Source: The Militant, Vol. IX No. 8, 24 February 1945, pp. 1 & 5.
(William F. Warde was a pseudonym of George Novack.)
Transcription/Editing/HTML Markup: 2018 by Einde O’Callaghan.
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The Crimea conference marks the highest degree of unity achieved by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. The elation expressed by the official press in Washington and London as well as in Moscow reflects this fact. If not all the questions dividing the Allies and bringing them into sharp conflict with each other were settled, it is clear that some of the most pressing problems which engendered serious friction between the meetings at Teheran and Yalta have been ironed out.
Among the major matters disposed of were the territorial partition of Poland and the kind of governments to be imposed upon Poland and Yugoslavia. The Baltic states are to remain part of the USSR. In return for these and other concessions in Eastern Europe, Stalin has evidently set aside his Free Germany Committee headed by Junker generals. The Allied plans for the military occupation, dismemberment, despoliation and enslavement of Germany signify that their policy in Italy will seem beneficent compared to their projected treatment of Germany.
For a free hand in the Balkans and the states bordering on the Soviet Union, Stalin has given sureties to the Anglo- American imperialists that in the countries occupied by the Red Army he will continue to maintain intact capitalist property. He has also agreed to support governments in these, countries which, while subservient to the Kremlin, are pledged to protect the capitalists and landlords against the demands of the popular masses.
As the EAM’s shameless surrender to Scobie’s “armistice” terms in Greece indicates, Stalin is also fully prepared to give unreserved support to the Allies in their schemes to dominate the countries allotted to their spheres of influence in Western Europe. He has thrown in the services of the Stalinist parties as small change in this deal.
In the horse-trading that went on at Yalta, there were undoubtedly a number of other commitments made about which the official pronouncements have not said a word. This is confirmed by a cable from London by Raymond Daniel published in the Feb. 18 N.Y. Times, stating that “the unpublished results of the conference may have as strong an influence on future events as those that have already been published.” As one small example, N.Y. Times correspondent Harold Callender reported from Paris on Feb. 16 that “the British and Americans at the conference agreed that the Marianas and other islands mandated to Japan after World War I should be under American control after the defeat of Japan.”
The Yalta conference did not and could not eradicate the deep- seated imperialist rivalries between the United States and Great Britain nor eliminate their underlying class hostility toward the USSR. The bitter competition between the capitalist cliques of the United States and England over markets, sources of raw materials, control of the air, the seas and the land and their other dog-fights over the spoils of war are bound to break through all attempts at regulation and to increase in intensity. Nor have the Yalta decisions removed the fundamental sources of the sharp conflicts between England and the USSR over their respective spheres of influence which flared up in the past year from Iran to Poland. Above all, despite Stalin’s efforts to deny and to suppress it, there remains the irreconcilable antagonism between the capitalist powers and the Soviet Union which flows from the existence of nationalized property in the USSR.
These differences and divisions which have repeatedly unsettled relations among the Allies will persist after Yalta as before. But their struggles against each other will perforce be conducted in a masked manner, accompanied by public protestations of unbreakable friendship and complete harmony.
For the time being, however, unanimity prevails among the “Big Three.” It is important to understand the main factors which have impelled these powers at this juncture of events to override their differences and agree upon common policy. There is first the military necessity of completing the crushing of German resistance and defeating Japan. It was these military needs of the Allies which induced Churchill to conclude his 20-year treaty with Stalin in 1941 and led Roosevelt to give such extensive lend-lease aid to the USSR.
But the principal motives behind the Yalta decisions were political rather than military in character. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin were primarily preoccupied with the revolutionary mass movements which are beginning to erupt throughout Europe and which they anticipate will spread like wild-fire after Hitler’s collapse.
These three Allied leaders fear that the war-weary tortured, starved, and desperate peoples will turn in mighty wrath against all the authorities and institutions of the existing system in an iron resolve to take their destinies into their own hands. They are afraid that the insurgent workers and peasants will drive out the capitalists and landlords and take possession of the factories and fields. They are afraid that the peoples will set up genuinely democratic governments of their own choosing and make peace among themselves while they combat the possessing classes and their supporters.
It is this common fear of the revolutionary self-action of the masses that binds together Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin and animated all of their deliberations and decisions at Yalta.
These three evil men have already exhibited in action their counter-revolutionary aims in Italy, Greece and Belgium and they will not hesitate to pursue the same criminal course in any other country.
Their published plans for Germany are not solely designed to crush German militarism or to eliminate Germany as an industrial rival. They are primarily constructed to keep the German masses in chains in order to prevent them from overthrowing capitalism and establishing a workers’ republic on the ruins of Hitler’s Reich. In their eyes a far greater danger than either Hitlerism or Junker militarism is Communism which both Churchill and Stalin have already designated by its proper contemporary name of Trotskyism.
If these conspirators succeed in carrying through their counter-revolutionary aims, if the joint struggles of the workers and peasants for socialism do not frustrate their designs, they will have sown the seeds of the Third World War. The strangling of the proletarian revolutions in Germany and other European countries at the close of the First World War by the capitalists and their Social-Democratic accomplices paved the way for the rise of fascism and the present war. The definitive defeat of the coming revolutions in Europe by the Anglo-American imperialists aided by the Stalinists can only plow the ground for a new and far more ferocious reaction. This would in turn inevitably culminate in another world war which would be the graveyard of civilization.
These are the terrible perspectives which issue out of the secret conference at Yalta. But the counter-revolutionary conspiracies hatched there are far from realization. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin are now coming to grips with a force potentially far more powerful than themselves. This is the revolutionary might of the insurgent European masses impelled by the urge to hew their way out of the bloody capitalist chaos and create a new Socialist society.
Already in Greece, Belgium, Italy and elsewhere the workers have displayed their determination to resist their would-be enslavers and fight for their emancipation. And these are only the first actions in a struggle which will not and until the Socialist United States of Europe becomes a reality.
Last updated on: 19 September 2018