Word: yalta
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...Yalta Conference opened, it was obvious that the Red army would take the rest of Poland, and within a matter of weeks. Stalin did not need a Yalta agreement to give him the real estate; his motive at Yalta was political, not geographic. Nobody knew better than the Russians that the Poles would not make docile slaves. With Germany and France out of the future great-power picture (as Roosevelt and Stalin agreed), Britain and the U.S. were the only ones to which Polish patriots could look for help. Stalin needed to destroy this hope-to show the Poles that...
Lublin Doesn't Answer. In a written message, apparently ghosted by Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt proposed that two Lublin Poles and two others from within Poland (but nonCommunist) be summoned to Yalta. Maybe they could work out a new provisional government agreeable to all. Added Roosevelt: if the four Poles succeeded, he was "sure" the U.S. and Britain would "disassociate themselves" from the London Poles...
...counterproposal became, with some minor changes, the substance of the Yalta agreement on Poland. It ignored Roosevelt's four Poles project. It drew Stalin's frontiers for Poland, including on the west a deep wedge of Germany to the Oder-Neisse line. It held fast to the Lublin Poles as the base for a provisional government. It pledged the Big Three to recognize this government before elections for a permanent government...
...Yalta agreement gave Stalin no territory his armies did not take. But it gave him what he wanted. So shocked were the Poles at the action of the Western powers that the Communists were able to fasten their grip on Poland without meeting dangerous resistance. By now, most of the original Russian stooges have been liquidated, and Poland (pop. 26,200,000) is run by Marshal Rokossovsky of the Red army...
...glimpse of the might-have-been at Yalta was given by a letter to General George Marshall from Major General John R. Deane, head of the U.S. military mission to Moscow from 1943 to 1945. A month before the Yalta Conference, Secretary of War Henry Stimson forwarded the Deane letter to President Roosevelt. If, as Stimson probably hoped, Deane's conclusions had guided U.S. representatives at Yalta, the conference results might have been far different...