"Putting all this together during March 1945, British and American leaders detected a fundamental and sinister shift of Soviet policy. Why it had happened, however, seemed less clear. Most attempts at explanation took as their premise the continued good faith of Stalin himself: that seemed to be one of the lessons of Yalta, indeed of wartime summitry as a whole. Therefore the change of heart was presumed to lie with his advisors—those sinister forces supposedly swirling around in the shadowy recesses of the Kremlin. British Cabinet Minister Ernest Bevin (soon to become foreign secretary) suggested that blame for the turnaround should be ascribed to Molotov. Alternatives postulated by the Foreign Office were the “Party bosses behind the scenes” or “Army marshals at the front” who were throwing their weight about amid the chaos of Eastern Europe. Churchill was similarly unwilling to blame Stalin. On 5 April he wrote darkly to FDR about “the Soviet leaders, whoever they may be.”"
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Members of the Parliament of the United KingdomAnti-communistsLabour Party (UK) politiciansGovernment ministersLabor leaders
Original Language: English
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Sources
David Reynolds, Summits: Six Meetings That Changed the World (2007), pp. 149-150
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ernest_Bevin
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Ernest Bevin
Ernest Bevin (9 March 1881 – 14 April 1951) was a British statesman, Labour politician, and trade union leader. He co-founded and served as general secretary of the powerful Transport and General Workers' Union from 1922 to 1940, and as Minister of Labour in Winston Churchill's coalition government during World War II. He succeeded in maximizing the British labour supply, for both the armed services and domestic industrial production, with a minimum of strikes and disruption. His most impo
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