Yalta ratified the agreement between Washington and London, the two main imperialist powers that emerged victorious in World War II, to carve up the world into “spheres of influence” with the complicity of the bureaucratic regime in the Soviet workers state.

At that summit meeting, attended by U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Moscow committed itself to do its part to guarantee the defense of capitalist property relations throughout war-devastated Europe, which by then was seething with revolutionary unrest among workers and farmers in a number of countries, from France to Greece.

At issue in the debate among capitalist circles is that, in exchange for Moscow’s counterrevolutionary role, Washington and London agreed to accept Eastern Europe—then occupied by Red Army troops—as a Soviet “sphere of influence.”

In Eastern Europe, the Stalinist regime initially propped up weak capitalist governments as a buffer between itself and imperialist Europe. Within a couple of years, however, as the imperialist powers escalated military and economic pressures against the Soviet Union, Moscow pulled the plug on those regimes and carried out the overturn of capitalist property relations in the countries of the region.

“For much of Eastern and Central Europe, victory brought the iron rule of another empire,” said Bush in his May 7 speech in Riga, Latvia’s capital. “This attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable,” he asserted. Bush said the Yalta agreements were in the same “unjust tradition” as the August 1939 Stalin-Hitler nonagression pact, which secretly divided up Poland between German imperialism and the Soviet Union, and the September 1938 Munich Pact, in which the governments of France and the United Kingdom agreed to the Nazi-led German government’s demand for control of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.

“Mr. Bush has criticized Yalta at least six other times publicly, usually in Eastern Europe, but never so harshly,” noted an article in the May 16 New York Times.

Liberal politicians have long defended Roosevelt’s signing of the Yalta accord, arguing that it didn’t change anything but simply recognized the existing relationship of forces in Europe at the time.

Conservative commentators expressed their agreement with the U.S. president. “Bush was right to regret Yalta,” commented a May 11 editorial in National Review. His words “were meant to encourage democrats from Moscow to Tehran.” Patrick Buchanan, an incipient fascist politician, took a different position from Republican and Democratic politicians. In a column entitled “Was World War II Worth It?” he asserted that Bush “told the awful truth about what really triumphed in World War II…. It was not freedom. It was Stalin, the most odious tyrant of the century.” He further argued, “If the objective of the West was the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was a ‘smashing’ success. But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in.”

Bush and all bourgeois commentators, whether from a liberal, conservative, or ultrarightist perspective, are covering up what the Yalta conference was really about.

The truth can be found in a Feb. 17, 1945, front-page article in the Militant. The headline summed it up: “Secret Allied Conference at Yalta Designs Plans to Dominate Europe; Conceal Reactionary Aims Behind Deceitful Promises; Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin Scheme to Crush Popular Revolutions Against Capitalist Rule.”

In the article, George Novack, writing under the pen name William F. Warde, said, “Meeting in conspiratorial secrecy at Yalta on the Black Sea, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin further elaborated their plans outlined at [a 1943 summit in] Teheran to carve up Europe, reduce its segments to semi-colonial status, subjugate its peoples, and crush the popular revolutions against capitalist rule, which are maturing throughout the war-torn continent….

“In Western Europe against the manifest will of the people and without bothering even to consult them, the Anglo-American imperialists have set up dictatorial puppet regimes, as in Italy and Greece, composed of militarists, monarchists and ex-fascists together with the traitorous Stalinists and Social Democrats. The masses starve, while the Allied armies loot the scant resources of the occupied countries. The scum of the ruling classes who collaborated with the Nazis are not only protected from the just wrath of the people, but kept in positions of authority and power,” the article explained.

As part of trying to keep continental Europe a weak rival to U.S. and British imperialism, the agreement at Yalta also set up plans for the occupation and dismemberment of Germany. The country was divided into four zones, with sections of the country under the control of U.S., British, French, and Soviet forces. The occupying imperialist forces sought to plunder the country’s wealth and prevent a revolt by working people. In the Soviet zone Moscow implemented a “reparations” policy of shipping whole factories out of Germany to Russia.

In countries proclaimed to be in the “Western sphere of influence,” Stalin kept his Yalta promises by ordering the influential Communist parties there to back bourgeois parties, blocking working-class struggles that could have toppled capitalist rule.  
 
Stalinist betrayals in France, Greece
In France, Italy, and Greece, the predominant force on the scene was the Stalinist-led resistance movements. Workers in France virtually had power in their grasp in 1944 when Hitler’s armies were driven out of the country. Armed workers took over many cities and factories, but the treacherous role played by the Communist Party there enabled the French capitalists to regroup and hold onto power. The CP, the dominant force within the French trade union movement, rallied workers to back the capitalist government of Gen. Charles de Gaulle, who was put in power by the U.S. and British imperialist forces in August 1944 after the collapse of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain. Stalinists became ministers in de Gaulle’s cabinet and forced workers’ militias to give up their arms and disband.

In Greece, the Partisan resistance movement forced the Nazi occupation forces to withdraw in September 1944. The CP-led National Popular Liberation Army (ELAS), in accord with Stalin’s policy of ceding Greece to the British “sphere of influence,” welcomed British troops into the country in October, even though ELAS had 50,000 troops under arms and was the only serious contender for power. Stalin and Roosevelt had given their backing to the British imperialists’ plan to intervene in Greece and install monarchist forces in power.

Monarchist troops fired on a mass ELAS demonstration in Athens on Dec. 3, 1944, provoking a month-long battle between the city’s working class and the British and monarchist armies. Two months later, the CP-led ELAS agreed to disarm in exchange for a short-lived legality. While sections of the leadership of ELAS disagreed and the civil war continued for four more years, the Stalinist betrayal enabled the local bourgeoisie, with support from the British, and then American, imperialists, to prevail.

In Central and Eastern Europe, as the Soviet army advanced toward Berlin, the discredited capitalist regimes collapsed and were replaced by governments in which Moscow, standing behind local Stalinist parties, exercised power.

For a time after the war, Moscow retained the capitalist structures in Eastern Europe as a bargaining chip in its efforts to secure a peaceful coexistence with imperialism. However, as Washington launched the Cold War against working people in that region, the Stalin regime responded by allowing controlled mobilizations of workers and farmers there to overthrow capitalist property relations, bringing into existence bureaucratically deformed workers states.

The counterrevolutionary pacts signed at Yalta and then in Potsdam, Germany, in July 1945, were also aimed at holding back the rising anticolonial struggles.

With Tokyo’s surrender, for example, the Japanese occupation regime in formerly French Indochina collapsed. A spontaneous revolt swept Vietnam on Aug. 19, 1945, leading to the proclamation of an independent Vietnam with Communist Party leader Ho Chi Minh as president. The new government, a coalition between the Vietnamese CP and various capitalist parties, welcomed British troops into Saigon at the beginning of September. The British army, which deployed under its command 5,000 armed Japanese troops, 2,000 French soldiers, and a small contingent of U.S. troops, declared martial law in southern Indochina. British-led forces attacked the independence fighters in Saigon and restored the French colonial regime in the south.

In March 1946 the Vietnamese Communist Party signed a pact with Paris, which recognized the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North as a semiautonomous part of the French Union, and authorized the landing of French troops in Hanoi. Using this beachhead, the French military ordered a massive bombardment of Haiphong harbor in November 1946 in which 6,000 people were killed. The Vietnamese Communist Party agreed to these concessions to the imperialist democracies that had defeated their rivals in World War II under heavy pressure from Moscow and Beijing.

The Vietnamese workers and peasants then had to wage another 30 years of war against French and then U.S. imperialist forces to win independence and the reunification of their country, after a heavy toll.
 
 
Related articles:
Yalta pact aimed at crushing anticapitalist revolts
Imperialists used 1945 accord with Stalin to maintain domination of W. Europe  
 
 
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