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¶ On the Far East, Roosevelt had Stalin's 1943 promise, first given without any mention of a price, that Russia would go into the war against Japan soon after the conclusion of the German war. The question of a price to Russia entered the negotiations later, partly at Stalin's initiative, partly at Roosevelt's. At Yalta, there was no haggling about Stalin's price; he got all he asked, without argument. Roosevelt apparently welcomed the expansion of Russian power in the Western Pacific. Behind Churchill's back, Roosevelt offered Stalin participation in a Korean trusteeship from which Roosevelt proposed to exclude Britain; Stalin disdained the bait. Behind Chiang Kai-shek's back, Roosevelt gave Stalin his view of China's internal strife: "The fault lay more with the Kuomintang [Chiang's party] . . . than with the so-called Communists." Stalin did not argue. If this was Roosevelt's view, then world Communism would know how the U.S. stood when the Red Axis began to destroy Chiang with the concessions in Manchuria that Roosevelt made at Yalta—also behind Chiang's back.
Prelude to Discord. U.S. apologists for Yalta have said for years that its mistakes are only apparent by hindsight, that the circumstances of 1945, especially the brave and loyal Russian record of cooperation in the war, made reasonable the assumption that Russia, Britain and the U.S. could act in postwar concert. The record as now revealed undercuts this argument. Stalin, at least, kept his head above the tide of comradeship. He defined his national and party objectives, studied them carefully, defended them with lucid (if dishonest) arguments, and attained them. Some of his aims seemed quite limited when compared to the ballooning notions of world reorganization cherished in Washington; Stalin fought for one river boundary of Poland against another with the myopic pertinacity of a 17th century diplomat arguing over a second-string fortress. But of these small, ignoble chunks of reality was the actual postwar world built. _ Nor did Roosevelt at Yalta act and talk like a man who wholly believed in the future concert of the Big Three. He and Churchill did not talk to Stalin in their natural voices; they descended again and again to the level of cynicism on which they knew Stalin to be morally at home.