Yalta: The Price of Peace (review)

Whatever the shrill voices of believers in conspiracy, the Yalta Conference decisions have long been understood by historians as the logical, if unsatisfying, conclusion of military events and high politics during the Second World War. Did Franklin Roosevelt suddenly “sell out” Eastern Europe in mistaken efforts to create a long-term cooperative relationship with the Soviet Union? Did Winston Churchill fight in vain to save Eastern Europe from Soviet domination? Did Iosif Stalin pull the wool over the eyes of an ailing Roosevelt and his “loyal lieutenant”?

Plokhy’s study of the conference supplants Diane Shaver Clemens’s Yalta, published by Oxford University Press forty years ago. Others have skirted the edges with different interpretive conclusions, but none have approached Plokhy’s detailed retelling of both specifics and atmospherics. He brings more to the table than just detail. He captures the complex personal and political dynamic between the Big Three leaders. Using the snippets of new documentation coming out of the Presidential Archive (former Politburo Archive) in Moscow, he offers an intelligent and persuasive analysis of why Stalin acted. His analysis of Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s motives makes eminent sense.

Plokhy’s balanced and plausible portrait of Stalin is the book’s most important contribution. Stalin comes across as implacable in his quest to gain control in Eastern Europe, specifically Poland. How that would be done, and how that control would be exercised, were subsidiary issues. The security of the Soviet state, in Stalin’s view, depended on firm control—this was his absolute sine qua non. If Churchill’s federated Europe and Roosevelt’s great-power system depended on Poland’s being “free” in the sense of non-Soviet, then the Cold War was inevitable.

Plokhy writes well. The book is long and detailed, but a good read. He has a sharp eye for clever anecdotes. That praise earned, two cautions should be noted: First, no matter how many caveats Plokhy offers, and no matter how many times he denies accepting the great Yalta myth—that it was the definitive conference that created the postwar world—so tightly focused a study of the famous meeting does in fact tend to reinforce the myth. Although Plokhy summarizes the background for each of his thirty-odd chapters, those excursions stand alone, never pulled together to present a cohesive and comprehensive lead up to Yalta. This is not so much a criticism as a warning—a caveat lector. The book is so comprehensive about Yalta that you will think it explains how the postwar world came about. It does not, and cannot. The Polish question is an example.

Conflicts over Polish boundaries and governance likely caused the outbreak of the Cold War. If a historian of that era needs to get anything correct and in context, it is the Polish question. Plokhy’s all-too sketchy discussions of the Teheran Conference (which was to Yalta as the Old Testament is to the New) does get right that Churchill proposed and Roosevelt agreed to move Poland westward. Yet in the two longer chapters on the Yalta talks about Poland, that foundational commitment seems nearly forgotten. From the evening when Churchill moved his matchsticks in what he called the parade maneuver “left close,” Poland’s borders were determined, regardless of the ancillary details about which branch of the Oder River. Nor could any Polish government win an election without repudiating those new eastern and western boundaries. End of story. Plokhy recognizes that Churchill and Roosevelt sought cosmetics—a “decent-looking agreement”—yet he still treats the meaningless discussions over Poland as if they were serious. Once again we end up with an image of Yalta as definitive, which it surely was not.

The second caution is that no book that touches on high policy during World War II should be published today without reference to the new findings coming out of Soviet-era documents in the Russian archives, particularly the Presidential Archive. Plokhy is a native speaker of Russian and seems to cite the...