stalin was lying sociopath
Oh come on you guys; you are just piling on poor ol’ Uncle Joe. He says that if the Polish people so desire, they will be in an alliance with the USSR against the Germans, and then you get on him for supposedly not keeping his word. He did honor that; Poland was in an alliance with the USSR against Germany. The western half of it, anyway. And the Polish people did so desire. At least according to how Stalin had the votes counted. So give the guy a break.
Do I really need the sarc tag?
Moose, I liked your post. Far too many people of conservative bent have, in my opinion, unfairly attacked FDR for “betraying” or “giving away” Poland to the Soviets. I always ask them to answer one question: Tell me the date when the United States Army abaondoned Poland and turned it over the the Red Army? The answer is that it never happened. The Soviets wrested Poland from the Germans by conquest as they were on their way to Berlin. A look at the map of as of the date of this article makes it obvious that the outcome was unavoidable. And once the Red Army occupied Poland, there was nothing short of war with the USSR that was going to get it to leave. We tried what diplomatic and economic leverage we could on Stalin, but the simple fact was that he wasn’t going to give up Poland and he knew the United States and Great Britain were not going to resort to armed force to kick him out.
You look at Stalin’s photo attached to this article, and even though it is dated even in 1944, you can see his personality in those cunning feline eyes of his. He was brilliant, ruthless, cruel and with an incredible capacity to work. Once he divined a goal, he never deviated from it and would pay any price to get it. Just what the Russians revere in a leader.
He did play FDR and Churchill against each other. He knew, far better than Hitler, how to drive a wedge between them. Churchill wished to preserve the British Empire, FDR wanted it liquidated. Stalin knew of this difference and exploited that fundamental wedge issue for all it was worth. FDR was also far too trusting of Stalin. Stalin trusted nobody, except for a brief period from 1939-1941, when he trusted the one man nobody should trust, Adolph Hitler.