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Dancing with the Devil
Dancing with the Devil: Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Lasting Legacy of the Yalta Conference
By Richard M. Ebeling
The following is abridged from a speech
delivered at “Evenings at FEE” in February 2005.
The Second World War has left a permanent scar on
mankind. The battle lines of war engulfed all of Europe, much of Asia, parts
of Africa, and touched the shores of North America. As many as 50 million
people may have died in this devastating firestorm. This war also marked a
descent into the worst nightmare of barbarism in human history. The Nazis
slaughtered millions whom they classified as “racial vermin.” Those
innocent human beings were to be eradicated from the face of the earth in a
deluded pursuit of engineering a “master race.” Never had humanity
witnessed such a magnitude of madness.
By the beginning of 1945 it became increasingly
clear that both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan would be defeated and the
agony of war would finally end. The weary world longed for peace, security,
and freedom. The future, everyone understood, was in the hands of Franklin D.
Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, the political leaders of the
victorious United States, Great Britain, and Soviet Union. During February
4–11, 1945, the “Big Three” met at Yalta in the Crimea, along the coast
of the Soviet Black Sea, to map out the postwar world.
Churchill was in the weakest position of the three.
He had led the British people through more than four years of war, standing
alone for a year against the Nazi war machine after the fall of France in June
1940. Britain was financially and militarily exhausted. Thus FDR and Stalin
were to determine mankind’s destiny.
Roosevelt, though in poor health, had just been
elected for an unprecedented fourth term. His New Deal brought about a
colossal expansion in Federal power, spending, regulation, and control over
virtually every facet of life. Despite a setback in 1935, when the U.S.
Supreme Court declared most of his economic planning schemes unconstitutional,
FDR continued on the path of Big Government through a vast array of
interventionist and welfare-state policies. He had transformed the traditional
American Republic almost beyond recognition.
When war came, first in Asia between Japan and
China in 1937, and then in Europe following the German invasion of Poland in
1939, FDR took on a new mantle of authority: New Deal savior of the world.
Violating numerous neutrality acts that the Congress had passed and which he
had signed, Roosevelt bent the constitution to edge America toward war long
before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The Brutal World of Joseph Stalin
Stalin felt stronger then ever. In the eyes of Western
leftists the Soviet Union offered the hope of a bright socialist tomorrow,
where toiling workers ruled in place of capitalist profit mongers, and want
and worry vanished through the miracle of government central planning. In the
early 1930s FDR said that he admired the fact that the Soviet people “all
seem really to want to do what is good for their society instead of wanting to
do for themselves.” In 1945 when he came back from the Yalta Conference, the
President told members of his cabinet that he found in Stalin’s nature
“the way in which a Christian gentleman should behave.”
 This
“Christian gentleman” was in fact Hitler’s competitor in brutality and
mass murder in the 20th century. A bank robber on behalf of the Russian
socialist movement before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Stalin proved a
master of political intrigue. After Lenin’s death in 1924 he succeeded in
destroying all of his rivals and rose to absolute power in the Soviet
Communist Party and government.
He let nothing stand in his way. Ordering
comprehensive central planning and total collectivization of the land in the
late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin quashed all peasant resistance through
forced famines, torture, terror, and exile to the vast wastelands of Siberia
and Central Asia. Between nine and 12 million people perished in the process.
In the mid-1930s he turned his ruthless power
against imaginary “enemies of the people.” Mass purges and show trials
sent millions of new victims to their deaths, after “confessions” had been
beaten out of them. Millions more were sent to the concentration camps of the
GULAG to work and die as expendable slaves for “building socialism.”
After Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nazi and
Soviet regimes used their propaganda machines to condemn each other. But in
fact, the two dictators learned from and secretly admired each other.
For Stalin, Hitler was a useful tool to start a
Second World War, which Stalin was plotting to trigger “inevitable”
revolutions that would bring communism to power throughout Europe. That’s
why Stalin initiated the diplomacy with Germany that led to the Nazi-Soviet
pact of August 1939, and freed Hitler from the fear of a two-front war. The
infamous pact divided Poland between the villains, and handed the Baltic
States and parts of Finland and Romania over to Stalin’s “tender care.”
In the autumn of 1940, after France was defeated
and England stood alone, Hitler invited Stalin to join the Axis powers to
divide up the world. Stalin finally agreed, but his territorial demands were
more than Hitler was willing to share. So, instead, Hitler made his fatal
mistake and decided to invade the Soviet Union to destroy his totalitarian
rival.
Stalin and the Spoils of Victory
Now, in February 1945, Stalin sat down with FDR at Yalta
to gain the spoils of victory that he had dreamt about since his deal with
Hitler in 1939. The job was made much easier for Stalin since, as the Soviet
archives have now revealed, FDR’s government was riddled with Soviet agents
and fellow travelers who passed along all of Roosevelt’s plans. In addition,
the villa where FDR and the American delegation were staying was completely
bugged by the Soviet secret police.
The cornerstone of Stalin’s agenda was the
destruction of Germany as a future political and military adversary, as a way
for spreading communism to the rest of Europe. Germany was territorially
dismembered with almost one-third of its eastern lands being annexed by Poland
and the Soviet Union. (Stalin also kept almost all of the Polish territory he
had gained in 1939.) What remained of Germany was divided into zones of
occupation, with the Soviet zone reaching far into the center of Europe.
Austria, too, was divided into occupation zones. In both cases, Berlin and
Vienna were isolated islands in Soviet-controlled territory, leaving the
American, British, and French zones in these cities at the mercy of
surrounding Soviet forces. At the end of the war Stalin immediately stripped
the Soviet zone of all undestroyed industrial equipment, and began the process
of establishing a puppet communist regime in what later became East Germany.
Ever the master manipulator, Stalin promised
Roosevelt and Churchill free and open elections in the Eastern European
countries “liberated” by the Soviet Army. But Stalin had other plans. Two
months after the Yalta Conference, he told a Yugoslavian communist delegation
visiting Moscow that, “This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a
territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own
system as far as his army can reach.”
Indeed, over the next three years Stalin’s secret
police assisted the Moscow-controlled communist parties in Poland, Hungary,
Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and Czechoslovakia to set up “people’s
democracies” through the usual means: repression, imprisonment and murder.
While the war raged in Europe, the United States
and Britain were also pushing back the Japanese in Southeast Asia and across
the Pacific at great loss of life. Stalin, on the other hand, remained at
peace with Japan, having signed a non-aggression pact with Tokyo in April
1941. The Soviet archives demonstrate that Stalin desired a war between the
United States and Japan. He believed that the chaos of such a conflict would
ripen the conditions for communist revolutions in Asia.
Soviet Booty in Asia
At Yalta, Stalin offered to enter the war against the
Japanese once Germany was defeated—but only at a price. He demanded the
Soviet annexation of the Japanese-controlled southern half of Sakhalin Island
(with its oil fields) and the strategic Kurile Islands, north of the Japanese
home islands. He also insisted that the Japanese military base at Port Arthur
at the southern tip of Manchuria be transferred to Soviet control (Japan had
acquired it in 1905 after the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese war).
Finally, Stalin claimed Soviet jurisdiction over several of the major railway
lines running through Manchuria. He insisted on all this booty in Manchuria
without the Chinese government’s prior knowledge or approval.
The Big Three also agreed to divide Korea (which
had been under Japanese control for half a century) along the 38th parallel
into Soviet and American zones of occupation. When the war ended, Stalin
started establishing a communist regime in North Korea. The Soviet archives
confirm that Stalin also approved and helped plan North Korea’s attack on
South Korea in 1950, which dragged the United States into a three-year war at
the cost of 50,000 American lives.
Soviet forces attacked the Japanese in Manchuria
immediately after America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945.
At virtually no cost, Stalin gained control over a vast area of northeast
Asia. Shortly after the Soviet Army overran Manchuria, Stalin had the
industrial facilities of this part of China stripped and shipped to Siberia.
After the Japanese surrender, the Red Czar allowed
Mao Zedong’s communist forces to enter Manchuria. The Soviet Army turned
over vast quantities of captured Japanese military equipment to the Chinese
communists, helping to assure Mao’s eventual triumph on the Chinese mainland
in 1949.
When Roosevelt returned from the Yalta Conference,
he addressed a joint session of Congress and assured the American people: “I
come from the Crimean Conference, my fellow Americans, with a firm belief that
we have made a good start on the road to a world of peace.” For far too
long, he also stated, Americans had been afraid of the word “planning.”
FDR insisted that “many benefits to the human race have been accomplished as
a result of adequate, intelligent [government] planning.” He was confident
that the Yalta Conference had laid the “groundwork of a plan” for a new
world order.
FDR: The Global Planner
That “plan” was the creation of the United Nations.
For the establishment of the UN, Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave Joseph Stalin
virtually everything the tyrant wanted. The UN, controlled by the United
States and the Soviet Union, along with Great Britain, France and China, was
to become the policeman of the world.
FDR envisioned America’s participation in a
project of global social engineering, which would set the world right through
economic sanctions and military force. What this might cost in American lives
and material fortune never seemed to enter Roosevelt’s mind. Nor did he
appear to have second thoughts that giving the world a New Deal might result
in further losses of liberty at home. No, FDR did not worry about these
“minor” matters. After all he had Stalin, that “Christian gentleman,”
as his imagined partner for managing the world.
Sixty years have now passed since the fateful
meeting at Yalta. FDR danced with the devil, and the world suffered the
consequences. Stalin, who helped Hitler start the Second World War, reaped his
reward at the end of it: Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, at the cost of
terror and tyranny for all the people who were forced to live in the
“socialist paradise.” The people of North Korea, also swept up in the
communist net, still live under it. The triumph of communism in China was also
helped along, with hundreds of millions placed under the yoke of Mao’s
murderous regime.
Stalin died in 1953. Thirty-eight years later the
Soviet Empire disappeared from the map. Yet the legacy of the Yalta Conference
still haunts us. Many of the conflicts around the world today are outgrowths
of the political, economic, and moral destruction that Soviet communism left
in its wake. It also fostered a belief that governments can plan the peace and
happiness of mankind, if only they have the power to direct our lives. Our
task in the 21st century is to finally free ourselves from this legacy.
 Dr.
Richard Ebeling is well known as a dedicated and passionate spokesman for
liberty. The author of numerous books and articles, he lectures worldwide on a
broad variety of free-market and historical themes. In 1991 while consulting
on market reform and privatization in the former Soviet Union, he joined the
defenders of freedom and faced the Soviet troops in Vilnius, Lithuania, and
again in Moscow, Russia, during the attempted communist coup d’état. Dr.
Ebeling is the president of the Foundation for Economic Education.
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