I don’t know, but there were agreements with the Soviets, never enforced, to allow free elections in the Eastern European countries. How could they have been enforced? I don’t know, but why make agreements if you’re not going to try to enforce them? Eastern Europe, remember, wasn’t just unconditionally handed over to Stalin. And yet it was betrayed.
See, you just hit on the two biggest problems in the whole deal.
1. How do you enforce Stalin’s agreements? He never intended to keep them. They were window dressing. The only thing Stalin respected was force and power. So long as he had his army in Poland, it wasn’t going to leave without greater force being applied to it. He knew damn well the West had no stomach for it. Poland wasn’t Pearl Harbor. I don’t see how you get enough Americans fired up to fight the USSR. Stalin didn’t, either.
2. You used the one term that has bothered me the most when I see this debate: that we “handed over” Poland to Stalin. No, we didn’t. You assume Poland was “ours” to “hand over.”
It never was. Our army never occupied it for us to be in position to “betray it.”
“Eastern Europe, remember, wasn’t just unconditionally handed over to Stalin. And yet it was betrayed.”
Yet not a peep about the 24,000 ‘liberated’ US POWs Stalin interred in gulags? Stalin used them to obtain concessions and very few came back. The Brits got some of theirs back by bargaining away the lives of 2,000,000 Cossacks who had fled westward into Czechoslovakia. The Cossacks, and their families, were unloaded from the trains into quarries and machine-gunned.