Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [292]
Churchill told the War Cabinet that he was “quite sure” Stalin “meant well to the world and to Poland.” Likewise, facing fierce criticism in the House on February 27, he cited the fact that “most solemn declarations have been made by Marshal Stalin and the Soviet State” about Polish elections. “I repudiate and repulse any suggestion that we are making a questionable compromise or yielding to force or fear … The Poles will have their future in their own hands, with the single limitation that they must honestly follow … a policy friendly to Russia. That is surely reasonable.” Fortified by the fulfilment of Stalin’s promise of noninterference in Greece, he clung to the hope that the Soviet warlord would keep his word about Poland: “I know of no government which stands to its obligations, even in its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government. I decline absolutely to embark here on a discussion about Russian good faith.”
Over a drink in the smoking room afterwards with Harold Nicolson and Lord De La Warr, he said that he did not see what else he could have done at Yalta, save accept Stalin’s assurances. On the night of February 28, he told Jock Colville that he would refuse to be cheated over Poland, “even if we go to the verge of war1067 with Russia.” He voiced aloud his fear1068 that he might be deceived by Stalin, as Neville Chamberlain had been deceived by Hitler—then dismissed it. He was exultant when an amendment on Poland moved by Tory right-wingers in the Commons was defeated by 396 votes to 25. But eleven ministers abstained, and one resigned. Eden, lacking confidence in Russian good faith, remained deeply depressed. General Anders, for the Poles, told Brooke that “he had never been more distressed1069 since the war started … He could see no hope anywhere.”
Back in Moscow, Stalin expressed satisfaction about the outcome of Yalta. Unsurprisingly, he spoke more warmly of Roosevelt than of Britain’s prime minister. “Churchill wants a bourgeois Poland1070 to be the USSR’s neighbour,” he told Zhukov, “a Poland that would be hostile to us. We cannot allow this. We want to ensure a friendly Poland once and for all, and that is what the Polish people want, too.” Pravda’s political columnist told Russian readers with satisfaction, “We see unprecedented unanimity1071 in the United States and England in welcoming the resolutions of the Crimea Conference.” The paper asserted that American and British commentators treated the protests of Polish émigrés with the contempt which these deserved.
No course short of war with Russia would have saved Polish democracy in 1945, and by February only a compound of vanity and despair could have caused Churchill to pretend otherwise. The Soviet Union believed that, having paid overwhelmingly the heaviest price to achieve the defeat of Hitler, it had thus purchased the right to determine the polity of eastern Europe in accordance with its own security interests. To this day, Roosevelt’s admirers declare that he displayed greater realism than Britain’s prime minister in recognising this. The Western Allies lacked power to contrive any different outcome. Churchill, who had fought as nobly as any man in the world to deliver Europe, was now obliged to witness not the liberation of the east, but the mere replacement there of one murderous tyranny by another.
TWENTY-ONE
The Final Act
IN THE LAST MONTHS of Churchill’s war premiership, his satisfaction about the Nazis’ imminent downfall was almost entirely overshadowed by dismay at the triumph of Soviet hegemony in eastern Europe. He wrote to a Tory MP on March 6, “We are now labouring to make sure that the Yalta Agreement