UNGUARDED MOMENTS

ON Stalin's night to play host at dinner, "The atmosphere," says the record, "was most cordial and 45 toasts in all were drunk." Under sparkling chandeliers at Yusupovsky Palace sat the men casually engaged in reshaping the globe.

Marshal Stalin, the cobbler's son who was on the way to inheriting a quarter of the earth, proposed a toast to the Prime Minister of Great Britain: "The bravest governmental figure in the world . . . fighting friend, and a brave man." Winston Churchill, the pink-cheeked giant of Western statesmen, who was about to be ousted from power, raised glass to Marshal Stalin, who, "in peace no less than in war, will continue to lead his people from success to success." Stalin drank to the health of the President of the U.S.. "the chief forger of the instruments [for] mobilization of the world against Hitler." Franklin Delano Roosevelt, gentleman by birth and democrat by career, who was soon to die, offered his toast, to "give every man, woman and child on this earth the possibility of security and well-being."

That was Yalta. More of it lay in the quips, anecdotes, frank confidences and muttered asides with which the Yalta-men laid onto the table their thoughts.

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"The President," said the transcript of a private Stalin-Roosevelt conversation, "said he would now tell the marshal something indiscreet, since he would not say it in front of Prime Minister Churchill--namely, that the British for two years have had the idea of artificially building up France into a strong power ... He said the British were a peculiar people and wished to have their cake and eat it, too."

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Prophetically, it turned out, Churchill remarked at a dinner that he was the only leader present who could be turned out of office by his people at any time. "Marshall Stalin ironically remarked that the Prime Minister seemed to fear . . . elections, to which the Prime Minister replied that he not only did not fear them, but he was proud of the right of the British people to change their government any time they saw fit."

But Stalin himself did not think Churchill had much to worry about. "Marshal Stalin remarked that he did not believe the Labor Party would ever be successful in forming a government in England."

Stalin, said Churchill, had a much easier political task, since he had only one party to deal with.

Yes, replied Stalin, experience has shown that one party is of great convenience to a leader of a state.

...

As the conference was about to break up, Roosevelt was impatient to leave. "I have three Kings waiting for me in the Near East," he explained.

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Stalin remarked that "the Jewish problem was a very difficult one, that the Russians had tried to establish a national home for the Jews in Birobidzhan, but they had only stayed there two or three years and then scattered to the cities."

I am a Zionist, said Roosevelt to Stalin. Are you?

Yes, said Stalin, but I recognize the difficulty.

...

At their first Yalta tete-`a-tete, Roosevelt and Stalin recalled Stalin's toast at Teheran a year before to the idea of executing 50,000 German army officers as reprisal.

"The President said he had been very much struck by the extent of German destruction in the Crimea, and therefore he was more bloodthirsty in regard to the Germans than he had been a year ago. And he hoped that Marshal Stalin would again propose a toast to the execution of 50,000 officers of the German army."

Everyone was more bloodthirsty, said Stalin. "He said the Germans were savages, and seemed to hate with a sadistic hatred the creative work of human beings. The President agreed ..."

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Indo-China, Stalin told Roosevelt at a private meeting, was a very important area. To the Russian dictator, who stood no higher than 5 ft. 4 in., the President said that "the Indo-Chinese were people of small stature, like the Javanese and Burmese, and were not warlike."

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Churchill exploded when the Big Three began to take up the U.S. idea of postwar trusteeships. "He did not agree with one word of the trusteeship report . . . Under no circumstances would he ever consent to 40 or 50 nations thrusting interfering fingers into the life's existence of the British Empire." Later Churchill said that the principles which had been incorporated in the Atlantic Charter were already in force throughout the British Empire. "I sent a copy of this interpretation to Wendell Willkie," he added.

The President: "Was that what killed him? (Laughter.)"

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