Stalin was not especially anxious to meet because the facts on the ground favored him, and he had no wish to subject himself to pressure from his allies to roll back from his victories. By February 1945 his troops had overrun the Baltic states and Poland, along with Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria, and he had no intention of relinquishing control.
With regard to Poland, the American delegation, which included Roosevelt, Harriman, and Secretary of State Stettinius, was stunned by the Soviet leader’s unabashed double-talk. A “free, independent, and powerful Poland was essential for Soviet security,” Stalin assured his western allies. But, Stalin continued, because Germany had invaded the Soviet Union through Poland, the Soviet Union “had to dominate that state [Poland] completely.”
The leaders of the Big Three spent days arguing about Poland, though politely and with no mention of the Soviet annexation of half the country in 1939. Roosevelt and Churchill supported the non-Communist Polish government-in-exile that had been set up in London when the war started, and they pressed for an arrangement that would enable it to compete for power with the Communist group sponsored by the Soviets, presumably in an election, but the Soviets did everything they could to foil this objective. A few months before the meeting at Yalta, in August 1944, the Polish Home Army attempted its famous uprising in Warsaw, fighting house to house and street to street for more than two months in an effort to expel the Nazi occupier. The uprising was timed to the arrival of the Soviet army just on the other side of the Vistula River from the center of Warsaw, but there the Russian troops remained, Stalin watching and waiting while the Germans wiped out Poland’s non-Communist armed resistance and then leveled Warsaw. Stalin was happy to see those Poles eliminated who might form an independent opposition to Soviet influence.
By the time the three leaders met at Yalta, the Russians had already installed in Warsaw what was to become the puppet government of Poland, and there wasn’t much that Roosevelt and Churchill could do about it. There was a euphonious agreement pledging the Soviet-supported government to hold free elections in the future and, more generally, assuring the liberated peoples of Europe their rights to “to restore their sovereignty and to establish their own democratic governments.” But, as George Kennan, second in command at the American embassy in Moscow and later the chief architect of containment, put it at the time, these words amounted to “the shabbiest sort of equivocation.” When the Polish Communists failed later to hold the promised elections, the western allies could do nothing about it. Later in 1945, the British and the Americans recognized the Soviet-controlled Polish government, which, in exchange, took in a few non-Communist members. Soviet domination of Poland became an accepted fact for the foreseeable future.
Given the Soviet Union’s ambitious goals and its actions in Eastern Europe, one might expect there to have been some concern that Stalin would want to do something similar in China. In fact, there was very little thought at the top echelons of the American government about the possibility that Soviet aims in Europe and Soviet aims in Asia might be similar. Roosevelt’s immediate goal at this meeting was to get the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan once the war in Europe was over. Stalin had secretly agreed to that in principle during the Big Three meeting in Tehran in 1943 and in his meetings with Harriman, but now Roosevelt wanted to nail him down on specifics, like the number of troops he would contribute, and when exactly Soviet participation would begin.
There was some difference of opinion within the American government on whether a Soviet front in the Japanese war was necessary or desirable. The State Department on balance was opposed to a deal with the Russians on this. John Davies, recently departed from Chungking and on his way to his new posting in Moscow, had wisely prophesied around the time of the Tehran conference (without knowing about the secret pledge Stalin had made to Roosevelt there) that the Russians would open a front in Asia “only in order to be able to participate in dictating terms to the Japanese and to establish new strategic frontiers.” It made little sense to Davies and others in the State Department to defeat one enemy, whether Germany or Japan, only to invite a menacing future strategic rival to occupy the very territories that the defeated enemy had been driven out of. Moreover, there were senior military officers, namely Admiral Ernest King, the second-highest officer in the American navy, and five-star general H. H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the U.S. Army Air Force, who believed the war in Asia could be won by enforcing a blockade of Japan alone.
Marshall and the Joint Chiefs of Staff insisted that a massive invasion of the Japanese islands themselves was going to be necessary to defeat the Japanese, for whom, they firmly believed, mass collective death in resistance would be preferable to surrender. American military planners estimated that the expected invasion would cost anywhere from 100,000 to 350,000 dead and wounded among the American forces. By entering the war in Asia, the argument went, the Soviets would tie up the million-man Japanese army in Manchuria, which would otherwise be deployed to the home islands to fight the American landings. Douglas MacArthur, who would have commanded the invasion of Japan, urged Roosevelt to get the Russians to commit sixty divisions, or more than half a million troops, against the Japanese army in Manchuria.
Roosevelt also wanted to advance a separate goal at Yalta, the paramount goal of American China policy, which was Chinese political unity. Earlier in the war, a basic assumption of American military planners was that China was an essential base of operations for the war against Japan, in part because a final attack on Japan itself could only be mounted from Chinese territory. By early 1945, China’s poverty and the abysmal condition of its armed forces had led to the abandonment of this idea. “By the time of the Yalta Conference,” the historian Tang Tsou has written, “leading American officials clearly recognized that China would not emerge as a great power at the end of the war.” Nonetheless, Roosevelt wanted China to be unified so it could make more of a contribution to the anti-Japanese fight, and he knew that the Soviets were in a position either to help achieve that goal or to hinder it. Roosevelt had heard all of Stalin’s and Molotov’s assurances that the Chinese Communists were not real Communists and, in any case, that the Soviet Union would not meddle in China’s internal affairs. He wanted to believe that these assurances were true. And if the Soviets could be brought into a formal accord with China’s Nationalist government, they might be deterred from throwing their support to the Chinese Communists, thereby wrecking the chances of political unity during the final Japanese campaign, or provoking a civil war once the battle against Japan had been won.
It was with all of this in mind that on February 8, 1945, FDR went to Stalin’s study at Yalta to talk about Soviet entry into the war against Japan. There were four people in the room besides the two heads of state—Molotov, Harriman, and two interpreters. To a great extent, the meeting was a formalization of the informal agreement that the two sides had already made more than a year earlier at Tehran, but this formalization was important.
Roosevelt began by asking Stalin if the United States could build air bases in Siberia for use in bombing raids against Japan, and Stalin agreed to allow two such bases in the Amur River region near China. FDR then gave a memo to Stalin asking for joint planning of Far Eastern operations, and Stalin said he would give orders to that effect. This was a breakthrough because Stalin was moving from an abstract promise of help in the Pacific theater to concrete planning. But before he was willing to talk about the military details, Stalin said, he had some political conditions.
First, he wanted to restore Soviet “rights” to the territories Russia had lost to Japan in 1905, namely the southern part of the Sakhalin Peninsula and a few islands in the Kurile chain north of Japan, which blocked Soviet access to the Pacific Ocean. Regarding China, Stalin wanted some big advantages in Manchuria, which Russia had also lost to Japan in 1905. It demanded control of the railroads there, a permanent lease on Port Arthur, a warm-water port at the southern tip of the Liaodong Peninsula
, and control over the nearby port city of Dalian; and it wanted recognition of the status quo in Outer Mongolia, which though theoretically independent was a satellite state dominated by Moscow but, having once been part of the Qing dynasty, was claimed by China.
In other words, in exchange for taking part in the war against Japan, Stalin would resurrect the colonial privileges that Japan had taken for itself in northeast China and that the European powers had enjoyed in the treaty ports since the Opium War, though they had formally relinquished those privileges a year or so before the Yalta meeting, which meant that, aside from British control of Hong Kong and Portuguese control of Macao, only the Soviet Union would retain semi-imperialist status in China. Nobody at Yalta was so impolite as to point this out.
Stalin’s demands put Roosevelt in a difficult position, stuck as he was between his military’s eagerness for the Russians to invade Manchuria and the awkwardness of publicly agreeing to a Soviet sphere of influence in East Asia. To navigate this diplomatic shoal, Roosevelt told Stalin that he’d be amenable to a deal, but only if it could be kept secret. To inform the Chinese would be the same as informing the whole world, since the Chungking government was incapable of keeping a secret. Roosevelt would get Chiang’s assent to the deal at the appropriate moment.
Harriman didn’t like it. Among other things, he objected to a startling phrase in the final text, worked out between the two sides after Roosevelt and Stalin had met for the half hour devoted to China, to the effect that “the preeminent interests of the Soviet Union shall be safeguarded” in Manchuria. The phrase “preeminent interests” was both vague and imperial in tone, while the secrecy of the deal, in which two powerful countries disposed of the interests of a less powerful one without even informing the less powerful one of the arrangement, echoed that of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact of just a short, violent six years before. Roosevelt had demanded and gotten time to get Chiang Kai-shek’s agreement to the arrangement, but this would be a mere formality.
Roosevelt, of course, was striving to save the lives of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of American soldiers that he thought might otherwise be lost, not a priority easily dismissed. But strangely, Roosevelt also trusted Stalin, demonstrably one of the most untrustworthy major figures of the twentieth century. He wanted to trust him. He felt that his vision for the postwar world depended on Stalin’s reliability as a partner. Or, as John Davies explained it later, the entire edifice that the president imagined for the postwar world depended on Stalin’s cooperation and goodwill. “The prescription for this,” Davies said later, expanding the view to Asia, “was open-handed generosity in granting aid to the Soviet Union, no bargaining for reciprocal advantages, and support of certain territorial and other claims that Stalin told Roosevelt he wanted fulfilled.” We’ve seen Harriman try to disabuse Roosevelt of that trust and to warn him that Stalin’s objectives were incompatible with American interests, and Harriman was not alone. Kennan warned that Stalin’s goals—he was talking about Europe—were utterly at variance “with the happiness, prosperity or stability of international life on the rest of the continent.”
Kennan knew that Stalin sought total postwar mastery of Eastern Europe and that any belief to the contrary was wishful thinking. Moreover, while many have attributed FDR’s blind spot on this subject to his feebleness in his last few weeks of life, he had engaged in this wishful thinking for the entire war. His own ambassador to Moscow, Admiral William H. Standley, who served in the Soviet Union before Harriman took over in 1943, used to complain about all the special emissaries FDR sent to Moscow who “leapfrog over my top-hatted head and follow the Rooseveltian policy—do not antagonize the Russians, give them everything they want, for, after all, they are killing Germans.”
There are three tremendous ironies here. One is that, eager for advantages in East Asia, the Soviets would surely have invaded Manchuria in any case, precisely to get a place at the table when the postwar terms were dictated to a defeated Japan. It had never been necessary to go to Stalin as supplicants seeking favors or to consent to his conditions in exchange for something he was eager to do anyway.
Second, the United States believed that in giving Stalin what he wanted in Manchuria, it was creating conditions that would strengthen China’s central government and weaken the Communists, when, as it would turn out, exactly the opposite was the case. To be sure, there were Soviet vows to leave Manchuria and to turn it over to the Chinese government, and many believed that they would, and that this would pave the way to a treaty between Moscow and Chungking that would exclude the Communists from power. “Russia promises non-intervention in Chinese affairs,” Henry Luce wrote in a Life editorial after Yalta, “thus pulling the rug out from under the Chinese Communists and deflecting their recently ballooning claims of equality with the government of Chiang Kai-shek.” But to believe that Stalin meant what he promised in China was simply naïve. In the end, Stalin did give up Manchuria, half a year late, not to the central government but surreptitiously to the Communists, providing Mao with control over a territorial base from which he could never be dislodged.
And third, as it turned out, of course, the atomic bomb brought about an abrupt Japanese surrender, and the American land invasion for which Russian help was believed essential never took place, even as the high price for that Russian help was paid.
World War II had all along involved a tremendous moral compromise, cooperation with one of the twentieth century’s worst dictators, Stalin, in order to defeat another such dictator, Hitler. We were too “weak,” Kennan said, “to win [the war] without Russia’s cooperation,” and this cooperation had been “masterful and effective.” To recognize this and to accept that Stalin would be getting as a reward the domination of Eastern Europe that Hitler had been denied was the essence of realpolitik.
At Yalta, the moral compromise was extended to Asia, where Russian help had not been extended, where it wasn’t needed, and it would do grievous harm to America and its values. A few months earlier, in August 1944, Zhou Enlai had predicted the consequences of Russian entry into the war. With the Dixie Mission having just arrived in Yenan and the Communists expressing their wish for deep cooperation and friendship with the United States, Zhou wrote a lengthy inner-party report giving his analysis of the international situation. He didn’t know whether the Russians would come into the war or not at that point, but it would be highly desirable for them to do so, he wrote, though it would be better not to express this desire publicly for fear of alarming the Americans about a future Soviet-Chinese Communist alliance. The Soviet entry into the war, Zhou said, would mean nothing less than “the victory of China’s new democratic revolution”—meaning the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek and the extension of Communism across the entirety of the Eurasian landmass from Warsaw to Canton—“and that is what Chiang and the Anglo-American conservatives do not want to see.”
CHAPTER NINE
Hiding the Knife
John Service made his final visit to Yenan in March 1945, when he had long talks with Mao that convinced him more than ever that an opportunity for a constructive working relationship with the Chinese Communists was there for the United States to seize, if only it had the wisdom to do so. While he was there, he got the news that American troops had stormed the Japanese stronghold of Okinawa, news, he felt, that had put Mao into “exceptionally good spirits, getting out of his chair to act out dramatic embellishments of his talk, and diverging to recall amusing anecdotes.” Mao expressed chagrin that the negotiations with Chiang Kai-shek mediated by Ambassador Hurley were proving “fruitless,” for which he blamed Chiang Kai-shek, but he was defiantly confident that if Chiang resumed his effort to wipe out the Communists by force, he would fail. “Chiang could not whip us during the civil war when we were a hundred times weaker,” he said.
But whatever happened in China, whether the negotiations succeeded or failed, whether the United States provided arms to the Communists or not, Mao assured Service t
hat China and the United States would be natural allies. They had “strong ties of sympathy, understanding, and mutual interest,” Mao said, as Service paraphrased him. They were both “essentially democratic and individualistic … by nature peace-loving, nonaggressive and non-imperialistic.” For all of these reasons, Service cabled, continuing to summarize Mao’s comments, “there cannot be any conflict, estrangement, or misunderstanding between the Chinese people and America.” The Communists’ goal is moderate, Mao said, encouraging what Barrett was later to call the “agrarian reformer guff.” It was reduced rents, progressive taxation, and the “institution of democracy.” As for the United States, Mao repeated the assurance he’d given Barrett a few months earlier, that even if the United States declined to provide his forces with “a single gun or bullet,” the Communists “will continue to offer and practice cooperation in any manner possible to them. Anything they can do … the Communists consider an obligation and duty.” But if the United States did see fit to arm the Communists, advantages would accrue to both countries. The war with Japan would come to a quicker end and the Americans would “win the undying friendship of the overwhelming majority of China’s people.”
These talks confirmed Service in his conviction that in its one-sided support for Chiang the United States was “letting the tail wag the dog” and losing a historic chance to build a cordial relationship with the Communists. A few months before, on an earlier visit to Yenan, Service had written, “Politically, any orientation which the Chinese Communists may once have had toward the Soviet Union seems to be a thing of the past.” The United States was a far more potent prospective partner in economic and technological development than the Soviet Union, and it had no colonialist designs on Manchuria or other regions of China, like Xinjiang. “The conclusion,” Service wrote in September 1944, “is that American friendship and support is more important to China than Russian.” Now he and Davies felt ever more urgently that the United States needed to act on that fact. From Moscow, Davies weighed in with a memo of his own in mid-April. He warned that the KMT lacked popular support, that it had no program to attract popular support, and that it was “inefficient, venal, and stale” with little chance of prevailing against the “dynamic and disciplined” Communists. As for the Communists, Davies continued, they began “as an instrument of Moscow’s policy of world revolution,” but the events of the war, during which they’d gotten very little help from the Russians, have pushed them in a nationalist direction. Will they nonetheless decide to be “voluntary creatures of Russian foreign policy?” Would they be “willing to cooperate with us on terms equal to or better than those which they will extend to the Soviet Union?” We don’t really know, Davies admitted. “What can be said at this juncture, however, is that if any Communist regime is susceptible to political ‘capture’ by the United States, it is Yenan.”
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