Eighty years ago this month, the United States and Great Britain effectively conceded Eastern Europe and parts of Central Europe to Soviet control at the infamous Yalta Conference held at the Livadia Palace in the Crimea. Forty years later, President Ronald Reagan in a statement on the 40th anniversary of the Yalta Conference pledged to undo the moral stain of Yalta. The “boundary which Yalta symbolizes,” Reagan said, “can never be made legitimate.” He described it as “the dividing line between freedom and repression.” More than four years after Reagan’s remarks, on Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall started to come down and the stain of Yalta began to fade away.

Reagan had set this in motion very early in his first term when he publicly called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and prophesied that communism would end up on the ash heap of history. Reagan spoke about the economic crisis within the Soviet empire and pursued politically subversive policies that exploited Soviet vulnerabilities.
The conventional and nuclear weapons build-up was part of the strategy, but so too was aid to anti-communist resistance forces within the empire (the “Reagan Doctrine”), support for the Solidarity movement in Poland, agreements with the Saudis to reduce the price of oil, the stationing of cruise missiles and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Central Europe, and public diplomacy that undermined the legitimacy of Soviet rulers.
The “victims” of Yalta were the peoples of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, East Germany, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria who suffered 40 years of repression behind the communist “Iron Curtain.” President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill accepted (Churchill reluctantly so) Stalin’s false promise of free elections.
Stalin’s achievement and the West’s disgrace were brilliantly captured by Whittaker Chambers who after Yalta wrote a “fable” for Time magazine titled “The Ghosts on the Roof,” which imagined the Ghosts of the murd...