The Second Front: The Americans Join In
Lavrov's questionable argument, which linked energy policy with the history of the Second World War, appears less strange if one considers the interplay of two similar factors in the speech given by President George W.
Bush in Riga on 6 May 2005. Bush entered the East European historical debate head on, placing the legacy of the Yalta agreements within the broader context of the progress of freedom throughout the world and American support for democracy in countries ranging from former Soviet republics to Iraq, the latter occupied by American troops. As Bush presented it, democracy was the link between America's policy in Eastern Europe after the Second World War and its policy in the oil-rich Middle East. But this is the only parallel that one might draw between the Russian and American positions on the significance of the Yalta decisions.As he accepted Vladimir Putin's invitation to attend the VE Day celebrations in Moscow and encouraged others, such as President Vike-Freiberga of Latvia, to do likewise, Bush decided to take the opportunity to visit not only Russia but also Latvia and Georgia, two former Soviet republics whose recent relations with Russia were far from smooth. The message was clear. Although the U.S. administration cared about maintaining good relations with Russia, it was not relinquishing its support of democratic processes in former Soviet republics struggling to escape the Russian sphere of influence. In Latvia Bush apparently felt obliged to take a stand on the legacy of the Yalta Conference, given the prolonged debate in that country on the history of Russo-Latvian relations during and after the Second World War. Referring to the conference in his Riga speech, Bush deliberately took the East European side in the ongoing debate. Indeed, he showed his readiness to go further than any of his predecessors in acknowledging American complicity in the Yalta division of Europe.
'As we mark a victory of six days ago - six decades ago, we are mindful of a paradox,' stated Bush. 'For much of Germany, defeat led to freedom. For much of Eastern and Central Europe, victory brought the iron rule of another empire. VE Day marked the end of fascism, but it did not end oppression. The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.'19
A U.S. administration official later revealed that the Yalta remark was intended as an invitation for Putin to apologize for the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact. If that was indeed the case, then the White House speechwriters clearly miscalculated, for the remark did nothing to change Russia's position on the issue. Bush certainly scored points with leaders of the 'new Europe,' but he also created unexpected problems for his administration at home. The speech reignited the old debate between Republicans and Democrats over the role of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in what his critics called the 'sellout' of Eastern Europe to Joseph Stalin. Conservative journalists and commentators such as Pat Buchanan and Anne Applebaum praised Bush's remarks as a long overdue recognition of the 'awful truth,' while liberals, represented by a number of historians of American foreign policy and the Cold War, accused the Republicans of reviving the spirit of Joseph McCarthy. The Democrats maintained that the Yalta Conference had done little more than recognize the reality on the ground, given that by the time of the Crimean summit Stalin had already gained control of Eastern Europe.20
The Riga speech was by no means the first public statement in which President Bush criticized the Yalta agreements.
He had done so on previous occasions as well, always expressing his criticism in remarks addressed to East European audiences. Those remarks were apparently designed to placate allies of the United States in the new Europe, demonstrating American concern about the consequences of an event crucial to their history. They were also aimed at President Putin, encouraging him to be more honest in his assessment of the role played by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. In the past, Bush's criticism of the Yalta agreements had failed to convince Putin to alter Russia's official interpretation of the event, but it was clearly appreciated by the East European elites.When it comes to American discourse on Yalta, Bush's critique did not follow in the footsteps of Joseph McCarthy, as claimed by his Democratic critics, but it echoed statements made by leading figures in President Bill Clinton's administration. In March 1999 Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the daughter of a former Czechoslovak diplomat who escaped to the West after the communist takeover, stated to representatives of East European governments: 'Never again will your fates be tossed around like poker chips on a bargaining table.' In fact, Albright was developing an argument made earlier by her deputy and Clinton's classmate Strobe Talbott. 'After World War II,' remarked Talbott in May 1997, 'many countries in the east suffered half a century under the shadow of Yalta. That is a place name that has come to be a codeword for the cynical sacrifice of small nations' freedom to great powers' spheres of influence, just as Versailles has come to signify a short-sighted, punitive, and humiliating peace that sows the seeds of future war.'21
Why, then, were the liberal opponents of President Bush so critical of his Riga speech? Leaving aside the political dynamics of May 2005, it should be noted that Bush was much more explicit in his critique of the Yalta agreements than his Democratic predecessors, especially as he compared Yalta not to Versailles but to Munich and the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact. In so doing, he indeed revived some of the ghosts of the McCarthy era.
'The Munich Called Yalta' was the title of a chapter contributed by William H. Chamberlin to a book published in 1950 that criticized American diplomacy for appeasing Stalin and sacrificing the independence of Poland and the national interests of China.22 By contrast, the comparison with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a new addition to the decades-old controversy introduced by the author of the Riga speech, the presidential assistant Michael Gerson.23 It seemed appropriate to mention the division of Europe between Germany and the USSR in 1939 in a speech made in Latvia, where the memory of the Hitler-Stalin deal is alive and well more than sixty-five years after the event, and where every schoolchild knows that at Yalta Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to Soviet territorial acquisitions based on that pact. Not so in the United States. By drawing attention to the connection between the pact and the Yalta agreements, Bush opened the door to possible comparisons of FDR not only with Neville Chamberlain but also with Hitler and Stalin. More than anything else, it was that sacrilegious suggestion that provoked attacks on the administration from the belligerent Democrats - attacks that the White House had not expected and would have preferred to avoid.What were the arguments on both sides of the Yalta debate in the United States? It would appear that the opposing parties contributed very little new material to the debate that reached its climax in the 1950s and 1960s. On the Democratic side, the old arguments were summarized and reiterated by a participant in the academic debates of the 1960s, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. In his commentary on Bush's Riga speech, he stated that the president 'is under the delusion that tougher diplomacy might have preserved the freedom of small European nations.' Schlesinger rebuffed that thesis, stating that 'it was the deployment of armies, not negotiated concessions, that caused the division of Europe.' He reminded his readers that at the time of the Yalta Conference Eastern Europe was already occupied by the Red Army, and conflict with the USSR was inconceivable as long as the war with Japan was still going on.
Among the achievements of the Yalta Conference, Schlesinger listed Stalin's promise to enter the war with Japan at a time when 'the atom bomb seemed to be a fantasy dreamed up by nuclear physicists,' and FDR's success in making Stalin sign the Declaration on Liberated Europe, which obliged the Soviets to conduct free elections in the countries of Eastern Europe that they occupied.24 Jacob Heilbrunn, writing in the Los Angeles Times, put forward another important argument in favor of Yalta that Schlesinger had overlooked. He claimed that refusing to make a deal with Stalin on Eastern Europe 'would have seriously jeopardized the common battle against Germany.'25The defenders of Bush's Riga speech did not, of course, argue that the West should have gone to war with the Soviet Union, jeopardized the victory over Hitler, or impeded the war effort in the Pacific. Their argument, like the reasoning of their opponents, was deeply rooted in formulas developed in the political and scholarly debates of the 1950s and 1960s. Pat Buchanan, for example, titled his article on the issue 'Was WWII Worth It? For Stalin, Yes,' echoing the title of the chapter 'Stalin's Greatest Victory' in Chester Wilmot's book The Struggle for Europe (1952).26 Buchanan juxtaposed Putin's rhetoric about the Soviet liberation of eleven countries with Bush's admission that many of the European countries liberated from fascism found themselves under another form of oppression as a result of the agreements reached at Yalta. Siding with Bush, Buchanan accused FDR and Churchill of selling out Eastern Europe to one of history's deadliest tyrants, Joseph Stalin. Following in the footsteps of prewar American isolationists, he also questioned the rationale behind American involvement in a war that took fifty million lives. Echoes of the earlier debates were also to be heard in the National Review editorial 'Yalta Regrets,' which stated that the United States could have won the war against Japan without Soviet participation.27
Anne Applebaum, on the other hand, added some new emphases to the old theme as she attacked 'a small crew of liberal historians and Rooseveltians' who claimed that 'Yalta was a recognition of reality rather than a sellout.' 'Their charges,' according to Applebaum, 'ignore the breadth of the agreement - was it really necessary to agree to deport thousands of expatriate Russians back to certain death in the Soviet Union? - as well as the fact that Yalta and the other wartime agreements went beyond mere recognition of Soviet occupation and conferred legality and international acceptance on new borders and political structures.' The new element in this conservative argument was the conviction with which the author spoke about Stalin's crimes and the complicity of the Western powers in them.
Applebaum, who has written an acclaimed book on the Gulag based on archival materials that became available after the collapse of the USSR, knew exactly what she was talking about when she wrote of the 'certain death' awaiting former Soviet citizens shipped back to the USSR by the American and British military. 'The tone was right,' stated Applebaum with regard to Bush's speech, 'and it contrasted sharply with the behavior of Russian president Vladimir Putin, as perhaps it was intended to. Asked again last week why he hadn't made his own apology for the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, Putin pointed out that the Soviet parliament did so in 1989. "What," he asked, "we have to do this every day, every year?"'28