Sadly, it soon became clear that Stalin would agree to anything, but would never keep his word. Soviet Communism had a clear goal of dominating eastern European nations, and would never allow them the civil rights and personal freedoms which the Yalta plan envisioned. For people in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia, the end of the war simply meant exchanging the inhumane oppression of the Nazis for the inhumane oppression of Soviet Communism.
Roosevelt desperately wanted the conference to succeed, and spent a great deal of effort to organize it, and to travel thousands of miles, even when his own personal health was very shaky.
So why did Roosevelt risk his life by traveling halfway around the world? His chief goals were twofold: to persuade Stalin to enter the Pacific war, which he hoped would avert the bloodshed of an invasion of the Japanese home islands and to persuade Stalin to join the United Nations.
These two goals, as reported by The Washington Times, motivated Roosevelt. On paper, he would succeed; but in reality, Stalin would not be of much help in the Pacific, and he would join the United Nations only to subvert it, not to promote it.
To achieve the first goal, Roosevelt blithely granted Stalin control of wide swaths of territory that by rights should have gone to his “ally,” Chiang Kai-shek of China. As for the Poles, FDR agreed to huge slices being taken off both its east and western borders.
Although Roosevelt had noble intentions, his desire clouded his judgment. He gave away too much, and got only false promises in return. Harvard’s Professor Plokhy writes that Churchill and Roosevelt both agreed
to redraw international borders and forcibly resettle millions of people without consulting the governments and nations involved.
Perhaps Roosevelt and Churchill couldn’t really believe that Soviet Communism was as savage as it actually was. For example, a Soviet soldier captured by the enemy was treated by the Soviets as a deserter, not a prisoner of war: and the punishment for deserting was death. The Washington Times continues:
One of the more cynical - and bloody - concessions to Stalin was the forcible return to the USSR of Red Army soldiers taken captive by the Germans, and hordes of displaced civilians. To Stalin, capture was akin to treason, and soldiers knew they faced imprisonment or death when returned; Hundreds chose suicide rather than return.
Although a historic moment, the Yalta conference was ultimately a failure: it created no safety and no freedom for the people in the post-war world. But it taught us an important lesson: free societies cannot enter into good-faith negotiations with totalitarian dictatorships.
