand structure for postwar European stability, either.

Yalta gets its bad name from what happened afterward. One by one, all the countries of Eastern Europe fell under Soviet domination. Roosevelt and Churchill should have driven a harder bargain, the sell-out theorists proclaim. They should have insisted on joint Soviet- British-American supervision, to insure that the elections were really free.

The fact was, however, that the Red