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The Western Leaders and the Soviet Conquest of Eastern Europe
| Article
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12245 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1987 |
9,778 Words |
| Author
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Alan J. Levine
Alan J. Levine is a historian specializing in twentieth-
century international relations and the author of From the
Normandy Beaches to the Baltic Sea. |
One of the intellectual oddities of recent years has been the resurrection of the belief, common in the 1950s, that the Yalta agreements and the policies of the Roosevelt administration during World War II lie at the root of the West's difficulties with the Soviet Union. A noteworthy controversy erupted after the appearance of an article by John Colville, Winston Churchill's private secretary, in the September 1985 issue of Commentary magazine. Colville's article, "How the West Lost the Peace in 1945," and additional remarks by other commentators in Commentary's November 1985 issue provoked a rejoinder by Theodore Draper in the New York Review of Books in January 1986. Draper treated the Colcille article as an example of "neoconservative history"--a school of thought Draper found wanting. A rather bad-tempered exchange of letters followed, published in a later issue of the New York Review of Books. Commentary, not to be outdone, produced a counterattack on Draper, "Ualta and the Neconservatives," by Paul Seabury. There may be little excuse for yet another examination of Yalta and the controversy over wartime policies toward the Soviets. A review of the Colville, Draper, and Seabury articles, however, suggests that there is a great deal more to be said, although Theodore draper's views are far better grounded in the historical record than those of his opponents, all the participants in this quarrel-which is more emotional than historical suffer from significant and tenacious misconceptions about what happened. All avoid asking certain pertinent (if unpleasant) questions, and their arguments, after all, are not minor academic squabbles. Curiously, not only the issues they examine, but the nature of the controversy itself -the questions they have chosen to ask and those they don't -may offer clues to the present dilemmas of the Western world. That Colville's article in Commentary should attract such attention and such widespread approvals itself curious. There is nothing original in it; and nothing, surprisingly, that derives form Colville's own observations within the British government. Little can be related to the not-very-revealing contents of Colville's diaries, published in 1985 as The Fringes of Power. Colville's article in Commentary is actually a regurgitated, uncritical summary of a brilliant book published in 1952, Chester Wilmot's The Struggle for Europe, that crystallized certain ideas about wartime strategy and diplomacy then widespread on both side of the Atlantic. Wilmot, who died in 1954, was a superb historian, but he wrote before many acts about wartime political polices and diplomacy were available. Some of his ideas were disproven as early as 1953, when the last volume of Churchill's war memories was published, and unfortunately Colville chose to base his arguments on those of Wilmot's
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