The Yalta World (1945-2021) As A Mythological Construct

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the Yalta system of world order as a mythological construct. The latter consists of the Soviet and Anglo-Saxon myths, which in their opposition form the mythological construct Pax Yalta. In the system of international relations, at the level of macrosocial relations, it performs the functions of the episteme of power. The construct is based on the special characteristics of space-time, which provide social trust in the various mythological elements of Pax Yalta. Namely: 1) the domination of the future over the present and the elimination of the recent past as an object of scientific or political attention; 2) the state of possession of the future and the elimination of not yet formed threats to power; 3) the discourse is carried out not by countries, not by social structures, but by individuals. However, since the 90s of the twentieth century, a systemic imbalance of the space-time constants of the Yalta world has been revealed, which leads to the prospect of the collapse of the Yalta world as a mythological construct. However, the disintegration and imbalance of the mythological construct does not mean the elimination of Pax Yalta as a fact of international relations, but only indicates a crisis of trust and the return of the construct to individual myths as such.

Keywords: Episteme, myth, "Pax Yalta" structure, power, Yalta conference

Introduction

The Yalta Conference of 1945, along with the Peace of Westphalia (1648) (Trent & Schnurr, 2018) and the Versailles system of peace treaties (1919–1922), became for a long time a marker characterizing a special reality – Pax Yalta. It was carefully built and shaped by experts from both the USSR and the West (USA and Great Britain) for several decades.

The discussions that flared up in 2015–2019 with renewed vigor on the expediency of maintaining (resuscitation, revival, oblivion, overcoming) the key principles, eidos, ideologemes, universals of the Yalta world in the field of international power relations almost a century after its creation, exacerbate the relevance of addressing precisely the issues of interconnectedness mythological construct and historical event as a source of our knowledge about the past and present of the Yalta system of world order. Moreover, the mythological construct itself is increasingly perceived as: “a universal element of social communication, reproduced at all historical stages, myth-making as a process of creating a mythological message or a system of messages” (Strelnik, 2018, p. 81).

Problem Statement

How is the Yalta Conference viewed from the point of view of historical orthodoxy? Its full name is "Yalta (Crimean) Conference of the Leaders of the Three Allied Powers – USSR, USA and Great Britain (February 4-11, 1945)". For classical historical science, this is a local fact, geographically determined by the Western and Southern coast of Crimea. It is strictly chronological: all meetings, all decisions, all documents were carried out and created on February 4-11, 1945 A.D. Also, strictly local references to the very fact of the Crimean (Yalta) conference are recorded: from W. Churchill's speech in parliament in 1945 (Churchill & Eden, 1945), to, for example, the speech of American President George W. Bush in the Baltic States in 2005 (The White House, 2005). But the localization of places of reference to the Yalta events (the White House, the Kremlin, an Internet blog, etc.) and the personalities who carry them out (politicians, journalists, artists, directors, diplomats, etc.) can differ significantly from each other, and the difference between them goes far beyond any reasonable, from the point of view of historical science, limits. This means that abstraction is inevitable – the exclusion of all phenomena, all logical connections that do not fit into the format of the 1945 international meeting.

From this point of view, a hypothetical orthodox historian, Yalta-45 is an encapsulated, hermetic historical fact with quickly disappeared consequences associated with a change in the US political course, the removal of W. Churchill from power and the beginning of the Cold War. Thus, from the point of view of the formal historical approach, it is tightly sealed in its spatial locality and temporal chronology, in the subject region of historical science, but not in the modus of the existential region of history as a continuing present. Therefore, it can exist only as a historical myth, without even acquiring the status of a scientific historical problem in it. Hence, so much attention in the studies of the Yalta Conference to everyday details (Preston, 2020) or to the gender component of the Yalta Conference (Katz, 2020), with extremely weak and very myth-oriented work with historical archives (Shevchenko, 2018b). But it is also a fact that all the available independent studies of a large volume relate more to political science reviews than to historical science. They bear the stamp of ideological cliché and appeal to arguments from the rhetoric of diplomats, politicians or political psychologists, rather than to historical discourse as such. Among them, for example, there is no broad analysis of the discursive practices of the authors of memoirs in the style of a broad cultural and textual interpretation of the facts they have presented, the available emotional impressions and the declared images during the cross "interrogation" of English and Russian-language materials (preferably with the involvement of the archives of Germany, Italy and Japan). And this despite the fact that the latter are well versed in this technique and it is not something new and unusual for them, for example, when working with the memoirs of participants in the Spanish Civil War (Ortega, 2020). And finally, why are there classical historical monographs, for example, on encapsulated, hermetic events related to military operations, or, say, a dissertation on the Potsdam Conference, and namely on the Yalta Conference, there are not?

Research Questions

1) What is the essence of the Pax Yalta myth structure?

2) How is the special mytho-eidic state of Pax Yalta recorded?

3) What is the current state and perspectives of the mythological construct Pax Yalta?

Purpose of the Study

Determine the ontological sources of the mythological construct Pax Yalta in the specifics of its space-time to fix the current state of the specified construct.

Research Methods

It can be argued that the Yalta conference acted as Heidegger's nothing, which gave birth to something – the Yalta world and/or Yalta-45. Something in this understanding is a mythologically living being with a single space-time identity, understood absolutely, that is, intuitively, as the Yalta world for the USSR and/or Yalta-45 for the Anglo-Saxon world. This clearly follows from all the texts dedicated to him. Something is felt as a single, harmonious, living being, expressed not in schemes and logical conclusions, but in an image, a sign that is rooted in the eidos of the region of being itself. It is another matter that the perception of this reality is totally binary, which also leads to the binary nature of all practical actions. Suppose that both the Yalta world and Yalta-45 in their binary oppositions set the episteme of power Pax Yalta, which exists only insofar as there is a struggle and interpenetration of the two constructs described above.

Of course, the episteme Pax Yalta has its own geographic-chronological point and scale of the beginning – Crimea (or rather, Big Yalta), February 4-11, 1945.But immediately after the beginning, without transitional stages of geographic and chronological continuity, or factual causality, an entirely historical event of long duration arises, in the depths of which the mythological construct Pax Yalta is formed, which itself is a condition and factor of formation – an episteme of power for the present in international relations.

Findings

From our point of view, the paradox is that during the formation of Pax Yalta, strict historicism was not used consciously and in principle. The methodology of historical science with its focus on objectivity, regularity and substantive factual accuracy, as a rule, was ignored. Let's take an important fact as an example. Both before the Yalta Conference in 1945 and after it there were a number of diplomatic receptions with very serious consequences for world history: Tehran-43, Bretton Wood-44, Potsdam-45, Helsinki-75. A number of important events affected world history in the most colossal way, for example, Churchill's speech in Fulton (1946). However, within the framework of Soviet historical knowledge, they remained as local facts and did not acquire the status of the "Tehran Peace" or the "Epoch of Bretton Wood".

This happened largely due to the fact that for a number of years the Soviet historical myth was built on the assumption that Yalta-45 is the source of a new world order, a new network of relations that form a special image of the world, based on the meanings and ideals embedded in Yalta-45. In a narrow sense, it is only an episode of the military-diplomatic efforts of the Second World War. But this is only, in a narrow sense, a reason to turn to unpacking meanings that go far beyond the Second World War and are transferred to the area of a key event in the history of diplomacy, World history.

Proceeding from itself, the Yalta conference is an insignificant episode. Most of the documents signed in Yalta were not binding and did not bear the legal force. And those that were legally binding were agreements of a minor nature for the New World Order, which quickly lost their relevance. This fact did not provide historical science with the opportunity to provide that pathos and that sense of reality that Yalta received in the media already in 1945. Therefore, initially the image of "Yalta", even in studies claiming the status of objective historical studies, dominated the Yalta documents. And above all, through the pathos of the Victory in World War II (Rykun et al., 2020). This made it possible to create a situation where the ideals of Yalta dominated the historiography of the issue. Moreover, from the standpoint of the Yalta world, in the space of the Yalta conference there were already eidos of all possible structures responsible for social power in the macrosociological sense. This also applies to the Anglo-American model.

It is worth highlighting several theses characterizing the special mythology (mytho-eidicity) of Pax Yalta, which is fixed in a special space-time approach to historical eventfulness:

• Dominance of the future over the present and the elimination of the recent past as an object of scientific or political attention.

In Pax Yalta, the modus of the future undoubtedly dominates: both the Soviet-Russian and Anglo-American mythological constructs manifested their aspiration for the future, projected a very vague present into the future, and it was the future that justified their constructs of the present and the past. The source of the present provided the functionality of the future, for which the present was only an unstable and mobile gap. For Yalta-45, this is the inevitability of the future, which will eliminate the unnaturalness of the present and its source. For the Yalta world, the future is what the source of the present and the present itself (Eternal Peace) exist for. And the past, which was the basis for the emergence of the source of the present: Versailles-1918, Munich-1938, Moscow-1939, was excluded from the construction of the reality of the present and the future. A significant layer of time was ignored in both states.

• The state of possession of the future and the elimination of not yet formed threats to power.

In the modus of the future, both constructs were aimed at the most essential element of power in their linguistic expressions. For British power, this is the elimination of threats that have not yet formed, and potentially possible restrictions on Anglo-American domination. It is a struggle in the realm of possibilities and likelihood, which, as the first chapter has shown, is most appropriate for the English representation of the reality of power. For the domestic authorities, this is a struggle for possession of the future, a full-fledged state of possession of goods that are expressed objectively and physically visibly (Shevchenko, 2018a).

• Discourse is carried out not by countries, not by social structures, but by individuals.

The topical component of the myth was not located in the bowels of state structures or political organizations. The discourse was led by individuals, and depending on their decision, on their sympathy or antipathy, international discourse took on one or another character. Hence the attention to the psychological portraits of Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, Khrushchev, Eisenhower, Nixon, Brezhnev, Carter, Reagan, Gorbachev, Bush Sr., Yeltsin, Clinton, Bush Jr., Putin, Obama, Trump. Discourse topologically moved from the network of social relationships and grouped in the field of interpersonal communications, and from there it formed the features of international discourse at points saturated with power: at the UN sites, regional political conferences, etc. The situation can also be viewed through the concept of an "empty cell", when a politician in a certain sense is an empty cell, completely constituted by structures. So, the return of interest in the individual may not be a literal reflection of the situation, but an inverted gesture. But the very fact of wrapping is obvious.

We have presented a stable classical mythological construct that provides stability and domination to the episteme of Pax Yalta. But since at least the 90s of the twentieth century, such stability ceases to take place. The fact of destructive processes and destabilization is obvious. This is largely due to the distortion, deformation of the spatio-temporal foundations of the myth “Historical event Pax Yalta”. They can be summarized in the following paragraphs:

• Dominates and is recognized as really being exclusively the past, which alone is the present; the existence of the future is assumed, but systematically ignored as an object of scientific and socio-political attention.

Nowadays, unlike the twentieth century, the future has lost its dominance in the Pax Yalta episteme. The efforts of the expert community, politicians and the media are aimed at "returning" to the past – the Yalta conference, which loses its status as a source of the present and is recognized as a point from which to start building a new world anew. So, for example, some of the most cited modern English-language articles on the Yalta events are devoted to the identification of spy scandals 75 years ago to the detriment of the confusing present or future (Fetter, 2020). For example, in the Yalta-2 format (Baranov, 2020). Moreover, even in the developed futurology of Khazin (2019), there are no detailed research opinions about the long-term prospects and consequences of such a step. And this inevitably leads to the erosion of the spatio-temporal foundations of the myth. They still exist, but their reality is no longer as obvious and not as unconditional as in the twentieth century, and the episteme of power, as a result, becomes extremely prone to collapse and disintegration. This aspect is not an exclusive feature of the Yalta world, but rather the specificity of our modern existence, when: the processes of globalization and the culture of mass consumption associated with them transform the historical consciousness of a modern person, in which the existential “connection of times” disintegrates. The events of the past lose their existential status, turn into a set of information units, into material for the interpretive construction of history (Apollonov & Tarba, 2020, p. 54).

• This item is partially excluded from the list of active theses of Pax Yalta, partially absorbed by item "a".

The point consisted in the thesis "The state of possession of the future and the elimination of not yet formed threats to power". For the above reasons, it is currently not relevant.

• For the above reasons, it is currently not relevant.

When it came to Roosevelt, it was about himself, and not about "Roosevelt’s America". The same is true for the discourse around other Pax Yalta persons. But already at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the accents in international relations were fundamentally changing. There is "Yeltsin's Russia" and there is "Putin's Russia". There is “Obama's America” and there is “Trump's America”. The decisions of individual leaders through numerous linguistic means are explicitly or implicitly identified with the state structure, which they no longer so much head as they themselves are.

In this vein, an aspect not worked out in the article, but extremely promising, is the question of a myth that replaces and mitigates historical trauma, creating what the researcher of the ligament: “Historical memory – Historical trauma – Myth” is defined as: “a prosthetic memory” (Cabanas, 2019, p. 165). It is quite probable that the modern stage of development of the Yalta world just entered the period of the formation of the Myth as a prosthesis of historical memory.

Conclusion

We are witnessing numerous signs of the disintegration of the episteme of power in international relations, the imbalance of the historical myth and its erosion. However, "erosion", "blurring", "signs of decay" are not identical with annihilation, destruction and liquidation. Pax Yalta still exists, and the myth still feeds the episteme of power. Rather, there are separate myths: Anglo-Saxon and Soviet are rapidly encapsulated and cease to interact in their struggle, continuing to feed the episteme from their own and only their source of meanings, which creates a threat of rupture and death of the episteme as a single world power system. The technical tools in these processes are the formation of a certain mythological environment in a combination of photo/video and audio series when the consumer of the information product is introduced by subtle ethno-linguistic manipulations into the state of play, which was demonstrated in the practice of creating mythological constructs and eidos of a new episteme on the example of the Yugoslav wars and their submissions, in particular, on the YouTube platform (Smale, 2020).

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