"The real problems lay not in negotiation but in assumptions. Churchill and Roosevelt—who were right about Hitler from afar—were both captivated by Stalin when they met him in the flesh. Hopeful that the Soviet Union was gradually shedding its revolutionary skin, they saw a man of business with whom they could conduct meaningful negotiation. Both hoped and, to a large extent, believed that he could be trusted. Whenever doubts welled up, particularly for Churchill, he looked into the abyss, recognized that confrontation, let alone war, was “unthinkable,” and pushed on with the search for cooperation. Contrary to French mythology, Yalta was not the moment when the big powers crudely divided Europe. Churchill and FDR were still resisting a stark separate-spheres deal of the sort advocated by George Kennan. Nor was Yalta a sellout of Eastern Europe to the Soviets, as claimed by the Republican right: it was already clear that the Soviet Union would be the predominant influence in Eastern Europe. That had been decided on the battlefields of Russia in 1942–3, by the Allied failure to mount a second front until June 1944, and by the understandings already reached at Teheran in November 1943 and Moscow in October 1944. When they went to Yalta, Churchill and Roosevelt sought only to “ameliorate” Soviet influence."