Yalta Quotes

When he woke his conviction of failure was somehow less inevitable.

I am designing the future on beer mats, like Churchill and Stalin at Yalta.

The leaves did not stir on the trees, cicadas twanged, and the monotonous muffled sound of the sea that rose from below spoke of the peace, the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it rumbled below when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it rumbles now, and it will rumble as indifferently and as hollowly when we are no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies, perhaps a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing advance of life upon earth, of unceasing movement towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, Gurov, soothed and spellbound by these magical surroundings - the sea, the mountains, the clouds, the wide sky - thought how everything is really beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget the higher aims of life and our own human dignity.

General George Patton and others lamented that the Second World War had broken out in 1939 over saving the free peoples of Eastern Europe from totalitarianism—only to end, through the broken 1945 Yalta accords, ensuring their enslavement by an erstwhile Soviet ally whose military we had supplied lavishly.

At Oreanda they sat on a beach not far from the church, looked down at the sea, and were silent. Yalta was barely visible through the morning mist; white clouds rested motionlessly on the mountaintops. The leaves did not stir on the trees, cicadas twanged, and the monotonous muffled sound of the sea that rose from below spoke of the peace, the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it rumbled below when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it rumbles now, and it will rumble as indifferently and as hollowly when we are no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing advance of life upon earth, of unceasing movement towards perfection.

the Polish people be allowed to have a voice in the kind of govt. they want. Under the Yalta Pact the Soviets agreed they & others would be allowed to do this. The Soviets have never honored that promise.

A TUZZO LANTO Poici di Pare TANto SAca TULna TI, na PUta TUchi PUti TI la. RUNto CAta CHANto CHANta MANto CHI la TI da. YALta CAra SULda MI la CHAta Picha Pino Tito BRALda pe te CHIna nana CHUNda lala CHINda lala CHUNda! RONto piti CA le, a TANto CHINto quinta LALda ola TiNta dalla LALta, YENta PUcha lalla TALta!

Russian?" I asked dumbly. I do that sometimes.

Metaphors help you boil down the complications and ambiguities of your too-long life into a picture book. They help you lie to yourself

Churchill called Yalta ‘the Riviera of Hades’.

The popular conception that Churchill and Roosevelt simply fell into a series of traps laid by Stalin, believed his lies and naively allowed him to get everything he wanted at Yalta is a myth.

No one wants to be told that there was another, darker side to Allied victory, or that the camps of Stalin, our ally, expanded just as the camps of Hitler, our enemy, were liberated. To admit that by sending thousands of Russians to their deaths by forcibly repatriating them after the war, or by consigning millions of people to Soviet rule at Yalta, the Western Allies might have helped others commit crimes against humanity would undermine the moral clarity of our memories of that era. No one wants to think that we defeated one mass murderer with the help of another. No one wants to remember how well that mass murderer got on with Western statesmen. “I have a real liking for Stalin,” the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, told a friend, “he has never broken his word.”16 There are many, many photographs of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt all together, all smiling.

showed by his appetite his appreciation of Molotov’s magnificent refreshments. Relaxed and fortified, he returned to his car and proceeded to recite Byron’s “Childe Harold” to Sarah for the remainder of the journey to Yalta.

... those Yalta nights, with extraordinary women who could drink vodka without swooning until six in the morning and sweaty young people from the Association of Proletarian Writers of Crimea who came to ask for literary advice at four in the afternoon.

Returning to Washington,FDR declared that Yalta Conference had put and end to the kind of balance-of-power divisions that had long marred global politics. His assessment echoed Woodrow Wilson's idealistic and equally inaccurate claims at the end of World War I. In London, Churchill told his cabinet that "poor Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don't think I'm wrong about Stalin." Soviet-British friendship, Churchill maintained, "would continue as long as Stalin was in charge.

Yalta can be seen as neither the portal to Roosevelt’s “world of justice and equity” nor a disgraceful capitulation to red fascism but, rather, an intricate nexus of compromises by East and West. Roosevelt “largely followed through on earlier plans, and gained most of what he wished,” the historian Robert Dallek concluded,

when fear is deeply ingrained, habits adopted for self-preservation are not easily set aside.

But this had always been part of his work—no matter how vast the security apparatus behind you, the fact was that, in the end, you were alone.

Katherine read constantly. She loved biographies of male dictators and enjoyed a long Stalin phase when she became obsessed, not by the Gulags or by the Yalta Conference, but by his wife’s suicide, his taste for sweet Georgian wines, the way he made his ministers bark ‘The Blue Danube’ after dinner, like dogs. She quoted his daughter Svetlana, who said, ‘He was a Sagittarius, you know, on the cusp with Capricorn.

able to incinerate Japan—or the Soviet, for that matter—and so we no longer needed Russian help to defeat Japan. We started to renege on our agreements with Stalin, particularly reparations from Germany. We also quietly shelved the notion, agreed upon at Yalta, of a united Germany under four-power control. Our aim now was to unite the three Western zones of Germany and integrate them into our Western Europe, restoring, in the process, the German economy—hence, fewer reparations. Then, as of May 1946, we began to rearm Germany. Stalin went ape at this betrayal. The Cold War was on.

He would pace up and down the room for a long while, remembering it all and smiling to himself, and later these memories would fill his dreams, and in his imagination the past would mingle with the future. When he closed his eyes, he saw her as though she were standing before him in the flesh, younger, lovelier, tenderer than she had really been; and he imagined himself a finer person than he had been in Yalta. In the evenings she peered at him from the bookshelves, the fireplace, a corner of the room; he heard her breathing and the soft rustle of her skirts. In the street he followed the women with his eyes, looking for someone who resembled her.

A few hours later, lying on a mat during rest time, Vladimir embraced the tiny curled-up creature beside him, his first best buddy, just as Mother had promised. Maybe tomorrow they could go to the Piskaryovka mass grave together with their grandmothers and lay flowers for their dead. Maybe they would even be inducted into the Red Pioneers side by side. What good fortune that he and Lionya were so alike and that neither of them had siblings...Now they would have each other! It was as if Mother had created someone just for him, as if she had guessed how lonely he had been in his sick bed with his stuffed giraffe, the months spinning away in twilight gloom until it was June again, time to go down to sunny Yalta to watch the Black Sea dolphins jump for joy.

Envoi You will die on a boat from Yalta to Odessa. —a fortune teller, 1992 What ties me to this earth? In Massachusetts, the birds force themselves into my lines— the sea repeats itself, repeats, repeats. I bless the boat from Yalta to Odessa and bless each passenger, his bones, his genitals, bless the sky inside his body, the sky my medicine, the sky my country. I bless the continent of gulls, the argument of their order. The wind, my master insists on the joy of poplars, swallows,— bless one woman’s brows, her lips and their salt, bless the roundness of her shoulder. Her face, a lantern by which I live my life. You can find us, Lord, she is a woman dancing with her eyes closed and I am a man arguing with this woman

Once Stalin had more than a million soldiers occupying Manchuria, the Chinese civil war became inevitable, because Mao understood that the central government no longer had the capability to eliminate him militarily. The irony, of course, is that the president of the United States, meeting with Stalin at Yalta, implored the Soviets to send their troops to Manchuria and that the Soviet invasion was facilitated by American Lend-Lease supplies.

We spent the morning discussing Michael’s role at Tribune, guiding the journal’s policy toward endorsing the creation of NATO and establishing an anti-Communist stance earlier than most other leftwing publications. George Orwell had become a welcome figure to the staff at Tribune, even though readers protested: “Why do you take after the Russians all the time? We’re still allies with them.” Part of Michael’s friendship with Ernest Bevin was founded on their staunchly anti-Communist views, strengthened by their dismay at what happened to Poland, Czechoslovakia and other Central European countries that became Soviet satellites shortly after the Yalta agreement.

Yalta proved to be a textbook case of the propensity of American presidents to believe that on the strength of their personal relationship with a foreign leader a resolution to intractable problems could be reached, even if that leader was dictatorial and showed an unwavering devotion to what he judged to be his own national interests.

Communism was a godless ideology: an idealized system of human government that could only be maintained by operating a ruthless police state

The welter of major policy decisions taken by American leaders between May and August 1945 were among the most complex in the nation’s history. Purely military strategy was amalgamated into high considerations of foreign policy; all minds, including those of senior generals and admirals, were turning toward the postwar order. The president’s men were absorbed in the day-in, day-out skirmishes with Stalin over the Yalta accords, the occupation and reconstruction of Germany, the political claims of Charles de Gaulle in France, and the charter of the United Nations. They were just beginning to think about the future of Asia, the status of former Japanese territories, the fate of British colonies, the red insurgency in China, the future of Japan under Allied occupation, and the still-uncertain matter of whether Japan’s overseas armies would lay down arms if ordered to do so by Tokyo, or if they would have to be beaten in the field even after the home islands were subjugated.

Unlike the glamorous Harriman, the fifty-two-year-old Winant was not particularly handsome. He was warm and charming, but an air of melancholy seemed to hover about him, leading Kathy Harriman to quip that he might have been happier “if only he could find some cause to be a martyre [sic] for.

Several months after the war, as Winston was reminiscing wistfully, he offered Sarah a word of wisdom. “Out of a life of long and varied experience,” he said, “the most valuable piece of experience I can hand on to you is to know how to command the moment to remain.

Those who want peace Will always bow to the threat of violence, Triumph is only for those who do not fear war, And that is how Yalta should be understood.

I want to remind you of the sterling performance of the State Department at Yalta and Potsdam, when your forebears gave Stalin everything but the west lawn of the White House. That’s why we’re in the goddamned mess we’re in now.

I went to Yalta with Roosevelt, and I met Stalin and saw him make a bargain and pledge his solemn word. He was given everything he asked for—even things that we had no right to give. He made fools of us; Roosevelt knew it before he died and told me so.

Had there been anything beautiful, poetical, or edifying or simply interesting in his relations with Anna Sergeyevna? And there was nothing for him but to talk vaguely of love, of woman, and no one guessed what it meant; only his wife twitched her black eyebrows, and said: “The part of a lady-killer does not suit you at all, Dimitri.” One evening, coming out of the doctors’ club with an official with whom he had been playing cards, he could not resist saying: “If only you knew what a fascinating woman I made the acquaintance of in Yalta!

Los tres grandes se reúnen en Yalta. Pronto llegan a acuerdos sobre desarme y desmilitarización de Alemania, así como a la compensación que se le exigirá por los daños causados. Otros asuntos quedan menos claros. Churchill y Roosevelt temen que Stalin se adueñe de la tierra conquistada por sus ejércitos, especialmente los Balcanes, y que aspire al petróleo del golfo Pérsico. Stalin, a su vez, sospecha que sus dos aliados querrán suprimir los crecientes partidos comunistas de la Europa liberada. Finalmente, Churchill teme que Roosevelt se retire de Europa en cuanto acabe la guerra y lo deje solo ante el peligro.

It was a strange world, he continued, where Soviet expansionism could be called, in the Yalta definition, “establishing a broad democratic basis,” and where a single-party government that used secret police to educate its citizenry qualified as a democracy. It was stranger still when a leader could be called a dictator—the fascist Perón of Argentina was one, the fascist Vargas of Brazil was not—depending on his usefulness to U.S. foreign policy.18 These complaints were appended to Hoover’s larger catalog of the new liberalism’s sins: empty sloganeering, duplicitous policies, arrogant economic planning, sprawling bureaucracies, the buying of people with their own money, the creation of dependencies on the state, intolerance of opposition, the rewriting of history, the use of whipping boys to evade accountability, the turning of citizens against one another by promotion of class division, and an overarching belief, evident in the court-packing episode, that “the objective,” to use a favorite New Deal term, justified the means.19 These all became proofs in Hoover’s larger argument about the increasingly manipulative, overbearing nature of government, and the resulting degradation of public morals and true liberty:

At Oreanda they sat on a seat not far from the church, looked down at the sea, and were silent. Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist; white clouds stood motionless on the mountaintops. The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings—the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky—Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.

There soon were storm signals. Nikitchenko and Trainin, in line with the Soviet conception of law as the servant of the political leadership, had a very limited idea of the trial’s purpose. In the Russians’ view, the Nazi organizations had already been condemned as criminal by the Big Three at Yalta, and it was “unthinkable” that the international tribunal—an organ of much less authority—could come to any other conclusion.

At the Yalta Conference in early 1945, Franklin Roosevelt had made it clear that he had little interest in further close collaboration or partnership with the United States' Western Allies, whose empires and global influence were fast disintegrating. Serenely confident of his own country's power, he envisioned the Soviet Union and its main ally in dealing with postwar international problems.

Churchill was so overweight that in 1942 he had to have a new desk installed in his Cabinet war rooms beneath London’s Whitehall because he could not fit behind the previous one.

Mike Reilly had noted, while making security checks on peasant huts near the Livadia, that ‘every house, no matter how poverty-ridden, had a radio . . . They were odd-looking radios to these American eyes, as they had no knobs or dialling apparatus of any kind. It seemed that they were built to receive only one frequency, which was that of the powerful Moscow government-controlled station.

plenary session, February 4, 1945.

poster of the Yalta Conference—Yalta!—in his bedroom, the words “NEVER FORGET” emblazoned beneath Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in Polish, Latvian, Czech, Albanian, and all those other ex-commie tongues.

His inaugural address was the briefest in US history – less than 600 words – and his message simple: the people of America were ‘passing through a period of supreme test’ during which they had learned ‘to live as men and not as ostriches’ and to be ‘citizens of the world’. He promised that, ‘In the days and the years that are to come, we shall work for a just and honorable peace, a durable peace, as today we work and fight for total victory in war.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with King Abdel-Aziz ibn Saud, the founder of the modern Saudi dynasty, while returning from the Allied summit conference in Yalta. Although the details of this meeting have never been made public, it is widely believed that Abdel-Aziz offered Roosevelt unlimited access to Saudi oil in return for a U.S. pledge to protect the royal family against internal and external attack. And whatever the exact nature of this agreement, the United States has served as Saudi Arabia’s principal defender ever since.