The Yalta Story: 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.

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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.

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