diplomacy

diplomacy. On the outbreak of hostilities, diplomatic missions in enemy countries close down and the diplomats depart. But diplomacy continues to flourish in wartime; diplomatic business becomes, if anything, more urgent. Foreign ministries continue sending out directives and receiving reports; traffic in coded messages becomes brisker; the couriers go on carrying diplomatic bags, if necessary by different routes.

In addition, as belligerent countries concentrate on the conduct of war, neutral states start to play a more significant role in diplomacy. Their missions are sometimes requested to represent the interests of the combatants, and strategically placed neutral countries become meeting-points as well as escape routes. Switzerland and Sweden provided the meeting-ground for diplomats as well as spies in the Second World War; while Portugal became the gate through which refugees streamed out of Europe.

The establishments of the foreign ministries in both Allied and Axis countries had grown everywhere before the war; the ministries became clearing houses for many different kinds of foreign business, propaganda, and economic warfare among them. The diplomats were often consulted on the consequences of military strategies, without having a decisive voice in such matters; they became so overburdened with paperwork that the clarity of their judgement sometimes suffered.

It may be that diplomacy played a less significant role than it had done in the First World War. From 1914 to 1918, war leaders relied on diplomats to make up for military weakness on crucial occasions. The most striking example was the belief, held in Berlin, that diplomacy would help reduce the war from two fronts—in the west and in the east—to a single-front engagement. In the Second World War diplomatic dilemmas tended to be resolved by military action. For example, Japan, an ally of Germany, was fighting China (see China incident), which was being aided by the USSR, when the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939 was concluded; Japan's conundrum was resolved by the German attack on the USSR in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA), just as the era of US isolationism was brought to an end by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Improved radio communications strengthened the growing preference of heads of government for keeping in touch directly with each other, and the position of diplomacy also changed for other reasons. The Germans under Hitler and, before them, the Soviets after the Bolshevik revolution, had begun using other means than diplomacy to keep in touch with the outside world. Lenin (1870–1924) and Stalin had the Comintern at their disposal, which gave Soviet foreign policy a second string. Equipped with a less appealing ideology than communism, Hitler learned how to use the Nazi Party, in conjunction with the Germans outside the Reich (see Volksdeutsche), as vigorous players in the international field.

The network of diplomatic agreements, with which Hitler entered the war, was both ideological and contradictory. Co-operation between Germany and Italy, the two leading fascist states in Europe, had been initiated as early as 1936. It was anchored in a loose accord, which became known as the Rome–Berlin Axis. The Anti-Comintern pact between Germany and Japan was concluded a few months later, towards the end of 1936: Italy acceded to the pact in November 1937. On 22 May 1939, Italy strengthened its understanding with Germany by a more formal alliance, which became known as the Pact of Steel, and on 27 September 1940 the Tripartite Pact, which was meant to lay down the foundations of the New Order both in Europe and in Asia, was signed in Berlin by Germany, Italy, and Japan; it was subsequently joined by the smaller states in eastern Europe which had come under the influence of the Reich.

Hitler's Polish campaign, and then the attack on the USSR, were launched without formal declarations of war. German diplomats had less opportunity than they had, say, in the First World War to be active in the search for potential allies. Hitler placed more reliance on military occupation, both in Scandinavia and in the Balkans, than on diplomatic persuasion.

Nor did the diplomacy of Hitler's foreign secretary Ribbentrop look coherent. Until the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazi–Soviet Pact had been in place, in stark contradiction to the Anti-Comintern Pact. The first signal was sent from Moscow in May 1939, when Molotov replaced Litvinov in the commissariat of foreign affairs, and the policy of collective security lost its main Soviet exponent. Hitler, on the other hand, wanted a guarantee of Soviet neutrality before he attacked Poland; a late approach from London to Stalin could no longer prevent his agreement with the Germans.

The New Order for Europe (see Germany, 4) had first begun to take shape when, during the years of the economic slump, Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler's minister of finance, created the dependence of the agrarian economies in the Balkans on the Reich. Other steps towards the New Order were taken by aggressive moves, both military and diplomatic, including the annexation of Austria and the Munich agreement. From Hitler's point of view, these were mere frontier rectifications, intended to correct some of the injustices of the old order in Europe, created by the peace treaties (see Versailles settlement). Others followed when the Vienna awards—a result of Hungarian diplomacy—ceded to Hungary certain Czechoslovak territories ( 1938) and then northern Transylvania which belonged to Romania ( 1940).

By the time of the second Vienna award, the spring and summer campaigns of 1940 had made Hitler the master of a great part of continental Europe. Stalin, alarmed by the speed of Hitler's advance in the west, intensified his effort to improve the position of the Soviet Union on its western border. The negotiations with Finland concerning a mutual assistance pact which included territorial and diplomatic concessions to the USSR, failed, and, in November 1939 the Finnish–Soviet war began. It cost the Soviet Union its seat on the League of Nations ( 14 December 1939) but helped it to gain about 12% of Finnish territory, by the Treaty of Moscow made on 12 March 1940. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were also absorbed by the USSR, after communist coups carried out between 15 June and 16 August. On 23 June, Stalin informed his German partners that he would like to have Bukovina in addition to Romania's Bessarabia, because it contained a Ukrainian population. This claim was too much for Hitler, who decided to block further Soviet advances. Nevertheless, the humiliation of Romania was not yet at an end. The Treaty of Craiova, on 23 August, handed over southern Dobruja to Bulgaria, a territory which it had lost in the second Balkan War in 1913. Hitler agreed to guarantee Romania's territory, which had been diminished by about a third within two months, only after the second Vienna award.

The New Order was created by diplomacy out of economic need, historical resentment, and military aggression. Propaganda put on it whatever gloss it possessed, while the requirements of the industries of the Third Reich at war helped to give the New Order some kind of cohesion. In the Auswärtiges Amt (foreign office) as well, the diplomats were distracted by an increased agenda, and by the new methods of dealing with the world outside the Reich.

Only a small part of the conquered territories suffered outright annexation. Several countries came under German military administration, including occupied France, Belgium, and, in 1941, Greece and Yugoslavia. Norway and the Netherlands, on the other hand, were placed in the care of civilian commissioners. Denmark enjoyed an exceptional status under the royal family, which decided to stay in Copenhagen after German occupation. The formula for the Nazi rule of Slav territories, through imperial pro-consuls, had first been tested in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia before the outbreak of war; it was then used in Poland and, finally, in the occupied territories of the USSR.

The New Order in Europe also contained Hitler's allies on approval: in addition to Italy, they were Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Albania, which had been annexed by Italy in March 1939. Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940: its place in the New Order was never secure. The theories of Hitler's philosophers of race allowed that fascist Italians might be sound ideologically, but they questioned their racial purity. The Germans had encouraged Mussolini's involvement in the Spanish Civil War so as to distract his attention from south-east Europe, where German diplomacy was becoming increasingly active. When the Italians received German military support for their failing ventures in the Balkans, it was clear that their role in the New Order could never be prominent. The day before the invasion of the USSR, Hitler dictated a long letter to Mussolini in which he said that he had never felt at ease in a partnership with Moscow. This was the first Mussolini knew of Hitler's intention and it is not known whether he felt relieved to hear that the great ideological rift in Nazi foreign policy was about to be mended at last.

On the Allied side, policy co-ordination was the key issue of British and French diplomacy: the Supreme War Council was created soon after the outbreak of the war; an agreement not to conclude a separate peace was signed in the spring of 1940. Otherwise, British and French interests were hard to reconcile. The British assumed that the war would last at least three years, and they put their faith in the effectiveness of a naval blockade. The French, on the other hand, intended to move the war as far away as possible from their border.

It was in Scandinavia that the French and the British interests promised to be reconciled and where successful diplomacy could have proved harmful to Germany's interests. Iron ore mined in northern Sweden was an important source of supply for German industries, and most of it passed through the Norwegian port of Narvik. On 16 September 1939, the British government declared that an attack on Norway would be regarded as equivalent to an attack on the UK. Various schemes for mining Norwegian territorial waters were considered in London. The context of Allied diplomacy in Scandinavia changed after the USSR started the Finnish–Soviet war on 30 November; the joint Franco-British plans to help Finland and to stop the traffic in Swedish ore came to almost nothing. The desire of the Swedish and Norwegian governments to maintain their neutrality, as well as their reluctance to provoke the Soviets, frustrated the plans of the Supreme War Council before Finnish resistance came to an end.

On 8 April 1940, the Admiralty in London announced that a minefield was being laid in Norwegian territorial waters; on 9 April, the Germans launched their Norwegian campaign, occupying Norway's principal ports, including Narvik and Oslo. The phoney war had drawn to a close: after the occupation of Norway and Denmark, the Wehrmacht turned against the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg (see FALL GELB). The French front was penetrated in the middle of May and, on 14 June, the Germans entered Paris.

British opinion did not consider the fall of France to have also been the defeat of the UK; for more than a year, however, the country would stand, with its empire, all but alone against an opponent in control of a large part of continental Europe. In the long term, the task of diplomacy was to help the UK survive the isolation; and, eventually, to break out of it. In the short term, the diplomats must try to limit the consequences of defeat.

When the Dutch C-in-C ordered his troops to resist the Germans, Lord Halifax asked the Dutch foreign minister to let the state of hostilities continue, without negotiating with the Germans. The Dutch royal family came to London, while Léopold III chose to stay in Belgium. The Belgian politicians, including Paul Henri Spaak (1899–1972), assured the foreign office on 28 May that they would also fight the war to the end. The continuity of the Dutch and Belgian governments-in-exile provided a spark of hope for the future.

About midnight on 21 June, the new French government under Pétain received the German terms. In a symbolic act, the armistice was signed in the same railway dining car, in the forest of Compiègne, in which the Germans had signed their capitulation in 1918. The threat that the UK would suffer the same fate as France came and went, as the Germans failed to invade; but after the entry of Italy into the war the policies of neutral Spain and Turkey became decisive for the British position in the Mediterranean. It was assumed in London that the Spanish leader, Franco, was looking forward to the defeat of the Allies: yet he did not want a clear-cut victory of the Axis either, because he feared that it would strengthen the position of Italy in the Mediterranean.

Late in September, it seemed that the Wehrmacht would move against Spain rather than the UK. On 23 October Hitler travelled to the Spanish border to meet Franco, who refused to make military concessions to Germany and succeeded in keeping Spain out of the war. In a conversation with Eden in May 1941, the Spanish ambassador said that, as long as the UK held Suez, Franco would resist the Germans and argue that there was little point in closing down one end of the Mediterranean while the other remained open.

The Turks, on the other hand, concluded a treaty with the UK and France on 28 September 1939. After the fall of France, they argued that they were no longer bound not to intervene in the case of aggression in the Mediterranean. They did, however, declare that they would remain non-belligerent. The British expected more of the Turks, especially after the Italian attack on Greece, launched on 28 October 1940, which began the Balkan campaign. The aim of the foreign office was to get Turkey to co-operate with Yugoslavia and go to war with Bulgaria if Bulgaria allowed the Germans to cross its territory. The British knew that the Germans would not allow the Italians to suffer defeat in Greece; and that, on 17 November, Bulgaria's King Boris (1894–1943) visited Hitler. But the Turks were not in a heroic mood, while the foreign office (though less than the prime minister) tended to understate the effect in the Balkans and the Near East of the appearance of British military weakness.

Until the end of 1941, the effort to assure the USA that the UK was worth backing in the war took the foremost place in London. Roosevelt, re-elected on 5 November 1940 for his third term as president, was resolved to keep the USA out of the war in Europe; but, equally, he did not want the UK to suffer defeat. In the UK's hour of greatest need, Churchill's relations with Roosevelt were conducted with tact and a great sureness of touch. In a letter to the president early in December 1940, the prime minister concluded that if the president was convinced ‘that the defeat of Nazi and fascist tyranny is a matter of high consequence to the people of the United States and the Western hemisphere, you will regard this letter not as an appeal for aid, but as a statement of the minimum action necessary to achieve our common purpose’. On 17 December, Roosevelt made a reference to the possibility of ‘leasing’ war material to the British. The question remained of how the UK would pay for such material: the answers were contained in the Lend-Lease Bill, introduced in the Congress on 10 January 1941. The Bill underwrote the US intention that the UK should not lose the war through the want of material means.

After Germany's entry into the Balkan campaign in April 1941, the second phase of hostilities was about to open. When the USSR and then the USA were drawn into the conflict by aggressive German and Japanese moves, the continuities between the First and the Second World Wars became clearer. The latter was, of course, concerned with the maintenance in Europe of the status quo established after the First, or with its reversal. After 22 June 1941, when the Germans invaded the USSR (see BARBAROSSA), the combination of the east and the west of Europe against its centre was renewed. There again arose the concern, in London, that the USSR might conclude a separate peace with Germany, and Stalin, after the Bolsheviks' experience of the civil war and the western powers' intervention in it, was deeply suspicious of his allies.

Though the emerging alliance against Hitler was less tied together by diplomatic conventions than had been the alliance against Germany in the First World War, much more time was spent on the design of the post-war world. One of the impulses for the special interest in the future was the presence of several governments-in-exile in London; as well as of communist émigrés in Moscow. But the main contrast between the two World Wars soon emerged. In the First, the Russian steamroller, after initial advances, was put into reverse; in the Second, the Red Army, after severe setbacks, advanced into the centre of Europe. This profoundly altered the strategic context of diplomacy in the Second World War and a new diplomatic agenda started to be drawn up.

However, the two wars remained linked, for the governments-in-exile as much as for the leaders of the Great Powers, by political memories as well as by personal connections. Ignacy Paderewski (1860–1941), who had delighted President Wilson with his accomplished interpretations of Chopin on the piano, and who became the first prime minister of Poland after the First World War, emerged again as the president of the Polish National Council in France. Władysław Sikorski, who had also taken part in the reunification of Poland, and who served a term as prime minister in 1922–3, became the head of the Polish government-in-exile in London. Edvard Beneš, who had helped Tomas Masaryk (1850–1937) achieve the recognition of Czechoslovakia by the Allies in 1918, was assisted by Masaryk's son, Jan, to overcome diplomatic hurdles during the war.

The west Europeans in London, including the Scandinavians, in the main shared in the British foreign office's assumption that the states of continental Europe would return to approximately the same position as they had occupied before the war. The east Europeans, on the other hand, believed that they must maintain strong links with the west after the end of the war. Before June 1941, General Sikorski had assumed that his country was at war with the two partitioning powers, Germany and the USSR. The Poles expected the situation of 1918 to be repeated. They believed that the USSR would have no say in the making of peace and that western influence would again prove decisive in the making of post-war order.

Whereas political refugees came to London as a result of the war in Europe, Moscow had become a centre of foreign communists between the two wars. The first wave arrived after the suppression of the regime of Béla Kun (1886–1939) in Hungary in 1919; and among the last arrivals were the leaders of the Communist Party banned in post-Munich Czechoslovakia. Though the ranks of the exiles had been depleted in Stalin's purges, those who survived played significant roles in the politics of their countries during and after the war.

The Bulgarians provided the Comintern with its secretary general, Georgi Dimitrov; among the Germans, Wilhelm Pieck came to Moscow from exile in Paris and Walter Ulbricht (1893–1973)—another member of the KPD Politburo—arrived from Prague. Ana Pauker (1893–1960), a Romanian communist, and Matyás Rákosi, a member of Béla Kun's short-lived Soviet government in Hungary, also sought asylum in Moscow. Bolesław Bierut (see Lublin Committee) came after he had been threatened with arrest in Poland; and Klement Gottwald (1896–1953) headed the last group of communist migrants, when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was banned shortly after the Munich agreement.

In an unexpected move, on 15 May 1943, the Comintern asked its member countries to dissolve the organization. Stalin distrusted international socialism, especially when he was unable to manipulate it; and he had turned to other means of exerting Soviet influence abroad, more acceptable outside the USSR than the Comintern. A few weeks after the German invasion, a Panslav congress took place in Moscow. It aimed to unite the Slavs in resistance against Hitler, and call into play political forces outside the Comintern; three similar congresses followed in Moscow, as well as a conference of American Slavs in Detroit in April 1942.

Differences between the policies of exile communities in Moscow and those in London soon emerged. Moscow for instance advocated acts of sabotage and the organization of partisan warfare at a level of intensity and sacrifice which Beneš, for one, was unwilling to allow. It was nevertheless Beneš who regarded Stalin as a person with whom the Czechoslovaks—as well as the other Allies—could do business, while virtually the whole Polish emigration resisted such an idea. The British foreign office tried hard to help the Poles come to an agreement with the USSR: after great difficulties, a treaty was signed between them on 30 July 1941.

The Soviets renounced the Nazi–Soviet Pact and its associated treaties on the insistence of the Poles, who assumed that Moscow thereby acknowledged Poland's claim to its pre-war territories in the east. General Sikorski put the matter bluntly to Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London: he said that he would not consider returning to a territorially diminished Poland after the war. In December 1941 Sikorski travelled to Moscow, for an extraordinary meeting with Stalin. At a time when the Wehrmacht had a spearhead within sight of Moscow, Stalin told the Poles, in a tense moment, ‘We will conquer Poland and we will give it back to you.’ Sikorski and Stalin signed a declaration of friendship, but Soviet–Polish relations did not prosper (see Poland, 2(e)). The policies of exiled governments, of the Poles especially, gave the British foreign office an unusual, close-up view of Soviet diplomacy. A new field of foreign relations was opened up, which became the matrix of the post-war division of Europe. Before BARBAROSSA, the foreign office had disagreed with the views of Stafford Cripps, its ambassador in Moscow. Cripps argued that the Soviets were more concerned with the possibility of the UK's constructing an anti-Soviet combination after the war than with the policies of a victorious Germany. At that time, the foreign office wanted the Soviets to remain at least neutral in Europe—as neutral to the UK, that is, as they were to Germany—and, in Asia, to renew, or continue, their assistance to China against Japanese aggression. In return, the British were prepared to recognize Soviet acquisitions in the Baltic and in other parts of Eastern Europe, and they were ready to make an offer of commodities required for the USSR's defence.

The foreign office persisted in this policy of helping the Soviets, especially after Eden succeeded Halifax as foreign secretary, and on the day BARBAROSSA was launched Churchill broadcast an offer of assistance to the Soviet Union. An agreement between the two countries was signed on 12 July 1941, and concerned the two points suggested by Stalin. It was an undertaking by the UK not to conclude an armistice except by mutual consent; and a promise to offer the USSR material support.

Early in the autumn a British delegation, headed by Lord Beaverbrook travelled to Moscow together with the Americans, led by Averell Harriman (see Three-Power conference). It did not provide Stalin with the assurance, especially in the matter of military assistance, he had expected. An unfriendly message from Stalin reached London on 11 November; it elicited the promise from the prime minister that he would travel to Moscow with military experts soon, and that the UK would declare war on Finland, Hungary, and Romania.

As far as the future of Europe was concerned, the return to the status quo in the area west of the River Rhine was never questioned in the British foreign office; it was the future of Germany, and of the territory lying between Germany and the USSR, that came under review. As early as November 1940, a ‘confederation’ between Poland and Czechoslovakia was declared under the sponsorship of the foreign office; it was further explained in January 1942. In July 1941, Sikorski told Eden that the Yugoslav leaders favoured the creation of two federal blocks; one was to be grouped around Poland, the other around Yugoslavia. The Greeks in London were also in touch with the Yugoslavs on the possibility of forming a union in the Balkans.

As the alliance against Hitler broadened, the scope for diplomatic activity became less. In the Far East, as China began to drift into civil war, the Americans went on the offensive against the Japanese in the Pacific; the British and the Americans—with French and Polish assistance—fought the North African and Italian campaigns but all the Allies (except China) became equally engaged only in Europe north of the Alps. It was there that the Big Three showed they had more power at their disposal than any combination in history. Confronted with this Grand Alliance, Goebbels's propaganda transformed the idea of the New Order in Europe into the concept of Festung Europa.

While the future of Europe moved to the top of Allied diplomatic agenda, the strategic context of the main agenda item changed. Beneš, sensitive as ever to the underlying shifts of diplomacy, visited Washington in May 1943, so as to secure Roosevelt's support for a new and comprehensive treaty between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. Beneš described Stalin as a benign leader, anxious to reform his country; the president thought the view novel and acceptable, and hinted that the treaty could be a model for similar treaties for countries bordering the Soviet Union. The British foreign office was more reserved about the idea: Eden suggested that the Czechoslovak treaty would put the Poles at a disadvantage in their relations with Moscow.

Late in the autumn of 1943, Beneš travelled to Moscow. He was open with the Soviets, and gave Stalin a valuable second opinion on the intentions of the Allied leaders. He assured Molotov that the British government had agreed to the expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia, and that all German property there would be confiscated and nationalized. He opened up the perspective before Stalin of an alignment between social and national revolution, not only in Czechoslovakia but in other countries of eastern Europe as well. He suggested that the new Polish prime minister, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, was the Polish leader most likely to come to terms with the Soviets and told Stalin how important it was that the USSR should share in the occupation of Hungary.

Meanwhile, in London, the concern, with the changing balance of power in Europe grew. On 9 September 1944, five days after the landing of the British expedition to Greece, Churchill arrived in Moscow for the TOLSTOY conference to discover Stalin's plans for eastern Europe. He offered to bring Mikołajczyk and his foreign minister, Tadeusz Romer, to Moscow at short notice. They landed at Moscow airport in the evening of 12 October, Mikołajczyk making the long trip for the second time in ten weeks. He still feared the incorporation of Poland into the USSR, and was uncertain about Polish frontiers. The need to resist Hitler had united the Poles; now, the emergence of a powerful USSR started cruelly to divide them.

Stalin helped to advance the interests of the Poles in Moscow, though he neither liked nor trusted them; and most of them were survivors of a party decimated in his purges. The defeat of the Warsaw rising had put the London Poles into a weak position, though Mikołajczk kept on refusing to give up the eastern territories of Poland, beyond the Curzon Line (see Polish–Soviet frontier). After Churchill and the Polish delegation left in October 1944, Stalin was compelled to rely on the Polish team in Moscow.

Stalin regarded the British plans, outside the unresolved Polish question, as being out of touch with reality. As far as he was concerned, Churchill's plan for a Danubian federation, or for a second German state based on Vienna, belonged to the same category of vague aspirations as did the earlier federal plans considered by the Polish, Yugoslav, Greek, and Czechoslovak politicians in London. Churchill had suggested that Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary should form a group which would become a customs union. Stalin replied that the eastern peoples would first want to build up their national life, without restricting their rights by combining with others.

In the concluding phase of the war, diplomacy tended to be transacted at the very top of the Allied hierarchy. Meetings of the Big Three in particular exercised magnetic power over diplomatic business. Items such as the definition of war aims, proposals for the organization of post-war security in Europe, the design for an international organization (see San Francisco conference), were often handed down to specialized committees and came to occupy most of the time of the diplomats. Chance remarks of the Allied leaders sometimes tended to assume the quality of self-fulfilling prophecies. At the Yalta conference in February 1945 (see ARGONAUT), Roosevelt suggested that the military zones of occupation might be the first step to the dismemberment of Germany: as they indeed proved to be.

In any case, Europe was being divided in other ways. The Allied Control Commissions in the liberated areas of Europe caused new disputes, in which military and diplomatic concerns overlapped. In Italy, Soviet delegates on the commission complained of being downgraded to the status of observers. In Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, on the other hand, western missions came to occupy similar positions. Nevertheless, when on 19 January 1945 the head of the US mission to Bulgaria learned, in a roundabout way, of the agreement between Churchill and Stalin on the division of influence on Bulgaria, he was convinced that the Soviets were in fact being more generous to his mission than they were obliged to be.

Moscow's aim was to break the power of the conservative military and bureaucratic élites in the defeated countries of south-eastern Europe; the power, that is, of the men who had brought those countries to side with Germany in the war. Western officers on the Allied Control Commissions found it hard to understand the extent of the upheaval brought to the region by German ascendancy. In opposition to the growing Soviet influence, they found their friends and informants among the people who were committed to the anti-communist cause. As early as the summer of 1944, the US state department was in possession of a great deal of information, from local sources in south-eastern Europe, concerning the Soviet threat to the region. It seems that the last great campaign by Goebbels's propaganda machine, which focused on the growing rift between the western Allies and the Soviet Union, made its mark.

At the time of the meeting of the Big Three at Yalta, the western partners held different views on the future uses of Soviet military power. Roosevelt assumed that the USSR had no imperial ambitions, while Churchill's view was less sanguine. He believed that Stalin not only planned expansion: he had opted for the tsarist form of imperialism. The terms of Soviet entry into the war against Japan were settled by Roosevelt alone with the Soviets; and, indeed, one of the conditions concerned the restoration of the rights lost by Russia at the Treaty of Portsmouth, on the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. Roosevelt's other omphalic concern was the establishment of a world security organization, and it helped to explain why he was less concerned than Churchill about the extension of the Soviet influence to the small states of eastern Europe. Roosevelt believed that they would find safety inside the new organization; just as the peacemakers after the First World War had assumed that the minorities in central and east Europe would be safe in the care of the League of Nations.

It was easier to make a general agreement on reparations at Yalta—awarding the USSR half of the German liability—than it was to come to specific terms on Poland. An accord was reached on the Provisional Government of National Unity, committed to hold general elections soon. The eastern frontier of the new Poland was fixed to run along the Curzon Line, while the question of the western border was left open, with a reference to ‘substantial accessions of territory in the north and west’ (see Oder–Neisse Line). The Polish government in London, on learning of the terms, described them as the fifth partition of Poland.

Late in June 1945, the Moscow commission succeeded in cobbling together a compromise cabinet, with Bierut at its head, to rule the new Poland. This was long after Stalin's suggestion that the model of Yugoslavia could be used for Poland had ignited Churchill's anger. Tito had marginalized the six members of the Yugoslav government who had come from London, including Ivan Subaš, the leader of the Croat Peasant Party. Churchill believed that Stalin had disregarded the fifty–fifty agreement on Yugoslavia that they had made at the TOLSTOY conference and that Tito was well on the way to a dictatorship.

After Roosevelt's death on 12 April and Churchill's electoral defeat in the summer, Stalin was the last survivor of the Big Three at the Potsdam conference in July 1945 (see TERMINAL). President Truman had initially thought that he could come to terms with Stalin, and that he should not side with the UK against the Soviets, before other voices from the state department started reaching him. The agreement at Potsdam recommended the application of the principles of the UN Charter to post-war problems, and attempted to prevent Germany from ever again becoming a threat to world peace. The Oder–Neisse line became the western border of Poland; and provisions were made for the creation of the Council of Foreign Ministers and for the conclusion of peace treaties with the former enemy states, Italy, Bulgaria, Finland, and Romania. Finally, Article XIII recognized that the transfer of German minorities from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary would have to be carried out. By then, many of the Volksdeutsche from eastern Europe had been on the move for a long time (see demography and deportations).

Clement Attlee knew even less about the development of the atomic bomb than did Stalin: it had been first tested successfully before the Potsdam meeting, and exploded over Hiroshima a week after its conclusion. Truman casually mentioned to Stalin at Potsdam that a weapon of unusual force had been developed: Churchill was certain that Stalin had no idea of the significance of the president's remark. At Potsdam, a new era of diplomacy opened.

Z. A. B. Zeman

Bibliography

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Zeman, Z. A. B. , The Making and Breaking of Communist Europe (Oxford, 1991).