A View from Livadia Palace
By Israel Shamir and AD Hemming

I drove up to white and sumptuous Livadia Palace with
some difficulty. The palace, once a royal summer
residence built and frequented by the last Russian Tsar,
stands on a rather steep slope amidst a spacious park
that descends to the Black Sea far below, and the road
is scary. But who cares: the view is superb – taking in
all of Yalta Bay -- with tranquil sea reflecting
mountains touched by the autumn purple and a few ships
in the harbour. Now, in late autumn, I had the glorious
palace all to myself – I answered a call from Washington
DC (albeit on my mobile) in the same oak-panelled
bedroom once assigned to Roosevelt!
The Palace hosted the historic Yalta conference in
February 1945; there is still the circular table around
which Franklin D Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef
Stalin divided the spoils of war and established the
post-WWII order which lasted almost half a century. My
Lonely Planet guidebook speaks of Livadia as the
place where Stalin “bullied Churchill”. What actually
went on between Stalin and Churchill? We know that soon
after the war, in his Fulton speech, Churchill
jump-started the Cold War; but not everybody knows that
the Cold War was his second choice – his first choice
was a real war against Soviet Russia with its
stated purpose “to
impose upon Russia the will of the United States and of
the British Empire”.
Some historical discoveries have to be constantly
recalled, as they have not seeped into our received
understanding of the world. One such revelation never to
be forgotten is the well-hidden story of ultimate
treachery planned in 1945: after four hard years of
terrible war, when the allies had just defeated Hitler,
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill prepared a
surprise attack on his erstwhile ally Russia in
coalition with Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht troops. The
unexpected assault on Russians was scheduled to begin
near Dresden on the first day of July, 1945. Churchill
intended to use, besides 47 British and American
divisions, ten crack German divisions he did not disband
so that he could send them back to the Eastern front to
fight the Russkies. Churchill was willing and eager to
launch this assault on Moscow's army without declaration
of war as perfidiously as Hitler had in 1941. Sir Alan
Brooke, the top officer in the British army, said of
Churchill that he was "longing for another war."
Stalin learned of the plan; it confirmed his worst
expectations of British intentions, solidified his hold
on the Eastern Europe and probably made him even more
implacable. After some thinking, US President Harry
Truman refused to give Churchill his support: the war
with Japan was still far from concluding, the A-bomb was
not operational yet and he needed Russian help. (Perhaps
Roosevelt would have reject it faster, but he died soon
after Yalta). “Operation Unthinkable” was aborted,
shelved and languished for many years until released to
public view in 1998.
In May 1945, the Brits did not disband some 700,000
German soldiers and officers. The Germans surrendered
their arms; but the weapons were stacked, not destroyed,
under explicit orders of Churchill, who intended to
rearm the Germans and send them against the Russians.
British military governor Montgomery explained in his
Notes on the Occupation of Germany that the German units
were not disbanded for “we had nowhere to put them if
they were disbanded and we could not guard them if they
were dispersed”. Even worse, the British wouldn’t be
able to use them as slave labour and starve them
if they were considered POW's (“We should have to
feed them on a relatively high scale of rations”).
This explanation is bad enough, but in a handwritten
note he left behind he gave an even worse reason:
Churchill “ordered that I
[Montgomery] was not to destroy the weapons of the 2
million Germans who had surrendered on Luneburg Heath on
the 4th May. All must be kept, we might have to fight
the Russians with German help.”
The full story has been published by David Reynolds in
his study
of the Second World War (he noted that Churchill omitted
this from his memoirs). The original documents were
published by the British national archives and can be
found in some form on the web, and on a good blog
http://howitreallywas.typepad.com/
. Still the story has not registered with the public
conscience to the same extent that accusations against
the Soviets have become a part of the historical
background. We all know that Stalin made a deal with
Hitler before the war, and that he kept Eastern Europe
under his control after the war. But we usually are not
told the circumstances. Even those who have heard about
Operation Unthinkable usually suspect it of being an
example of Stalinist propaganda.
This story explains why Stalin considered Churchill, in
the 1930s, a more implacable enemy of the Soviets than
Hitler, and why he was ready to enter the
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. He understood Churchill better
than many contemporaries, and knew of his pathological
hatred of Communism.
As World War I ended in November 1918, Churchill had
proposed a new policy: “Kill the Bolshie, kiss the Hun”.
(These remarks are cited by the Churchill hagiographer
Sir Martin Gilbert). In April 1919, Churchill referred
to the "subhuman goals" of Moscow's Communists and
especially of Leon Trotsky and his "Asiatic millions".
The rise of Fascism did not change anything to his way
of thinking. In 1937, when the Nuremberg Laws were
already in place, he said in the House of Commons: “I
will not pretend that, if I had to choose between
communism and Nazism, I would choose communism.” The
Communists were “baboons”, but Adolf Hitler “would go
down in history as the man who restored honour and peace
of mind in the great Germanic nation". In 1943, he
praised Benito Mussolini for rescuing Italy from the
Communists and said that Mussolini’s “great roads will
remain a monument to his personal power and long reign”.
This remark he preserved for eternity in Closing the
Ring, the fifth volume of his multi-volume history
of the Second World War.
Churchill considered Communism a
“Jewish plot”; his love for Zionism was partly based on
his belief that Zionists would take Communism off the
Jewish mind. In 1920, long before Henry Ford, he spoke
of the International Jew: “This movement among the Jews
is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to
those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela
Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma
Goldman (United States)... this worldwide conspiracy for
the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution
of society on the basis of arrested development, of
envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been
steadily growing. They have become practically the
undisputed masters of that enormous empire [Russia].”
Hitler was only plagiarizing him.
If Churchill had had his way, who
knows how it would have ended, and how many people would
have been killed? The Soviet army had four times as many
soldiers and twice as many tanks as the British and
Americans combined. It was battle-tried, well-equipped –
it had had two months of rest. Probably the Russians
would have been able to repeat their achievement of 1815
and liberated France with the support of its strong
communist movement. Or perhaps the Soviets would have
been pushed back to their borders, and Poland would have
joined NATO in 1945 instead of 1995. The US President
dismissed Churchill’s plan; Truman was the mass murderer
of Hiroshima, but he was not in a suicidal mood.
In 1945, Churchill was worried that the Russians would
continue their westward march, to France and then the
English Channel. This was his explanation for Operation
Unthinkable. However, Joseph Stalin was scrupulously
straightforward in his dealings with the West: Not only
did he not send his tanks westward, he never crossed the
lines established in Livadia Palace by the Yalta
Conference of February 1945.
He did not support the Greek Communists who were very
close to victory, and who undoubtedly would have won
the day but for British intervention. The Greeks
appealed to Stalin for help, but he told them he had
given his word to Churchill: “Russians will have 90% of
the say in Romania, British - 90% of the say in Greece,
and go 50/50 about Yugoslavia”. He did not support the
Italian and French Communists, and removed his troops
from Iran. He was a most reliable ally, even to people
who were not themselves reliable. He was not an adept of
parliamentary democracy, but nor were his counterparts,
the American and the British leaders; they
accepted democracy only if and when they liked the
results. They prevented communist victory by their guns,
he prevented anti-communist victory by same means.
So Churchill’s treachery was not needed for its stated
goal. Probably, British and American soldiers would not
have understood the idea of fighting the Russians for
whose victory they had prayed but a few weeks before,
the same Russians who had saved them when the German
Ardennes counter-offensive was about to send the
invasion armies down the way of Dunkirk. Thankfully, it
never came to trial: the British people voted the old
warmonger out.
The idea of using German Nazi military potential against
the Soviets did not die, however. In a provocative piece
called HOW THE NAZIS WON THE WAR, Noam Chomsky has
written about “. . .the US State Department and British
intelligence, which took some of the worst Nazi
criminals and used them, at first in Europe. For
example, Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Lyon [France], was
taken over by US intelligence and put back to work.”
“General Reinhard Gehlen was the head of German military
intelligence on the eastern front. That's where the real
war crimes were. Now we're talking about Auschwitz and
other death camps. Gehlen and his network of spies and
terrorists were taken over quickly by American
intelligence and returned to essentially the same roles.
This was a breach of Yalta accord, one of many committed
by the West.
“Recruiting Nazi war criminals and saving them is bad
enough, but imitating their activities is worse”. The
purpose of the US and England, writes Chomsky, was “to
destroy the anti-fascist resistance and restore the
traditional, essentially fascist, order to power.”
“In Korea, restoring the traditional order meant killing
about 100,000 people just in the late 1940s, before the
Korean War began. In Greece, it meant destroying the
anti-Nazi resistance and restoring Nazi collaborators to
power. When British and then American troops moved into
southern Italy, they simply reinstated the fascist
order-the industrialists. But the big problem came when
the troops got to the north, which the Italian
resistance had already liberated. The place was
functioning- industry was running. We had to dismantle
all of that and restore the old order.”
“Next we [the US] worked on destroying the democratic
process. The left was obviously going to win the
elections; it had a lot of prestige from the resistance,
and the traditional conservative order had been
discredited. The US wouldn't tolerate that. At its first
meeting, in 1947, the National Security Council decided
to withhold food and use other sorts of pressure to
undermine the election.”
“But what if the communists still won? In its first
report, NSC 1, the council made plans for that
contingency: the US would declare a national emergency,
put the Sixth Fleet on alert in the Mediterranean and
support paramilitary activities to overthrow the Italian
government. That's a pattern that's been relived over
and over. If you look at France and Germany and Japan,
you get pretty much the same story.”
According to Chomsky, the US and Britain were first of
all against Communism. The Nazis took a second seat in
the gallery of hated regimes. Though nowadays racism is
considered a no-go, there is no reason to assume that
Nazi Germany was any more racist than England or the US.
In the US, intermarriage between blacks and whites was
illegal or criminal until recently; lynching of blacks
was a common affair. The British practised ethnic
cleansing all over the world, from Ireland to India. The
USSR was the only major non-racist state, led by (beside
Russians) Georgians, Jews, Armenians and Poles.
Intermarriage was encouraged, and a kind of
multiculturalism was the operational doctrine. Yet it
was Communism which could not be forgiven.
Though Churchill did not send the Wehrmacht to fight the
Russians in 1945, the transition to the Cold War was far
from bloodless. In the Ukraine, the US supported and
armed pro-Nazi nationalists for several years to come.
And even nuking Hiroshima may be seen as the first act
of Cold War, says
New Scientist: “The US decision to drop atomic bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was
meant to kick-start
the Cold War rather than end the Second
World War, according to two nuclear historians who say
they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.
Killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was
done more to impress
the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they
say. And the US President who made the decision, Harry
Truman, was culpable, they add. (For more evidence that
Hiroshima was nuked in order to impress the Russians see
here).
If so, NATO's 1999 War against Yugoslavia can be seen as
one of the last wars against the remnants of communism;
what we observe now in Syria is a mopping-up operation,
for the Syrian regime is mildly socialist.
However, I should tell you that among modern Russian
historians this theory – that Western policies are
wholly driven by an ideological anti-Communist streak –
has been doubted or even denied, and for good reason:
just sixty miles from Livadia lies the fortress of
Sebastopol, where united British and French forces tried
to subdue the very non-Communist Tsarist Russians in
1850s; and Yalta Bay was visited by US battleships in
2008 during the confrontation between pro-Western
Georgia and a very non-communist Putin’s Russia.
Should one explain this by the geopolitical struggle for
Heartland as per Mackinder; or by the theological
reasoning of Orthodox Christianity being attacked by
heresies; or by the Chomskian concept of Core vs. Rim?
It is beyond the scope of this article to answer this
question.
Russians are always Russians, whether Communists or
Christian Orthodox or Continental or just a Rim state
that does not submit to Core writ. Josef Stalin was then
the man in charge – a hard man, but certainly he had a
hard task and was dealing with hard people. The white
palace of Livadia is a good place to contemplate these
momentous historical events.
[Research and idea by AD Hemming, who has been an
activist for progressive causes since the early 1960s,
has been a researcher, poet, journalist, historian and
got his feet wet as a progressive in the civil rights
movement in US South as a teenager. English language
editing by Ken Freeland.]
Israel Shamir is now in the Crimea and can be reached at
adam@israelshamir.net