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As the Yalta Conference opened, it was obvious that the Red army would take the rest of Poland, and within a matter of weeks. Stalin did not need a Yalta agreement to give him the real estate; his motive at Yalta was political, not geographic. Nobody knew better than the Russians that the Poles would not make docile slaves. With Germany and France out of the future great-power picture (as Roosevelt and Stalin agreed), Britain and the U.S. were the only ones to which Polish patriots could look for help. Stalin needed to destroy this hope—to show the Poles that the Western powers would in practice throw the principles of the Atlantic Charter overboard. The first step must be to get the U.S. and Britain to abandon the London Polish government.
Favors & Flattery. Right at the start of the polemical sham battle over Poland Roosevelt exposed the poverty of the Anglo-American effort. There were two related avenues for a strong U.S. approach: the high principles of self-determination for even the smallest state, and the heavy pressure of such practical measures as Russia's stake in the future of West Germany. Instead, Roosevelt and (sometimes) Churchill couched their main plea to Stalin in terms of petty politicians asking favors. At that level Stalin inevitably bested them.
"There are six or seven million Poles in the U.S.," began Roosevelt. ". . . It would make it easier for me at home if the Soviet government would give something to Poland." Stalin could not have cared less how Roosevelt's popularity rating fared in Buffalo's Sixth Ward. To such arguments the Soviet dictator had a bland counter: "What will the Russians say?" Without the Polish territory he coveted, said Stalin, "I cannot return to Moscow."
Roosevelt and Churchill stooped to wheedling flattery. Be magnanimous, they said. At least, said Roosevelt, give Poland the oil province of Lvov (it lay east of the Curzon line, which the Allies of World War I had proposed as the fairest ethnic frontier between Poland and Russia). Churchill lifted the appeal to an oratorical height: "This is what is dear to the hearts of the nation of Britain . . . that Poland should be free and sovereign . . . mistress in her own house and in her own soul . . . [Our] interest is only one of honor."
Stalin cut them down. "Throughout history," he said, "Poland has always been a corridor for attack on Russia ... It is not only a question of honor but of life and death for the Soviet State . . ." And it was not a question of magnanimity alone. The Curzon line, he explained pedantically (for he had learned his homework much better than the other two of the Big Three), had been "invented not by Russians but by foreigners ... by Curzon, Clemenceau and the Americans in 1918-1919." How could he be "less Russian than Curzon and Clemenceau?"
Lublin Doesn't Answer. In a written message, apparently ghosted by Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt proposed that two Lublin Poles and two others from within Poland (but nonCommunist) be summoned to Yalta. Maybe they could work out a new provisional government agreeable to all. Added Roosevelt: if the four Poles succeeded, he was "sure" the U.S. and Britain would "disassociate themselves" from the London Poles.