Yalta 1945: Europe and America at the Crossroads, by Fraser J. Harbutt

Abstract

This book is impressive, provocative and also (I have to declare) not a little exasperating. Let me say something about each. To begin with, it must be said that Fraser Harbutt has unquestionably produced an impressive work of original scholarship which takes issue with the mainstream narratives about the origins of the Cold War which have dominated the last two decades. Yalta 1945 is both a powerful challenge to the doyen of US Cold War historians, John Lewis Gaddis, and many others (for example Melvyn Leffler) who have produced important and influential studies. Just as many of us have set exam questions asking ‘who or what was responsible for the Cold War?’; Harbutt poses the same question—and comes up with a provocative and challenging thesis. While Gaddis has been clear that ultimate blame lay with the devious, mendacious, manipulative dictator in the Kremlin with whom it was (in Gaddis's judgement) ultimately impossible to deal, Harbutt disagrees. Of course, he argues, Stalin was at least in part responsible for what occurred in Europe, but the main burden of culpability must rest with Britain, and principally with Britain's war-time Prime Minister. If there is a villain of Harbutt's book, it is Winston Churchill. In a nutshell, Britain, with its old modes of diplomacy, its imperialist heritage and (for Harbutt) delusions of grandeur, must shoulder the responsibility for the division of Europe, the fate of the Poles and the missed opportunities of Yalta. It was Britain which attempted during the war years to create a settlement with Stalin, dispensing liberally with the fate of whole nations and peoples. Nowhere, Harbutt argues, was this more obvious—or indeed more odious—than in the so-called ‘Percentages agreement’ of 1944. Here Churchill infamously ‘accepted’ a Soviet sphere of influence in East and Central Europe in return for British influence in Greece. In pursuit of continued co-operation with Stalin, not only were the British prepared to accept a division of the Continent but they looked the other way as the brave Poles were slaughtered and their country dismembered. In doing so, the British were attempting to keep Stalin ‘on side’, as they tried to maintain their empire through (especially) control of the Mediterranean.