Stalin's Legacy

[TimM]

Yes, but it was agreed that eventually, the Allies would pull out and let Europe chart its own course.  Stalin double crossed the U.S. and Britain, and Eastern Europe paid the price

[Constantinople]

Basically Russia occupied most of Eastern and Central Europe and the Americans wanted Russia to go to war against Japan.  This was very effective strategy and some historians think that the reason Japan surrendered was fear of Soviet occupation and not the A Bombs.  There was not much that Roosevelt or Churchill could do, due to the size of the Russian Army.  Stalin was a good strategist, even demanding that the conference be held in Yalta at Livadia Palace.  The 3rd conference would be at Potsdam. 

[TimM]

General Patton wanted to turn around and push the Russians back once Germany surrendered.  He said that they couldn't be trusted.  Granted, that would have triggered another war, but in a way, he was right.  The Russians stayed in Eastern Europe for nearly fifty years.

[Elisabeth]

There's no way British and American troops would have stood for an invasion of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, especially since until August 1945 (Hiroshima, Nagasaki) they were still living in fear that they would be sent to invade Japan. In such an event, which seemed inevitable at the time, casualties were predicted to be extraordinarily high, another D-Day. I've talked to a few American veterans of World War II, and seen interviews with many more of them on television, and they almost all to a man say they felt incredible gratitude and relief when the Japanese finally surrendered and the expected Allied invasion of Japan was called off. At that point they say, they knew they were "saved," they had "survived" the war. I think we underestimate the extreme level of war fatigue that the Allies were experiencing at this point (especially the British and French and Poles and so on, even more so than the Americans because they had been at war for almost six years).

[Constantinople]

and don't forget the Australians and Canadians.  My father was an airforce officer who was a navigator on a liberator bomber and used to fly from New Guinea to Japan.  He managed to survive for 4 or 5 years (for the duration of the war).  Once the Russians enterred the Pacific War, I am sure that the allied propagandists went to work and sent the Japanese a message that the Russians who already had two of the Kurrile Islands might be looking for more territory and that an allied occupation would be preferable to a Russian one.

[TimM]

Yeah, the only way to beat the Russians at that point would have been to use atomic weapons.  I'm sure there were some U.S. military officers who wanted to turn Moscow and Leningrad into radioactive craters (the Soviets didn't have the bomb at this point), but wiser heads prevailed.

However, the Russians were not supposed to stay in Eastern Europe and install Communist governments.  That was NOT agreed to at Yalta.  Stalin just took advantage of thing to build his own empire.

[Elisabeth]

I'm not clear on a few points, Tim and Constantinople, which I hope you can explain, because I am the first to admit that I mainly read pre-1945 history. I was under the impression that the Allied leaders, i.e., Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, divided up the map of Western and Eastern Europe quite cynically, if somewhat unofficially off the record as it were, into different spheres or zones of "interest." So C & R were willing to give over Eastern Europe to S and keep Western Europe for themselves if they could retain a significant interest in, say, a Balkan country that was technically "Eastern" but belonged to the West historically and culturally, and was of no small geopolitical significance - that is, Greece. Didn't they even agree on specific percentages of interest, in the case of Greece?

Also, didn't the Soviets renege on some of these agreements, for example free elections in places like Poland, or am I mistaken completely? I know in Czechoslovakia at least the majority of the population was behind the Communist Party and they apparently won the elections fair and square. But as I vaguely recall there were certain "incidents" with the Soviets in the immediate aftermath of the declaration of peace in Europe (and even as the first Nuremberg trial was going on, presided over by judges from all three countries, the US, the SU, and Britain), which prompted Churchill's famous (or infamous, depending on your political point of view) "Iron Curtain" speech, which is usually seen as marking a watershed in East-West relations, in other words, the beginning of the Cold War.

But if one of you or anybody else here who wants to volunteer information could outline the basic history of the causes/origins of the Cold War, that would be very helpful I think to the general discussion, because this entire topic is directly related to the issue of "Stalin's Legacy." I mean, who was to blame or was everybody involved equally to blame for the development of the Cold War?

[Constantinople]

Well first of all the holding of the Yalta meeting in the Soviet Union was a strategy.  It was originally to be held somewhere closer to the western Mediterranean.  Stalin was very shrewd and while he didnt exactly agree with elections, he didn't vocally oppose them either.  He also knew that he had possession of the territory that would eventually become Comecon.  In Czechoslovakia, there were elected governments until 1948, when the CzechoSlovakian communist party staged a coup.  Stalin was very careful to make the conversion of Czechoslovakia to communism look like an internal affair although it was orchestrated by the Soviet Union.
    In Poland, there was a coalition government between 1945 and 1947.  In 1947, the Polish Communist Party gerrimandered the election and Poland became communist, so there were free  elections in some countries.

[Constantinople]

Hungary was an Axis ally during the war.  The Soviet Union occupied the country following the second world war and therefore had an advantage in establishing a communist government after the war.  Even here, there was not a communist government until 1947.

Hopefully that will explain how Stalin did not breach the Yalta agreement but used it to gain satellites.

[TimM]

However, the agreement at Yalta established that, gradually, the Europeans would be given the choice to run their own countries.  That did not happen with Eastern Europe.  As I said, the Soviets were there and they had NO intentions of leaving.  The Warsaw Pact counties were, in essence, puppets to the Soviets.  Whenever one of those countries tried to get rid of Communism, the Soviets sent in the troops (Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968).  This was not what Yalta intended, for the Nazi regime to be destroyed so the Communist regime could step in and replace it.   However, that is what happened, because of Stalin's double cross.

[Constantinople]

Well it depends on whose perspective you look at.  From Stalin's perspective, that was exactly what Yalta was supposed to produce.  From the individual countries involved, or from the perspective of Roosevelt, Truman and Churchill Yalta was not supposed to produce a communist community.
    there was also a realization that the Soviet Union had suffered by far the most fatalities (23,000,000) and that the Soviet Union had absorbed much of the Nazi military brunt and that if the Soviets hadn't done that then it is quite possible that Britain would have been invaded sooner or later or at least a reconquest of the European mainland would not have been possible.  So the Soviets were given a bit more leeway than they normally would have.
   

[Alixz]

A little off topic, but about statues to those who are considered heroes or non heroes.  In Saratoga, New York, there is a monument to Benedict Arnold (who is, of course, known in the US as a traitor during the US Revolution.)  Arnold was the commander of West Point at one time during the war and turned it over to the British.

However at the battle of Saratoga, he was still on the US side and he was wounded in the leg.  So there is a monument to his leg - boot and all - at the Saratoga Battle site.  I have seen it and it seems sort of eerie to put up a monument to the man's leg because that wound was taken during a battle while he was on the side of the Revolution.

But people do strange things to honor war heroes, dictators or others as the public deems necessary.

However, this thread is very interesting and I don't know enough about World War II and Stalin to participate, I just wanted to mention the strangeness of how history honors those whom we don't see as deserving of honor.

I also remember another thread where a poster told of being able to buy Adolph Hitler dolls complete with uniforms and medals.  I don't remember if it was available on the Internet or in a specific country, but the adulation continues.

[Constantinople]

What do you mean a little off topic? 

[Constantinople]

And Tim, aside from Bulgaria and Romania, most countries in Eastern Europe were part of the Soviet Union, so those countries were not discussed under Yalta.  It is Central European countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia that were discussed.  Because the USSR had absorbed the 3 Baltic countries in 1940, they were not up for discussion either.

[Alixz]

 Bulgaria is one of the few countries on this planet that retains fond memories not only of Stalin but also and even more so of Hitler, because first, Hitler returned to Bulgaria lands that had been confiscated after World War I, and second, because the Nazis never invaded and controlled Bulgaria to the extent they did other eastern European countries. (Bulgaria also succeeded in rescuing all of its Jews from the Nazi concentration and death camps, save those Jews in the newly annexed territories, so to this day even the Holocaust doesn't seem quite real to the average Bulgarian.)

I think Bulgaria might be the only place on earth where you can buy actual busts of Hitler in secondhand shops, and miniature clocks with his face on them in the open air antique market in the center of town.

Just referencing this.   :-)