Crimea decisions kept from masses¶
Core Argument¶
Here, the chapter from Socialist Appeal (March 1945) mounts a polemical assault on the official narrative surrounding the Yalta (Crimea) Conference. Its core argument is that the conference was a fraud, a piece of imperialist stage-management whose real decisions were deliberately concealed from the working class. The public declarations—the destruction of Germany, the recognition of the Lublin government in Poland—are dismissed as either stale repetitions of existing policy or cynical rearrangements of bourgeois puppets. The Polish question is used to illustrate the fundamental continuity: the London and Lublin governments are presented as twin faces of capitalist reaction, equally hostile to the Polish masses, who were betrayed at Warsaw and will be forced to fight again.
The chapter’s most incisive move is its forensic reading of Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons. It contrasts the trivial details of banquets and tourist sites with the glaring silence on substantive issues. The precedent of Teheran is invoked: there, the “Big Three” secretly agreed to crush the Greek revolution, a decision only revealed a year later. The chapter argues that the same logic must apply to Yalta. With all Europe a “volcano” of economic chaos and revolutionary potential, the suppression of the coming European revolutions must have been the conference’s major unspoken agenda. The Stalinist press is accused of cynically endorsing “democratic demands” while the real content of the agreement—a plot against the working class—remains secret.
The polemic extends to the geopolitical carve-up. The chapter points to conflicts over Middle Eastern oil, the fate of French and Japanese colonies, and Stalin’s Far Eastern claims, noting that Churchill uttered not a word on these. The public agreement on a new League of Nations is derided as a “glorified” impotence, incapable of mediating the inevitable conflict between the USA and the USSR. The text’s theoretical thrust is Marxist: it argues that the root causes of war—capitalist competition and imperialist rivalry—cannot be resolved by the “arguments of the imperialist powers with the Stalinist bureaucracy.” The secret diplomacy of Yalta, it concludes, lays the foundations for a third world war. The only alternative posed is a socialist United States of Europe, led by a revolutionary German working class, against the Balkanisation and misery that the conference’s real decisions guarantee. The chapter ends with a demand for an end to secret diplomacy and for the working class to know the plots being hatched against it.