For several generations of foreign-policy students, the term “Yalta” was a code word for an ailing President Roosevelt bartering into communist slavery Poland and other Eastern European nations. The undeniable evidence was that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin treated many of the “agreements” painstakingly reached by FDR, Stalin and Winston Churchill in the Crimean city in February 1945 as worthless “promises” to be crumpled and tossed in the trash bin.
The Harvard Russian scholar S.M. Plokhy sums up the key lesson from the Yalta Conference in a telling phrase: “Democratic leaders and societies should be prepared to pay a price for close involvement with those who do not share their values.” And indeed a heavy price was paid for what happened at Yalta.
In hindsight - always a good vantage point from which to examine history - the scenario for Yalta was preordained. The Red Army already held sway over a wide swath of Eastern Europe, and Stalin’s appetite for more territory appeared unsated. He was in no mood to bargain over the spoils he had in hand, declaring, “This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system.” Such is what he proceeded to do, without a glance at the peoples he subjugated under communism.
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