To Make the World Safe for Communism
The photo is iconic: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin, leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — the “Big Three” — slumped carelessly side by side in chairs atop ornate Persian rugs at the former imperial Russian palace in Crimea. Flanked by lesser dignitaries and military brass, they met in February 1945 at the Yalta Conference to negotiate an end to World War II in Europe.
“Had the Yalta Conference been held before the presidential elections of 1944, Mr. Roosevelt would not have been reelected, because of the votes of Americans linked by blood to those nations which had been ‘sold down the river,’” wrote Arthur Bliss Lane in his 1948 exposé I Saw Poland Betrayed. Lane resigned his position as American ambassador to that unfortunate country in protest of the sellout, calling Yalta the “deathblow to Poland’s hopes” for independence.
Indeed, Stalin walked away from the conference with such monumental concessions that Americans should have scratched their heads at FDR’s and Churchill’s rallying wartime appeals to rid the world of Nazi socialism and Italian fascism. Apparently, Soviet communism wasn’t so bad; Stalin’s Western allies ceded dominance of Eastern Europe and crucial ports and infrastructure to the man whose name was synonymous with terroristic purges, gulag labor camps, and government-induced famine.
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