Yalta: The Great Betrayal
(EricMargolis.com) -- by Eric Margolis --
As Russian imperial residences go, Livadia is a rather small palace, even modest. Czar Nicholas II had this pretty palace of white limestone built as a family vacation residence in the sunny Crimea...
Photos show the imperial family grouped together at Livadia much as they must have appeared when they were later murdered in 1918 by Communist gunmen in a dingy basement in the Urals. One mourns this family so filled with deep love for one another, and their tragic end...
On Livadia’s main floor, one feels no melancholy, only anger. There, in February, 1945, US President Franklin Roosevelt, Britain’s Winston Churchill, and Soviet ruler Josef Stalin met to decide postwar Europe’s future.
In modern history’s greatest betrayal, the Allied war leaders handed half of Europe to Soviet rule, betraying tens of millions of its people to the gulag, dictatorship, and confiscation of all their property.
The late KGB general Pavel Sudoplatov, who led the team that killed Trotsky and later observed Yalta, aptly calls the pact in his memoirs, "as cynical as the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939" that carved up parts of Eastern Europe between Germany and the USSR. But in that case, Hitler and Stalin made a two-sided deal, restoring lands their nations had lost during and after World War I.
Yalta was a shameful, one-sided sellout of half the European continent. The left-leaning, likely senile Roosevelt kept hailing Stalin, who had murdered over 20 million people, "our Uncle Joe."
Ironically, last week, Georgia’s pro-western government just blew up a towering statue of Stalin in his birthplace of Gori, outraging many Georgians and Russians.
The heavy machinery used by Stalin to industrialize the USSR and build its arms factories was largely bought from the United States. The Soviet Union confiscated grains from its farmers to finance industrialization, leaving millions of them to starve. Mao Zedong would later pay for China’s industrialization in the same merciless manner during the 1950’s.
It has generally been forgotten that Stalin’s concentration camps and mass murder peaked in the mid-1930’s, at least five years before Hitler began mass murder. Yet America rushed to the Soviet Union’s aid when it was attacked by Germany, supplying huge amounts of material aid, arms, fuel and cash.
Amazingly, the naïve Roosevelt and the American delegation actually stayed at the Livadia Palace. The NKVD, the Soviet secret police, bugged every nook and cranny at Livadia, and heard everything that was said by the president and his aides...
How could warlords Roosevelt and Churchill been so foolish and cowardly? Stalin had 12 million soldiers moving into Eastern Europe. Stalin’s might intimidated Roosevelt and Churchill, causing them to replace one totalitarian dictator, Adolf Hitler, by appeasing an even more dangerous one, Stalin.
The Soviet Union had done the lion’s share of fighting in Europe, destroying 75% of all German land and air forces, and naturally expected the lion’s share of the spoils. When the Americans, British and Canadians landed at Normandy, facing them was the ghost of the once invincible Wehrmacht, fatally crippled by shortages of fuel, munitions, and armor, and without any air cover. It was amazing the Germans held out as long as they did on the Western Front
After German forces surrendered, US general George Patton was ready to turn his famed 3rd Army against the Russians in Eastern Europe. The US had the atomic bomb, Russia did not. But the US and bankrupt Britain decided to buy off Stalin. Eastern Europe paid the terrible price. Patton was relieved and subsequently killed in a still mysterious road accident.
In one of Stalin’s sinister, green-painted villas on the Russia coast near Sochi, , I sat at his desk, imagining how after Yalta his yellow eyes must have glinted with malice and triumph as he puffed his pipe...MORE...LINK