War and Myth IX

We are looking at five major myths (or unrealities) that shaped American policy and perception of the World after World War II. The first is the notion that Russians, and Russians alone, cheated at and after Yalta—that we got hosed at the conference.
First of all let’s look at the differences in philosophy that guided the three Yalta participants (Britain’s Churchill, who headed a washed up empire and was essentially out of the picture; America’s Roosevelt and Russia’s Stalin). What matters is how the Americans and the Russians viewed the world.
The Americans came to Yalta in February, 1945, as capitalists. A capitalist understands a world in which 51 to 60% control of any corporate entity means TOTAL control. We saw the world as a corporation in which we held a majority interest.
The Russians conceded our majority interest without question. They just weren’t working from a capitalistic blue print. They thought more in terms (as did the British) of 18th and 19th Century diplomacy. Whoever holds 60% of the territory governs THAT 60%. The other party, who holds 40%, governs that much of the area.
See a problem? We felt, instinctively that we should control the planet—the way a majority interest controls ALL of General Motors or Exxon Oil. The Russians conceded the Americas, all of the Pacific rim except Siberia, Africa, most of the Middle East and much of Western Europe.
Those were under American control. However, Eastern Europe, where the Russians had large armies on the ground—and through which invaders had cost Russia tens of millions of dead in the 20th Century alone--was THEIRS.
We cried foul (it should ALL be ours); they thought we were mindbogglingly greedy.
While Stalin could be viciously evil and duplicitous, he was neither a fool nor insane. He was perfectly aware of our nuclear monopoly; he knew our homeland was untouched—and he knew how weak Russia was.
Had the US suffered losses comparable to Russia’s in WWII, everything east of the Mississippi would be burned flat. Shattered, destroyed, unusable. All of European Russia looked a lot like the down town blocks of Hiroshima—one vast fixer-upper.
Historically it takes Russia fifteen years to recover from a war. (Right on schedule, in 1960, a Russian missile reached up into the sky and clawed down an American U-2 spy plane; next year they dared build the Berlin Wall. By the end of the 60s, they could match our ability to deliver thermonuclear war heads on target.) Russia was in no shape to argue in 1945—except where she had the Red Army physically present.
She kept the Yalta terms in Greece (1947) by closing off supplies to Greek Communist insurgents—she had promised control of Greece to the West. She kept Yalta terms in China by being the last major power to withdraw support from the Kuomintang government on the mainland in 1949.
Russia had ceded China to us—our boy simply was too corrupt to hang on. Mao pretty much won on his own—the only help Russia gave him was to allow him to pick up guns from the defeated Japanese he’d been fighting for eight years. Russia kept her word.
But she kept Eastern Europe. (Asking her to give it up would have been the equivalent of asking the US to give up Manhattan Island, New Orleans and San Francisco Bay.) Good capitalists we, we never forgave her.
We even insisted that only by incompetence or treachery had Roosevelt allowed her to hang on to that one corner of the globe. This was a myth that became a bedrock of American foreign (and even domestic policy) for the next several decades.
The Soviets were far, far from being nice people—but there was no truth to the myth. Next time, the myth that somebody in Washington treacherously gave away China.