Okay, dude, if you came here to Literature R Us, aka “Clickbait Central,” expecting nudie pics, well, take off, hoser, for you’ve been hosed. There are no pics of esteemed scholar Anne Applebaum here, clothed or unclothed. Better you should just quit this site now, google “Celebrity nipslips,” and be done with it. If, on the other hand, you’re up for a cranky, one-sided “debate” between a Pulitzer-prize winning scholar and a bathrobe-clad autodidact, dig in, for you’re in luck.
The object of my current wrath is a column that Anne wrote several weeks ago, prior to the recent endlessly, and justly, decried meeting between Presidents Trump and Putin: “Trump is hinting at concessions to Putin. So what do we get back?”. What ticked me off is that Anne, in (quite reasonably) knocking the caudillo confab in Helsinki, insists on playing the “Yalta card” while doing so, shamelessly resurrecting one of the great right-wing lies of the past two centuries. This is how she begins her column:
“‘We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had all been praying for,’ Harry Hopkins told his biographer. ‘We were absolutely certain that we had won the first great victory of peace.’ Hopkins, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s most important advisers, was not the only one present to have considered the Yalta Conference in February 1945 a great success. In his book on Yalta, the Harvard scholar Serhii Plokhy points out that everybody in the U.S. and British delegations, from gloomy George Kennan to cautious Winston Churchill, was pleased with the result. Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union seemed to have settled their differences, sketched out their spheres of influence and agreed that after the German capitulation, the liberated countries of Europe should all be democracies.
“The good cheer was brief. Within a few months, American and Soviet soldiers were shooting at one another over armistice lines in Bavaria. The false Soviet promise to bring democracy to liberated Eastern Europe degenerated almost immediately into farce. The “victory of peace” turned into the beginning of the Cold War, a generation-long struggle that involved an arms race, a massive American troop presence in Europe and the oppression of half the continent.”
Okay, so much of that is not true. What is true is that Harry Hopkins, quite stupidly, believed that the Soviets would keep their word about allowing democracy in eastern Europe, most particularly in Poland. What is not true is Applebaum’s claim that Serhii Plokhy “points out” in his book, Yalta The Price of Peace, “that everybody in the U.S. and British delegations, from gloomy George Kennan to cautious Winston Churchill, was pleased with the result.” That’s not at all what Plokhy said. Furthermore, it’s not what Kennan himself said in his memoirs.
First of all, Hopkins, and the U.S. delegation in general, with the great exception of Kennan,1 did not believe in “spheres of influence”. That was the whole point of the “United Nations”, that the old Metternichian game, where the “great powers” would run things, and the people would be squashed, would be swept away. Both Churchill and Kennan, on the other hand, wanted an explicit “sphere of influence” agreement, something that Plokhy repeats over and over in his book, and something that Applebaum surely knows. She simply rewrites Plokhy to bring his book into harmony with the old right-wing lies about how a senile Roosevelt let Alger Hiss deliver eastern Europe to Stalin on a silver platter.
Churchill and Kennan found the actual terms of Yalta acceptable because they recognized that the Soviets had won eastern Europe from the Germans. Plokhy quotes from a letter Kennan wrote to Charles Bohen, another foreign service officer who would play an important role in Russian matters: “I recognize that Russia’s war effort has been masterful and effective and must, to a certain extent, find its reward at the expense of other peoples in eastern and central Europe.” Churchill obviously felt the same way, and his own writings describes how he traded Stalin “90 percent influence in Poland for Russia for 90 percent influence in Greece for Great Britain”. But neither at all shared Hopkins’ pathetic effusiveness.
Furthermore, Plokhy gives his own summation of Yalta as follows: “One of the testimonies of the sound strategy at Yalta is that decades later after the conference, with the benefit of hindsight, new archival findings, and tons of research, it is still very difficult to suggest any practical alternative to the course they took.”
Applebaum knows all of this, of course. So why does she lie? Why does she deliberately misrepresent the contents of an important book and the actual historical record? Because Anne Applebaum is afraid, afraid of Trump (as am I). She’s afraid, and with good reason, that Trump will turn his back on democracy and “Europe” in order to cut deals with his authoritarian pals. And so she’s trying to gin up the old conservative alliance that ran foreign policy in the GOP since the advent of Ronald Reagan—the old Roosevelt-hating right-wingers and the neocon refugees (like herself) from George McGovern’s neo-pacifist Democratic Party. But lying for a good cause ain’t pretty. And it ain’t right, either.
Afterwords
George Kennan published the first volume of his memoirs in 1967. I read them at that time2 and his account of a conversation he had with Harry Hopkins regarding Poland always stuck in my mind.3 I wanted to consult the memoirs for this little squib, but unfortunately the DC library system didn’t have a copy, and the book isn’t available in electronic format, so I had to order a used copy, which took a while to arrive. In the book, Kennan tries rather to have it both ways: continuing to argue for his “spheres of influence” approach while recoiling (as who could not?) from the way the Soviets actually managed things in their sphere. He claims (very much after the fact in my opinion), that he tried to advocate, prior to Yalta, for a “tough line” (my quotes) with the Soviets regarding Poland. Since the war in Europe was already won by early 1945, why cooperate with the Soviets at all? “[W]e no longer owed them anything (if indeed we ever had)”.4
For a self-styled grand master of the great game, this is pretty terrible sophistry. First of all, Kennan’s “tough line” simply meant that the West would cut off all military and economic aid to the Soviets, which would scarcely slow them down in the least (and would cause them to exploit their newly conquered territories even more aggressively). Secondly, the purpose of Yalta extended far beyond the war in Europe. If the U.S. had cut off all military assistance to Stalin, he hardly would have agreed, as he did agree, to join the war against Japan. “We just saved a million American lives!” exclaimed the not terribly sentimental Admiral Ernest King5 at the news. Was it “wicked” of FDR to care more about saving a million American lives than “saving” eastern Europe, which it was far beyond his power to do in the first place?6
Furthermore, Kennan commits the most amateurish mistake of the amateur historian: assuming that what did happen was the only thing that could have happened. For what did Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin all fear the most? That in twenty years’ time, in 1965, Germany would initiate World War III. Of course, today it’s “obvious” that that never would have happened—that “little Germany” could never stand against either the mighty U.S. or the mighty U.S.S.R. But in 1945 everyone believed that it would happen unless the most ceaseless vigilance were maintained. However much they mistrusted each other, the Big Three needed each other, so they thought, in both Europe and Asia.7
Afterwords II
So what was Kennan’s little conversation with Hopkins? It occurred in Moscow shortly after FDR’s death in April 1945, a few months after Yalta. Hopkins, who would die soon himself, was in Moscow to continue discussions with the Soviets regarding the new, supposedly democratic government for Poland. Kennan told Hopkins that he felt the U.S. should disclaim any responsibility for what was happening in that country:
“Then you think it’s just sin,” he [Hopkins] said, “and we should be agin it.”
“That’s just about right,” I said.
“I respect your opinion,” he said, sadly. “But I am not at liberty to accept it.”
- Kennan was not at the conference, but rather in charge of the U.S. embassy in Moscow while Ambassador Averell Harriman was at Yalta. It’s certainly possible that Harriman kept Kennan away from Yalta because of his deep hostility to the Soviets. ↩︎
- The first time I read Kennan’s memoirs I was so impressed that I wanted to be a foreign service officer. The second time I read it I decided I didn’t want to be one. ↩︎
- Rather remarkably, to my mind, Plokhy never cites Kennan’s memoirs, either in text or footnotes, when discussing Kennan’s views. He always relies on other sources. ↩︎
- “If we ever had” is ridiculous. The Soviets both suffered and inflicted 90 percent of the casualties in the war against Germany. Kennan knew this. ↩︎
- Eisenhower famously called King “a mental bully. The kind of man I hate!” ↩︎
- In a worst-case scenario—no atomic bomb (which of course had not been tested prior to Yalta)—and no Soviet assistance, the U.S. would be forced to deal with both the Japanese defense of the home islands and a million-man Japanese army in Manchuria. The leftist cottage industry that has grown up arguing against the use of the atomic bomb does not impress me at all. If the Japanese had wanted to surrender prior to the use of the bomb, they could have. In fact, they did not until both the Soviet declaration of war and the second bombing. The U.S. offensive in Okinawa, the “last stop” prior to the actual invasion, cost an estimated 240,000 lives, counting both military and civilians. The Japanese forced many Okinawan civilians (who were not of Japanese descent) into military service, many of them underage. The Japanese also bullied and harassed thousands of civilians into committing suicide to “save” themselves from the barbaric Americans. American troops, of course, killed many civilians themselves. Right-wingers and left-wingers alike can explain why they “know” that such things never would have happened during a U.S. invasion of the home islands and Manchuria and, furthermore, that Roosevelt should have known it as well, in February 1945. ↩︎
- As Plokhy tells it, FDR more or less tricked both Churchill and Stalin into accepting France as a fourth occupying power (by telling them that the U.S. would be taking all of its troops out of Europe in two years), turning a fascist collaborationist into a virtuous “great power” overnight. Anything to get more hands to help hold down the monster. ↩︎
