By the end of 1943 it was clear which side World War II was leaning towards, so the Allied leaders agreed to meet in a neutral location to establish a joint strategy for those last moments of the conflict and the subsequent management of victory.
In the second half of November, the conference calls began with the Cairo , attended by Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang Kai-Sek, to discuss the war in the Pacific and see how they could put limits on Stalin in what was going to be a few days later.
This second time, on the 28th, Tehran had as a stage and focused on the European front, so the leaders of the USSR and the United Kingdom were there, as well as the US, the so-called Big Three; the others, like an angry de Gaulle, were left out. The German secret services got wind of the encounter and planned an attack on them, but it was discovered by the NKVD and came to nothing.
From the conference came the decision that the Soviets collaborate in all war strategies (with Operation Overlord as a reference) in exchange for aid to the Yugoslav partisans and territorial concessions in Poland.
During the day the tension between them was more than palpable:Stalin, who had had a bad trip because he suffered from aerophobia , he tried to attract the sympathy of the young shah Mohammend Pahlavi by offering him a regiment of T-34s and another of aircraft, being rejected. Likewise, he discussed Operation Overlord -which he did not see at all clearly- in person, leaving aside Marshal Voroshilov , without being able to specify a date. But he empathized with Roosevelt and that night he praised the vermouth that he had prepared.
A quick look at those evenings, synthesized from the memories and letters of each other, shows us the leaders from a different point of view , almost puerile, with continuous anger and reconciliations, in which Stalin would be the mischievous and roguish boy, Roosevelt the sympathetic conciliator, Churchill the irascible chubby man and De Gaulle the loner with whom no one wants to play.
The next day the germ of what would later become the United Nations was concretized and in the afternoon Chuchill delivered the famous sword to the Georgian. granted by George VI to the heroic defenders of Stalingrad; but this ceremonial act, which was nearly spoiled by Voroshilov's dropped gun on the floor, was only the most visible part of what was to happen for the rest of the evening. The Soviet leader offered a gargantuan dinner and spent the whole time sneaking Churchill's slyness , to Roosevelt's astonishment.
Then the British, outraged by the joke between Roosevelt and the Soviet about the number of Germans to be shot after the war (the American joked that between fifty and one hundred thousand, and the other replied that forty-nine thousand would suffice) , the mocking tone made them ugly, getting up to leave and knocking over a cognac glass in his nervousness. But before reaching the door Stalin himself hugged him , apologizing; Churchill calmed down and the other then changed his target to focus on Molotov , satirically encouraging him to tell how his magnificent pact with Hitler had been.
That hidden part of the conference bordered on surrealism when, at the party that the British legation offered for Churchill's 69th birthday, Beria He mistook the attempt of a servant to help his boss to take off her coat as a possible attack and took out his pistol, unleashing general alarm, although in the end everything was left in fright.
It would not be the only one because the dessert was two huge pyramids of ice cream with a light bulb inside and, when the base melted due to the heat, they fell just when the tray reached Stalin, exploding inside. Everyone was sprinkled with ice cream except for the Georgian, who dodged the incident subtly: “He missed the mark.” Saying goodbye on the last day, the British interpreter gave his Russian counterpart a book by Charles Dickens that the other accepted with some discomfort when his leader jokingly told him that he was getting too close to the West.
From February 4 to 11, a new conference was held in Yalta to deal with the configuration of Europe after the war. The first session went well but it started to go sour at night, when Roosevelt told Stalin that he and Churchill called him Uncle Pepe ; It was in a friendly tone but the aforementioned did not like it. The following session became famous when the British jokingly proposed to convert the Pope in ally and Stalin answered him by asking how many divisions he had. The truth is that those days were sown, telling jokes nonstop and expressing to his ambassador to the US, Andrei Gromiko, his sympathy for a Roosevelt who was already near death.
On the 8th, at another dinner in which Stalin also praised Churchill to loosen things up a bit, the US president asked about a man with glasses who was sitting next to Gromyko: “Ah, that one The Vozhd answered with his characteristic sarcasm. "That's our Himmler." He is called Beria ” . On the evening of February 10, Stalin toasted George VI's health despite the fact that the monarchy, he said, was not with the people; Churchill got irritated again.
Actually there were more meetings, less formal but just as substantial. For example, in December De Gaulle he visited Moscow and the ensuing banquet was very tense. Stalin, who had drunk too much, toasted everyone except his guest, whose arrogance he could not stand, and then dedicated himself to making fun of him, sardonically assuming the role of monster that the West ascribed to him, insinuating that he was going to have Stalin executed. all the Soviet military present and proposing to “liquidate the diplomats” with a machine gun as she hugged him stumbling. In the USSR it was normal to end parties completely drunk , with the men dancing clinging to each other due to the scarcity of women in these meetings; the ones celebrated by the Soviet leadership with their leader regularly always had that ending.
Another such moment was the visit made by the premier British to Moscow on August 12, 1941, shortly after the start of the German invasion of the USSR, to personally explain the Allied refusal to open a second front. Stalin reproached him that they could not win without taking risks and the other angrily replied that they had already fought alone in 1940.
He then told him about Operation Torch, planned to take over North Africa, which Stalin thought was nonsense, although he toasted it in an unusual way: “May God help the success of this undertaking!” However, the next day Churchill received a very critical memorandum from his colleague. that he accused the West of cowardice; the air seemed insane for the following days.
Or so it would have been if it hadn't been for the inevitable dinner, apparently worthy of Camacho Cervantina's wedding, they made peace. Stalin was charming once more until the alcohol began to take its toll on everyone; then he unleashed the usual humiliations against Voroshilov. However, late at night, Churchill retired, again feeling insulted, but so that that bitter feeling would not remain, he met the Vohzd again a little later at his private home; It was when he met his daughter Svetlana, in the middle of another great feast.
The last conference, the one in Posdam , it wasn't so funny because Roosevelt was dead and Stalin didn't like his replacement, Harry Truman (“There was no point of comparison” , he said), although the American did like the Georgian. Likewise, Churchill was halfway because he was defeated in the July elections and had to share the limelight with the insipid Clement Atlee , which in the eyes of the Soviet did not seem so “extraordinarily capable and cunning” .
However, there was time for one last shock when Churchill spoke for the first time of a steel fence (later he would transform it into a curtain) and Truman announced that they had succeeded in making an atomic bomb , causing Stalin to dismiss Molotov for Beria and order one from him as well.