Yalta was a carve-up — and the Poles are understandably still bitter about it

‘The strong do what they can. The weak suffer what they must.’ Thucydides’ principle expresses an uncomfortable truth. The eight-day meeting between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945 settled the fate of Eastern Europe and beyond. Its effects are still with us. President George W. Bush compared it with the way Britain, France and the Soviet Union sold out to Hitler before the war began: he called it ‘one of the greatest wrongs of history’. ‘Yalta’, like ‘Munich’, has become a synonym for the cynical betrayal of the weak by the strong. It is an oft-told, well-documented and controversial story. Diana Preston retells it fluently, perceptively and with meticulous scholarship. Her judgments are admirably sensible.

The episode is more complicated than the received view. In February 1945 the world was still viciously at war. Many hundreds of thousands, soldiers and civilians, were still to die. The Red Army already held Poland in a firm grip. It was mopping up in Hungary. In the previous three weeks it had advanced 300 miles to within 50 miles of Berlin. The Russians had already lost some seven million soldiers in dead and wounded. By the time the war ended, they would have lost 27 million soldiers and civilians altogether.

Though their casualties were far fewer, the British and Americans were still fighting desperately against the Germans in the west and against fanatical Japanese resistance in the east. It was not until August 1945 that a kind of peace arrived — at least for the people of Britain and America. On the Continent there were wandering millions, escaping from the advancing armies, liberated from concentration and prisoner-of-war camps or expelled from places where their ancestors had lived for centuries. It would be years before some of them found a home.