If the Yalta conference features at all in our collective consciousness it is as the photograph of the Allied leaders taken by Robert Hopkins, son of Harry Hopkins.
Roosevelt’s optimism that Stalin’s rapprochement with the West would continue after the war, though doing him credit, was misplaced. Churchill was aware that democracy in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, would have to be vigorously defended but short of going to war he had no leverage. If Stalin was pleased that the US and Britain had different views he hid it; an enigma wrapped in a riddle, as Churchill said about Russia in 1939. So far as the countries in Eastern Europe were concerned Stalin held all the cards. His armies were in occupation and he was not going to give up territories fought for at such great cost to Russian lives. In any case they had all been part of the Russian Empire less than thirty years earlier. As a consequence the Allies forcibly repatriated hundreds of thousands of innocent people to the Soviet and Yugoslav authorities at the end of the Second World War. If they were not executed, they were sent to prison camps where many died – few were released.
This terrible, bloody stain on the conscience of the Allies was not acknowledged at the time and it was almost forgotten. Almost that is until the 1970s when a campaign in the letters pages of The Spectator and The Times garnered enough support and money for a monument to be put up in South Kensington in the 1980s – fittingly, a short walk from the Polish Hearth Club in Exhibition Road. The club was founded jointly by the British government and the Polish government-in-exile in 1939 and still occupies the same premises.
Twelve Responses to Tragedy consists of twelve bronze busts squashed together on top of a stone pillar. It is set in a small triangular park opposite the Victoria and Albert Museum, where museum visitors often sit to rest their legs or have a picnic and replaces Angela Conner’s original monument.
In 2015, the 70th anniversary of the Yalta conference, another bronze was unveiled at Yalta. It weighs ten tons but does not acknowledge the terrible outcome of the conference.
In 2013 Christie’s sold this small (24 inches wide) bronze for £10,625. I hope it has found a good home where Yalta is remembered.
CAST AFTER THE MODEL BY ALEXANDER GRUBE, CIRCA 1945.
Perhaps the defence of Ukraine by NATO is an expiation of the wrongs done after World War Two.
While we are at it you could write a similar paper on the Treaty of Versailles at the end of WW1. Considered now as one of the reasons for WW2. On that note, if you haven’t watched All quiet on the western front I strongly recommend you do. It is available on Netflix.
Plus jamais ça. Lest we forget.
Have a lovely weekend
Thierry
Not all of the countries that fell under Soviet domination had been part of the Tsarist empire. Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and parts of Rumania and Poland had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empire. Germany had held a fair chunk of Poland, both Poland as it originally was before the partitions and Silesia and East Prussia.
Having said that, it’s hard to say what the western Allies could have done about eastern and central Europe.