Central and Eastern Europe at the Quebec Conference

Abstract

Although opinions differ as to the precise moment when the prospect of complete Soviet domination of Eastern Europe became one of Churchill’s main concerns, there is no question that it had assumed that character by the time of the Quebec conference in September 1944. Things had begun to go badly wrong in Churchill’s view from the time of the Moscow and Teheran conferences the previous autumn. At Moscow the US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, had offered no effective support to Eden, either in the latter’s attempts to help Poland in its dispute with the USSR, or on specific British proposals which sought to commit the Soviet Union to a liberal and democratic settlement in Eastern Europe. Indeed, Hull had made it obvious that he regarded the Polish, and all other East European problems, as subsidiary to the main objective of a tripartite Great Power agreement on a future world order. As a consequence, Eden’s proposals for Eastern Europe were rejected, or shelved, and the Soviet Union emerged from the conference with no restrictions on its freedom of action in Eastern Europe. More than that, Hull can hardly have failed to give the Russians the impression that the United States had little interest in Eastern Europe and was in effect offering the USSR carte blanche in that area.