China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (33 page)

This would seem to be the cause of the harder line adopted by the Communists in the Hurley-sponsored negotiations, whereas Hurley, as we’ve seen, had blamed Bird, Barrett, and McClure for this, along with the wider effort, as he saw it, by the China hands, led by Davies, to sabotage his mediation. There is no indication that Stalin actually reported to Mao on the results of his meetings in Yalta, but he didn’t have to.
Mao and his lieutenants would have known that the strategic picture was changing to their advantage. Stalin would want to get into the war against Japan, in part to achieve the long-standing goal of recovering the territory Russia lost to Japan in its humiliating defeat of 1904–05, and that could not be bad for the Chinese Communist cause. The day after the secret protocol was signed at Yalta, Mao was communicating to Party members in Yenan that the Communists’ policy of the previous few years—support for Chiang and a hand of friendship to the United States—was shifting in a more radical and combative direction. A few weeks before, Mao had been on the dance floor in Yenan’s Peach Garden encouraging the Dixie Mission members and special emissaries like Barrett and Bird to whirl around with Chinese girls. Now Mao called on all Communists to be prepared for bloodshed against “
Mei-Chiang,
” the derogatory Communist shorthand for the American-Chiang alliance. (
Mei
is the short version of
meiguo,
meaning America.)

This was a big rhetorical shift. Mao was friendliest when he felt most threatened, and for much of the war he felt threatened by the prospect of an American-backed attack on Yenan, which would have come when Stalin was overwhelmed by his war with Germany and unable to come to the rescue. Now, feeling less threatened, he told party members, “
Do not be afraid of [the Americans’] anger, and their loud accusations.” At the same time, Mao persisted in what some historians have called his charm offensive toward the Americans, who continued to see him in Yenan, to talk about possible cooperation in gathering intelligence, to rescue downed American pilots, to assume what Mao called the inevitability of an American presence in China. Mao did not let on to the Americans he met that his discourse inside the party ranks was shifting toward the Soviet Union. But something had shifted. Something new
about his prospects of taking total power had entered Mao’s mind when he heard about the meeting at Yalta, and this was never going to change.

Mao wasn’t the only one
who was reconsidering the situation at the time of the Yalta Conference.
W. Averell Harriman, Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was thinking deeply disturbed thoughts about Stalin and the Soviet Union as the war entered its final months. He was, as the later expression went, getting mugged by reality. A banker’s son who grew up in a forty-bedroom mansion on Long Island on an estate with its own polo field, Harriman had spent more time with Joseph Stalin than any other American. During most of his encounters, Harriman had been a supporter of his president’s grand vision of the postwar world, in which the coalition of great powers that would triumph over the Axis would perpetuate their friendship and alliance into the future, thereby ensuring global harmony and peace.

The warm feeling toward the Soviet Union that wartime cooperation had brought about is hard to visualize six decades later, after the Cold War and the voluminous documentation of Stalin’s destructive villainy. Now it is clear that in 1945 the world was heading toward a collision not just of powers but of values and ways of life, that the very notions of individual freedom, limited government, and protections against abuses of power were being challenged by an unscrupulous and illiberal giant. But at the time, a year before Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech, before “containment” of the Soviet Union became official American policy, and years before the advent of the nuclear balance of terror, the tremendous victories that the Russians had achieved over the Germans dominated the mood. Roosevelt, as we’ve seen, nurtured a cordial trust with regard to Stalin right up to his death in April 1945, especially his trust that he and his Soviet counterpart would perpetuate their alliance after the war.

Near the end of 1944, FDR attended a
mass rally of twenty thousand people at Madison Square Garden in New York, one of several held around the country to celebrate the eleventh anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic
relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet ambassador,
Andrei A. Gromyko, was present in the legendary amphitheater; so was the conductor
Leopold Stokowski, who
conducted an orchestral part of the program. Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of allied forces in Europe, was there to speak of “the great Red Army.” Secretary of State
Edward Stettinius talked of an “opportunity—such as the world has never known before—to advance the freedom and well-being of all mankind.” Roosevelt, who was accorded a prolonged standing ovation, evoked the “ever-growing accord” between himself and Stalin “to establish a peace that will endure.”

In Moscow, Harriman was losing his faith in just this beatific vision, and the reason was Stalin’s aggressive behavior, the growing sense during the brass-knuckles talks with him and his representatives that he envisioned a very different sort of world than the one Americans had in mind. On April 4, 1945, he sent a blistering cable to Washington complaining that the Russians operated “from the standpoint of
their own selfish interests.” They were censoring the press “to prevent the facts becoming known.” They “will relentlessly strip the enemy countries they have occupied of everything they can move.” Most important, Harriman recognized something deeply malevolent in Stalin’s goals. The Soviet dictator, he realized, was not the man Roosevelt thought he was, who would respond to generous treatment in reciprocal fashion. “
We must clearly realize,” Harriman wrote, “that the Soviet program is the establishment of totalitarianism, ending personal liberty and democracy as we know it.”

China does not seem to have been much on Harriman’s mind during this period, though he did worry about Soviet intentions there too. On April 21, nine days after Roosevelt’s death, he warned that the Soviets could well “
cause further trouble” in “Macedonia, Turkey, and especially China.” If Chiang, he said, doesn’t come to an agreement with the CCP before the Soviet occupation of Manchuria, the Russians “will certainly establish a Soviet-dominated Communist regime in those areas and then there will be a completely divided China.” Harriman in this statement makes the same wishful assumption of other American officials, which was that, somehow, if only Chiang could draw Mao in a unified government of China, there would be no malicious Soviet interference in China, but events would show this assumption to be very wrong. Still, China was much less a preoccupation for him and the other postwar planners than Europe was. In the weeks after the Yalta conference, it was rather
Poland that was sticking in the collective American craw, for it illustrated the incompatibility of American and Soviet goals, practices, and values.

Soviet designs on Poland had gone unmentioned during all but the final few months of the war. It had been deemed unproductive, impolitic, a faux pas, to bring up the events of six years earlier, when Stalin and Hitler, in a raw and blatant act of aggression, had divided Poland between the two of them. In 1939, the two dictators had watched as their foreign ministers,
Vyacheslav Molotov and
Joachim von Ribbentrop, signed a non-aggression pact, a secret protocol of which provided for Stalin and Hitler to wipe out Poland as an independent country and to create a new
Soviet-German border at the Vistula River, which runs through Warsaw, Poland’s capital. A week after signing the pact, on September 1, Germany, in the first of its massive and devastating blitzkrieg attacks, invaded Poland and quickly seized the western half of it, provoking Britain and France, which had treaties with Poland stipulating they would come to its defense in the event of German aggression, to declare war.

When the Soviets followed up with their own invasion of Poland two weeks later, there were no British or French declarations of war, in part because there were no defensive treaties aimed against the Soviet Union and in part because to have gone to war against both Germany and the Soviet Union at the same time would have been a preposterous impossibility. In any event, the immediate threat to Western
Europe and its freedoms was the one posed by Hitler. After signing the pact, Germany was free to turn its attention to the invasions of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, as well as its bombing campaign against Britain, all of which took place a few months later in 1940.

Meanwhile, in the
Katyn Forest in Russia, the Soviet secret police, in an operation approved by Stalin, murdered more than twenty thousand Polish citizens, including eight thousand army officers taken prisoner in the 1939 invasion. It was a preemptive attack, organized by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, and its utterly ruthless leader, Lavrenty Beria, aimed at eliminating any independent Polish leadership for the foreseeable future. The Soviets pinned blame for this signal and unforgivable atrocity on the Germans, an audacious lie that was believed around the world for decades. In January 1941, half a year after the
Nazi invasions of France and the Low Countries, Hitler and Stalin furthered their cooperation with a German-Soviet Border and Commercial Agreement, which provided for the exchange of Soviet raw materials and German industrial machinery.

As allies between 1939 and 1942, Stalin and Hitler both committed
the mass murders of enemies (to go with the murder or imprisonment of large numbers of their own citizens) unhindered by any moral restraint when it came to the advancement of their interests. Germany rampaged through Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, and France, and geared up for its genocidal persecutions in the East, while Stalin gobbled up the eastern half of Poland, the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, and the provinces of northern and eastern Romania (Bessarabia, Moldova, and northern Bukovina). Stalin also invaded neutral Finland, though, unlike the others, the Finns were able to put up a partially successful resistance, losing some territory but never succumbing to Soviet control. All of these countries and territories were within what the Germans had recognized as a Soviet
“sphere of influence”—that is, as one scholar has noted, a zone of occupation.

Then this nefarious and cynical German-Soviet alliance collapsed. In June 1941, a year after the German invasion of France, Hitler launched a massive three-front blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union, thereby virtually overnight transforming Stalin from a co-conspirator into a bitter enemy. Hitler’s treacherous act ruined Stalin’s earlier plan to dominate the entirety of Eastern Europe, and it opened up an alliance of necessity with Britain and the United States, who followed the age-old principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Now at Yalta, nearly four years and many costly Soviet victories over the German armies later, Stalin was determined to secure from his wartime allies the sphere of influence/zone of occupation that he had failed to get in the collapsed deal with Hitler, except bigger this time.

He made no secret of this. The conference at Yalta was the second wartime meeting of the three leaders, the first having taken place in 1943 in Tehran, where Stalin had already made his intentions clear. He hadn’t been very anxious to meet again, insisting that the next summit be held someplace close and convenient for him or not at all.
This required that Roosevelt travel by train from Washington, D.C., to Newport News, Virginia, then spend ten days on a navy cruiser to the Mediterranean island of Malta, where he met up with Churchill. After that came a seven-hour flight to Sevastopol, the American plane taking off at 3 a.m. to avoid possible German air attacks. Finally, the party had to travel by car on a ninety-mile switchback route through the mountains to Yalta. But such was Roosevelt’s wish to come to some understanding on the shape of the postwar world—including, most importantly from FDR’s standpoint, Soviet agreement to participate in the United
Nations, which was at the center of Roosevelt’s grand and idealistic scheme for the postwar world—that he complied with Stalin’s demand, at great risk to his own health.

Stalin was not especially anxious to meet because the facts on the ground favored him, and he had no wish to subject himself to pressure from his allies to roll back from his victories. By February 1945 his troops had overrun the Baltic states and Poland, along with Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria, and he had no intention of relinquishing control.

With regard to Poland, the American delegation, which included Roosevelt, Harriman, and Secretary of State Stettinius, was stunned by the Soviet leader’s unabashed double-talk. A “
free, independent, and powerful Poland was essential for Soviet security,” Stalin assured his western allies. But, Stalin continued, because Germany had invaded the Soviet Union through Poland, the Soviet Union “had to dominate that state [Poland] completely.”

The leaders of the Big Three spent days arguing about Poland, though politely and with no mention of the Soviet annexation of half the country in 1939. Roosevelt and Churchill supported the non-Communist Polish government-in-exile that had been set up in London when the war started, and they pressed for an arrangement that would enable it to compete for power with the Communist group sponsored by the Soviets, presumably in an election, but the Soviets did everything they could to foil this objective. A few months before the meeting at Yalta, in August 1944, the Polish Home Army attempted its famous uprising in
Warsaw, fighting house to house and street to street for more than two months in an effort to expel the Nazi occupier. The uprising was timed to the arrival of the Soviet army just on the other side of the Vistula River from the center of Warsaw, but there the Russian troops remained, Stalin watching and waiting while the Germans wiped out Poland’s non-Communist armed resistance and then leveled Warsaw. Stalin was happy to see those Poles eliminated who might form an independent opposition to Soviet influence.