Conclusions
It has become a cliche to state that all politics are local. It is more controversial to state that all historical debates are parochial or are determined by local (national) agendas, traditions, fears, and complexes.
The recent Yalta debate, despite its international scope, seems to support the second proposition as much as the first. Remembering, forgetting, and (re)interpreting the Yalta Conference during the winter and spring of 2005 turned out to be a process fuelled as much by national historiographic traditions as by current perceptions of national interests. Nevertheless, the recent Yalta debate allows one to draw some preliminary conclusions of a more general nature, as it sheds light on the interrelation between historical memory and international politics in a dialogue involving great powers and smaller states dependent on their protection. One such conclusion is that if the victims of Yalta stood united in their negative assessment of the Yalta accords, the victors' assessments of the agreements varied by political camp. It has been said that victors are not judged. The debates of 2005 in the United States and Russia show that they are judged not only by others but also by themselves.For the East Europeans, the anniversary was a chance to express their indignation about an event that had remained at the core of their historical memory and identity for the last sixty years. They could finally begin the process of healing their historical traumas by presenting a list of grievances to the main perpetrator, Russia, and its Yalta accomplices. It seems quite clear that for most of the Polish and Baltic elites, remembering Yalta was necessary not only to recover historical facts suppressed by the communist regimes but also to ensure international recognition of the trauma suffered by the East European nations after the end of the Second World War.
The first of these tasks was achieved immediately before and after the collapse of communism, with the consequent delegitimization of the Russocentric communist historical narrative. It was now time to achieve the second goal. By commemorating Yalta in 2005, the East European elites were once again parting ways with their nations' communist past and dependence on Russia - but they were now doing so on the international scene. As the countries of Eastern Europe were admitted to NATO and the European Union, it became safer for them to air their historical grievances against Moscow in the international arena. As the new Russia's activity in the region increased with the start of the new millennium, while a new generation of East European citizens who had never witnessed communist or Soviet domination of their countries came of age, it also became useful for domestic and international reasons alike to remind the world about the trauma of Yalta. As the East Europeans saw it, the new generation should not forget the lessons of the past, while the West should not repeat the errors of Yalta by allowing Russia a special role in Eastern Europe.No country in the region was more interested in delivering this message to the world than Ukraine, which had just emerged from the drama of the Orange Revolution, in which it rejected Russian interference in its internal affairs. While the new Ukrainian government would have preferred to side with its Polish and Baltic colleagues in unreservedly condemning the Yalta agreements, it had to beware of the lack of consensus on the significance of the Second World War within its own political elite. Remaining pro-Soviet sentiment in the country's eastern regions, as well as the still influential communist opposition in parliament, drastically limited the new government's options with regard to public remembrance of the end of the Second World War. The Ukrainian public debate on the legacy of the Yalta Conference was influenced not only by political dynamics after the Orange Revolution but also by international considerations.
None was more important than the issue of Ukraine's borders. While sharing the criticism of Yalta expressed by its western neighbours, the Ukrainian intellectual elites could not fully condemn the conference that had made their country a founder of the United Nations and provided international legitimacy for its western borders. Thus in the Ukrainian media the border question was discussed in the context of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact but not in that of the Yalta agreements. The sensitivity of the border issue helps explain Ukraine's reluctance to take advantage of the anniversary to raise its international profile: at Yalta the Big Three had made not only Poland but also Ukraine complicit in Stalin's division of Europe. As a result of the Yalta decisions, Ukraine obtained lands that did not belong to it before the war, although they were largely settled by ethnic Ukrainians. A new nation that could be considered both a beneficiary and a victim of Yalta, Ukraine, as represented by its government, preferred to 'forget' so important an event in its history as the Yalta Conference.What about the other beneficiaries of Yalta? No country seems more entrapped by the Yalta decisions and the legacy of Stalinism than the Russian Federation. Faced with actual and potential claims against its Yalta booty and post-Yalta policies on the part of Germany, Japan, Poland, and the Baltic states, the Russian leadership is as far today as it has ever been from issuing a public apology for the 'crimes of Yalta.' Russian imperial pride is one reason why President Bush's invitation to President Putin to apologize for the wrongs done to Russia's neighbours has elicited no positive response and will not do so in the immediate future. For the Russian elites, Yalta remains a symbol of their country's glory, reminding them of Moscow's former status as the capital of a superpower rivalled only by the United States. The nostalgic communists continue to see the Yalta decisions as proof of the triumph of communism and the greatness of the communist dictator Joseph Stalin.
Only the liberals, now weak and marginalized - an echo of the once powerful popular movement of the Gorbachev and early Yeltsin years - remain critical of both the Stalinist legacy and Russia's continuing imperial ambitions.All Russian political forces, from nationalists to liberals, approached the Yalta and VE Day anniversaries with their own hopes and political agendas. The ruling elites wanted to raise and embellish Russia's international image by reminding the world of its leading role in defeating fascism. The Russian conservatives complained about the post-Cold War world, rife with unpredictability and danger now that it was no longer held in check by Yalta-type agreements. In the eyes of Russian diplomats, the solution to the world's new insecurities was quite simple: it would suffice to recognize the territories of the former Soviet Union as a zone of Russian responsibility. Russian liberals expected the collapse of the unjust Yalta arrangements to lead to the complete elimination of the Iron Curtain and make Russia a full member of the club of European nations. None of these scenarios materialized, and the negative reaction to the Moscow celebrations in East Central Europe dashed the hopes of Russian conservatives and liberals alike. This failure should not obscure the general trend in the evolution of Russian collective memory since the collapse of the USSR. As the loss of empire becomes more obvious to the Russian elites and society at large, and former clients adopt more independent policies towards Moscow, official Russia becomes less inclined to issue apologies for crimes and injustices perpetrated against the empire's former subjects. On the contrary, it becomes more aggressive both in the interpretation of its historical role in the region and in the pursuit of its current policies there.
Only the United States rose to the occasion when in the words of its president it condemned the Yalta agreements, placing them in the same category as the Munich appeasement and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Unlike Russia, the United States is prepared to admit its historical error for the sake of building better relations with the countries of the region. President Bush's remarks about Yalta are an interesting case of the use and abuse of history on the international scene. There is little doubt that they were not intended mainly for a domestic audience. Bush appears to have had at least two goals in mind. The first was to support the countries of the new Europe that showed loyalty to the United States and embarrass President Putin, who was in no psychological, political, or economic position to afford a similar admission of guilt. The second was to legitimize his war in Iraq and his policy in the Middle East by pledging never again to abandon support for freedom and democracy - the latter being the major theme of his discourse on Iraq. The president's use of the Yalta anniversary to recognize America's past errors, while promoting his new international agenda, did not sit well with critics of his administration in the United States. Enraged by the comparison of the Yalta agreements to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (a mere recognition that, in the Baltic states at least, the Yalta decisions ratified the borders established by the Stalin-Hitler agreement of 1939), the Democrats rose instinctively to the defence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic president revered even by Ronald Reagan. The Yalta debate in the United States itself demonstrated once again the predominance of the national over the international perspective in the collective memory of the world's only remaining superpower.Nevertheless, it would appear that the United States is winning not only the geopolitical competition with Russia in its East European backyard but also the historical debate. The ideas of freedom and democracy, which lie at the core of the master narrative of American history, are well suited to the requirements of past and present American policy in the region and find support and understanding on the part of the East European 'losers' of Yalta.
As the tone of the Yalta debate in Poland demonstrates, the ideas of liberty and independence remain central elements of the Polish historical narrative and national self-image. They coexist with the tradition of depicting Poland as a quintessential victim of Russia and other world powers from the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the second half of the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth. In the East European countries discussed in this chapter, only the Ukrainian elite ended up sitting on the fence, in complete accordance with a popular historiographic paradigm of Ukraine as a country positioned on the civilizational divide between East and West, democracy and authoritarianism.In the case of Russia, its historical narrative lost its universal appeal with the collapse of communism. It is no longer possible to justify the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe either by the interests of world communism or by those of the toiling masses of the East European countries. The Pan-Slavic idea, employed by Stalin during and immediately after the Second World War, has also lost its appeal. The idea of Russia's great-power status, which works at home, can only frighten the western neighbours of the new Russia. Thus, as was the case during the Yalta Conference, Moscow sought in 2005 to find common ground with the West and its former republics and dependencies by appealing to Russia's role in the struggle against Nazi Germany and the liberation of Eastern Europe from fascist rule. While the anti-Hitler theme clearly worked and apparently has a future, the 'liberation' motif clearly backfired, since it opened Russia to attack by all those who were enslaved by communism after having been liberated from fascism. The only way for Russia to change the dynamic of the historical debate would have been to offer sincere apologies to the victims of the Yalta agreements. Moscow had missed one more chance to improve its image abroad and its relations with its western neighbours.