Why did the Allies agree that elections would be held in Soviet-occupied territories in Eastern Europe after the war?
1 Answer
It is interesting that I am reading about the subject in the book of A. Beevor about the Second World War:
Explanation:
From what I read, during the Yalta Conference (shortly before the fall of the Reich) the representatives of the three powers, Churchill for Great Britain, Roosevelt for the USA and Stalin for the USSR met to decide about the future of, basically, the World.
Churchill wanted to protect the Poles trying to establish free elections and let the people decide; Stalin was not so keen to let the Poles escape from his grip (he loathed the Poles and wanted a shield kind of nation to protect Russia from future "surprises" as in Operation Barbarossa!) and basically said: "we are occupying Poland and...well....we'll do what we like" in particular he had already placed a provisional puppet government (many "ministers" were from the Red Army) and the secret service, the NKVD, was already rounding up suspected collaborators, "fascists" and conspirators (to what?) to be shot or sent to the Gulags...needless to say that a lot of loyal polish freedom fighters fell into these categories for the simple fact of not being communist! Same thing was going to happen in Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, etc.
Roosevelt could have been the third force to counterbalance Stalin's arrogance but he was too sick to argue energetically and he had the dream of a post war United Nations body that would put an end to all wars (again...) and needed Stalin's support. So Roosevelt ignored Churchill and tended to accept Stalin's view and arrogant posture (you have to remember that Stalin wanted the border with Poland to be the same as he established 5 years before with the Nazi and also tended to arrogantly dismiss the atrocities he and his cronies perpetrated in Poland such as the Katyn massacre of Polish army officers).
Roosevelt also wanted the USSR to enter the war against the Japanese (although his generals probably were not very enthusiastic about it!).
At the end even Churchill had to bow his head when Stalin hinted that he already had conceded to the western allies to retain France and Greece having ordered the communist partisans in both nations to accept the legal governments!
The two, Roosevelt and Churchill, accepted that "free" (?) elections were going to be held in Soviet occupied territories without supervision and with obvious results (some of them were even already secretly established) because the famous Realpolitik lemma: "you give me something and I give you something". Everybody knew that the elections were a farce but at that moment they all needed Stalin (and probably they feared him).
