The Long Shadow of 'Uncle Joe'

Putin was certainly in no mood for apologies during the Moscow cele­brations of VE Day, and Bush did not insist on them. He stated in his remarks about his Moscow visit that he was dealing with a friend.

During the first half of 2005, the decisions adopted by the Yalta Con­ference were discussed by the Russian media in a number of contexts, including the long-term implications of the disintegration of the inter­national system created at that conference. On the eve of the Yalta com­memorations, the Russian state-run news agency Novosti released an interview with Valentin Falin, the former head of the international department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The veteran of Soviet diplomacy declared the Yalta agreements to be the best chance the world had ever had to end the threat of war. Falin interpreted attacks on the agreement as denuncia­tions of the legacy of President Roosevelt, whom he held in the highest regard. Quoting from Edward R. Stettinius's memoirs of the Yalta Con­ference, Falin rejected the assumption that Stalin, whom President Roosevelt almost affectionately called 'Uncle Joe,' had outmanoeuvred his American counterpart at Yalta. He noted that both the idea for the creation of the United Nations Organization and the final communique on the conference were conceived by the Americans. Falin held Presi­dent Harry Truman responsible for the failure of the Yalta agreements and the beginning of the Cold War. By reiterating that traditional Soviet-era view, Falin was in effect sending a new message to critics of Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe: if you do not like Yalta, address your grievances to the United States.

When asked specifically about the partition of Europe into spheres of influence, Falin first tried to dodge the question; when it was repeated, he used Soviet-era arguments to present Soviet actions at the conference in the best possible light. He rejected the interviewer's suggestion that any spheres of interest had been established at Yalta. Following Stalin's argument of 1945, Falin stated that the Curzon Line, which became the basis of the new border between Poland and the USSR, had been drawn not by the Russians but by the leaders of the United States, Britain, and France in 1919 on the basis of ethnographic maps. Answering a ques­tion about the Baltic states, Falin reminded his audience that they had been cut off from Soviet Russia during the revolution by pro-German governments and used by the West as a base for intervention against Russia. The United States, according to Falin, did not care about the independence of the Baltic countries as long as they supported the White government of Admiral Kolchak, and Roosevelt had opposed the inclusion of the Baltic states in the USSR only because he did not want to lose the votes of Baltic immigrants in the USA.³⁰ Falin clearly believed that Russia had nothing for which to apologize in rela­tion to the Yalta decisions. That was also the opinion of Vadim Trukh- achev, who commented in Pravda on an article by the Polish journalist Marek Ostrowski, noting that the latter had failed to mention that it was thanks to the insistence of the USSR that Poland had acquired its post­war western and northern territories.³¹

The Russian liberal press remained largely silent on the issue of Yalta in February 2005, when it was at the centre of controversy in Eastern Europe. Yalta reemerged in Russian public discourse only in April 2005 within the context of a broader debate on Stalin's role in Russian history. The debate had begun in the late 1980s with the onset of glasnost. It orig­inally focused on the crimes committed by the Stalin regime but acquired new characteristics in the 1990s with the rise of Russian nation­alism.

The authors of the appeal, who included Oleg Basilashvili, Alek­sandr Gelman, Daniil Granin, Oleg Tabakov, and the 'grandfather of perestroika,' Aleksandr Yakovlev, regarded Tsereteli's depiction of the Big Three as an attempt to build a monument to Stalin and as a step towards his political rehabilitation in Russia. 'For the first time since the revelation of Stalin's crimes against humanity,' wrote the authors of the appeal, 'an attempt is being made in our country to put up a monu­ment to him, and that on the sacred occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of Victory, which would have cost our nation considerably fewer vic­tims had it not been for Stalin's "purges" of military cadres and his glaring miscalculations in policy and strategy.'³⁴ The statement was a direct response to those in the Russian nationalist camp and among the public at large who often cite Stalin's contribution to the victory over Nazi Germany as the main argument for his rehabilitation.

The Stalin controversy and the approaching celebrations of VE Day finally brought the question of the Yalta Conference and the historical responsibility of the USSR (and, by extension, Russia) for its decisions to the attention of Russian liberals, giving them a legitimate voice in a discussion earlier dominated by officialdom. On 3 April 2005 Vladimir Pozner, the host of the popular Russian television program Vremena (Times), asked a guest: who was to be credited with victory in the Great Patriotic war, Stalin or the people? The guest refused to distin­guish between the two, and Pozner was later criticized by Russian nationalists for trying to separate Stalin and the state from the peo- ple.³⁵ But the liberals were not silenced. Writing in Izvestiia in late April 2005, Fedor Lukianov noted the danger of associating the end of the Second World War with the victory of the Russian state. He wrote: 'But if that war is understood not as a heroic feat of the nation but as the political triumph of the Russian state, then we fall into a trap. One would then have to argue, foaming at the mouth, that Stalin acted as he should have done, the pact of 1939 was in accord with international law, and Yalta brought democracy to Eastern Europe.'³⁶ Writing after the VE Day celebrations in Moscow, Viktor Sheinis, a member of the liberal Yabloko Party, stated that at Yalta the Western leaders had approved the territorial acquisitions obtained by Stalin according to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Those decisions blocked the progress of democracy in Eastern Europe for more than forty years, and it should come as no surprise that the East Europeans regarded Yalta as another

Munich and refused to participate in the VE Day celebrations in Mos­cow. In Sheinis's opinion, 'If one is to show respect for Churchill, who understood earlier than others what a mess Stalin's Western allies had made, then I would depict him not in a chair on the Crimean shore but at the rostrum in Fulton. But such a monument should not, of course, be erected at Yalta.'³⁷