What Happened in Yalta?
Russia has taken steps to regain what was once part of the USSR. Ukraine as we all know is a sovereign state and will fight to the end to preserve its status.
So what happened at Yalta? Why is it relevant today? Stalin was at clearly at an advantage when he met with Roosevelt and Churchill.
“Yalta” (the conference and not the place) evokes powerful emotions to this day. For Russians, through the Cold War and today, Yalta symbolizes a pinnacle of great power comity and accommodation; the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently floated the idea of another Yalta Conference. For Poles, Balts, and many others in Central Europe, Yalta means a betrayal of their countries and the United States’ abandonment of its core values on the altar of Great Power politics; they (and Ukrainians) fear the United States will be tempted by a “second Yalta” in which Washington and Moscow make deals at their expense. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/
Betrayal barely describes what happened to the Baltic States and the Eastern block countries. They were plunged into decades of an economic, political, and social darkness. Why were they penalized so severly while Germany went on to recover and become an economic force in the world?
Putin is still spreading his propoganda stating Ukraine Is a Nazi regime. For years Russia used this propoganda to create a world image that it was pro Jewish that still reigns to this day even thought there were many Jews killed in the Gulags. It took years for the French left to recognize that Stalin was not a savior in any way but a brutal dictator. The collectivization of farms (which in Ukraine led to the deaths of 3.9 million people) was only one part of the horrors of the Stalin years.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/red-famine-anne-applebaum-ukraine-soviet-union/542610/
These days, the US is blamed for expanding NATO when in fact, the countries that joined were desperate to have that protection from Russia.
When the USSR collapsed there was shock around the world at how poor the country truly was. My trips to Latvia right after 1991 gave indications to how the country was run. There were no maps available since there was fear of invasion. The front door was a bourgeois entrance to a house so it was boarded up. The collective farmers struggled to survive and had to resort to hiding the extra cow that provided milk for the family. Production was decentrailized. There was one factory that made boxes for transporting chickens but those chickens came from an entirely different province. When I travelled with a Spanish friend at the time he remarked how Riga reminded him of growing up under Franco.
