Operation Argonaut and Ukraine

As a result of this decision, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were relocated from Europe to the Far East, where as part of the Soviet forces, they routed the Kwangtung (Guangdong) Army and stormed the Kuril Islands. Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, who was born in Odesa, successfully commanded one of the three newly-formed fronts, while our fellow countryman from Uman district, Lieutenant-General Kuzma Derevianko, signed, on behalf of the Soviet Supreme Commander-in-Chief together with the representatives of the other great powers, Japan’s act of unconditional surrender on September 2, 1945, which put a formal end to the Second World War.

The conference focused considerably on the future borders of the European states, including a restored Poland, which had a direct bearing on Ukraine. In general, the Polish question occupied more discussion time than any other topic in Yalta.

Earlier, at the Teheran Conference in 1943, the US and Britain had attempted to call into question Ukraine’s western border established in 1939. At the time the Soviet delegation had pointed out that this border was correct from the ethnic point of view and referred to the so-called Curzon line proposed in 1919 by the Entente Supreme Council as the eastern border of Poland. In response, Winston Churchill displayed a map on which the Curzon line’s southern segment was drawn east of Lviv, thus leaving the city in Polish territory. The Soviet side in turn produced the text of British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon’s radiogram of July 12, 1920, which listed the points through which the border must pass: Grodno — Jaliwka — Brest — Dorohusk — Ustyluh — east of Hrubeshiv via Kryliv, and then west of Rava-Ruska and east of Peremyshl as far as the Carpathians. In other words, Lviv (Lwow at the time) appeared to be part of Ukraine. For lack of other arguments, Churchill was forced to declare, “I am not going to make a fuss about Lviv.” Then he said to Joseph Stalin, “In principle, there are no serious differences between us.”

Yet, at the Crimean Conference, Franklin D. Roosevelt tried (with Churchill’s consent) to revise the previous agreement. He called for “concessions to the Poles in the southern segment of the Curzon line.” This in fact amounted to deviating from the line rather than questioning its legitimacy. Stalin said to this: “The authors of the Curzon line are Curzon, Clemenceau (prime minister of France and chairman of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919- 1920 — Author ) and the Americans. There were no Russians at that conference. The Curzon line was adopted on the basis of ethnographic data... What will the Ukrainians say if we accept your proposal? You will put us to shame.” It was stressed that this proposal did not fit in with the ethnic composition of the region, where the Ukrainians comprised the majority. Acceptance of the Curzon line as a basis for resolving the problem was in itself a major concession, for this line left a considerable part of ethnic Ukrainian lands — the Posiannia, Pidliashshia, Kholm, and Lemko regions — under Warsaw’s control. It was also announced that during the Moscow talks in October 1944 three members of the Polish government in exile, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, Stanislaw Grabski, and Tadeusz Romer, had willingly accepted territorial compensation at the expense of Poland’s western territories seized by Germany. As a result of these irrefutable arguments, the conference reached the following conclusion: “The three heads of government consider that the eastern frontier of Poland should follow the Curzon Line with digressions from it in some regions of five to eight kilometers in favor of Poland.” Lviv was considered part of Ukraine. This Yalta Conference decision laid the groundwork for all subsequent international agreements and is also the basis for today’s nearly 550-km- long Ukrainian-Polish border.

One of the most important items on the Crimean Conference’s agenda was the creation of the United Nations Organization (UNO) to promote international security and cooperation. In particular, the “Big Three” discussed which countries would attend the UN founding conference. Earlier, at the 1943 Teheran Conference and in the course of further correspondence between the leaders of the great powers, the USSR suggested that the future international organization include as members all 16 Soviet republics. Roosevelt said in reply that in this case all 48 US states should also be UN members. To break the deadlock, the Soviet delegation changed its position and stated on February 7 that it considered “correct and fair if three or, at worst, two Soviet republics were among the initiators of the international organization. We mean Ukraine, Belorussia, and Lithuania.” Reference was made to Ukraine’s recognized importance, population size, and economic resources. Ukraine and the other “named republics suffered the greatest losses in the war and were the first territories invaded by the Germans.” Roosevelt then insisted that this problem would be solved if his country were given more than one vote in the UN. In the end, Stalin agreed that the US and the USSR would have three votes each (in the latter case, one for the USSR and one each for Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belorussia). The conference resolved that Ukraine and Belorussia would be among the UN’s founding members.

Naturally, Stalin was not thinking of Ukraine’s interests in Yalta but the need to gain additional votes in the future UN and the solution of some difficult domestic problems. For instance, speaking to Roosevelt on February 7, he complained about “the difficult situation in Ukraine,” where the national movement was well on the rise. According to Stalin, Ukraine’s membership in the UN was indispensable for the preservation of unity in the USSR. To this end, in 1944 people’s commissariats of defense and foreign affairs were established in Ukraine and other Soviet republics, which made them de jure subjects of international law. This contrasted favorably with Hitler’s policy of partitioning Ukraine, eliminating any forms of statehood, and exterminating the Ukrainian people as such.

Naturally, Stalin was watching closely so that these steps did not cross the line he had drawn and had no adverse effect on the federal state. When playwright Oleksandr Korniychuk, who was appointed Ukraine’s people’s commissar of foreign affairs on February 5, 1944, proposed a rather modest reorganization of his agency, whereby it would remain a branch of the All-Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs but would still be able to establish direct diplomatic relations with other counties, he was promptly dismissed from this post in July 1944. On June 26, 1945, a different and more cautious people’s commissar, Dmytro Manuilsky, signed the UN Charter on behalf of Soviet Ukraine.

In any case, the Yalta Conference’s decisions on Soviet Ukraine’s accession to the UN were undoubtedly a positive fact: Ukraine was returning to the international arena, albeit on a limited scale. In spite of Stalin’s subjective intentions, the objective status of Ukraine as a founding member of the UN was an important cornerstone of its independence, which was proclaimed in 1991.

Ukraine was also deeply interested in the implementation of other decisions that were made in Yalta, including the reparations protocol, which was signed after a lengthy debate and mutual recriminations. This document obliged Germany to compensate for the losses it had inflicted on the countries that suffered from its aggression. The reparations envisaged the requisition of a variety of equipment, ships, railway rolling stock, industrial enterprises’ shares, a supply of consumer goods, as well as German labor. Although the reparations never reached the planned targets, Kyiv alone received 8,300 carloads of equipment and goods in 1945-1946 from Germany and its client states. German prisoners of war were also involved in the reconstruction of the crippled economy.

The Big Three also signed an agreement concerning the reciprocal repatriation of the allied states’ POWs and civilians, which made it possible in 1945-1946 to repatriate 1,036,000 American, British, French, Polish, Yugoslav, and other prisoners of war liberated by Soviet troops from Nazi captivity. In 1945-1949, nearly 5,416,000 Soviet citizens were repatriated to the USSR, 37% of whom (1,524,000) were Ukrainians and 36.8% (1,488,000) Russians.

The fate of these repatriated people varied. The vast majority of Ukrainian civilian slave laborers in Germany — 1,137,000 — were reunited with their families in their former places of residence. Out of the 387,000 liberated Ukrainian POWs, about half of them joined Soviet Army units, 17% were deported to the Gulag, and over 30% were consigned to so-called working battalions, in fact slave labor teams, at industrial enterprises.

It is impossible to assess the course and importance of the Yalta Conference correctly without understanding the role of the individual participants and the importance of their decisions. In particular, facts that have come to light now disprove the claim that Roosevelt was too acquiescent because of his illness and Stalin’s pressure.

The US president became disabled in 1921 at the age of 39 and was confined to a special wheelchair. This did not prevent him from being elected president in 1932 and reelected in 1936, 1940, and 1944 (the two last terms as a wartime exception). Naturally, his health had not improved during those years, and the burden of war-related worries had been sapping his strength. Yet he continued to work vigorously, embarking on long journeys by land, sea, and air. It was Roosevelt who proposed the idea to hold a conference in the Crimea and actively worked toward this goal. According to the conference minutes and observations of the participants, while in Yalta Roosevelt effectively chaired the sessions (on Stalin’s suggestion): he was always composed, attentive, calm, witty, and quick on the uptake when somebody was speaking. He knew how to devise a formula that could reconcile the arguers. Everyone was surprised by his stamina, cheerfulness, and alertness during the lengthy sessions. In addition, the president was absorbed in the affairs of his own country via a communications center on board the USS Catoctin anchored off Sevastopol.

President Roosevelt consistently defended US interests at the conference. Having talked the Soviet leader into declaring war on Japan, he made it clear that the West would oppose excessive Soviet influence on the countries of Eastern Europe. At the very first session the American leader asked Stalin if the European-gauge railroads in the Red Army-occupied territories were being refitted for a broader gauge, which would mean that these states would have closer ties (at least in economic terms) with the USSR. Stalin had to assure him that he had no such intentions. Roosevelt also succeeded in ensuring that in the Declaration on Liberated Europe the three powers pledged to ensure the restoration of the sovereign rights of peoples and the resolution of political and economic problems by democratic methods based on the principles of the Atlantic Charter and the UN Declaration. The Soviet side also made a number of other concessions. It was decided that voting in the UN Security Council would take place according to the US-proposed formula: equality of the great powers’ votes and refusal of an interested party to vote. The USSR agreed to closer coordination of the allied war effort, granting France an occupation zone in Germany and a seat in the Control Commission, accepted the West’s compromise wording on the composition of the Polish government and holding free elections in that country, and accepted the US viewpoint on how to solve the reparations problem, etc.

Of course, Roosevelt was a realistic politician, well aware of the need to take into account the limits of pressure on the opposing side and of the latter’s pliability. He proceeded from the existing correlation of forces and common interests of states. It was this approach and the ability to cooperate with their partners that enabled the Big Three to make decisions in Yalta that were acceptable for each of them and to avoid ill-advised steps. For instance, according to Ambassador William Averell Harriman, “there were no negotiations about any division of the world.” The point is that, as the minutes say, when Winston Churchill visited Moscow in October 1944, he drew up what he himself called “a rather dirty and crude document” that indicated the division of the Soviet and British “spheres of influence” in Eastern Europe. Stalin did not express his stance toward this proposal and did not discuss it. He merely ticked this paper off with a blue pencil, which might equally mean that he agreed with what was written there or that he had read it. Given the vague reaction of his Soviet partner, Churchill chose not to attempt anything similar in Yalta. The USSR’s influence on postwar Eastern Europe was based not on some international documents but on the actual balance of power, the presence of Soviet troops in a number of countries, and the existence of economic, political, and ideological leverage.

The conference produced agreements which, as the participants estimated, could help avoid unleashing a new world war in the next 50 years. A representative international symposium held at Lyvadiya in early February 2005 noted that in the last 60 years humanity has managed to avert a worldwide military conflagration. Europe, including Ukraine, still has the borders that were proposed in Yalta. The UN, established in compliance with the agreements reached there, is still actively functioning. This international forum clearly hears the voice of independent Ukraine, a country that became one of its founders in accordance with the fateful decisions made in 1945 in the Crimea.