In the famous pages de Gaulle devoted to this visit in his Memoirs, accompanied by some marginally doctored documents,47 he portrayed himself as having for a week resisted Stalin’s pressure to recognize the Lublin Committee and contrasted this with what happened two months later at the Yalta Conference where Roosevelt and Churchill effectively abandoned eastern Europe to Stalin. Since de Gaulle was not present at Yalta – he was not invited to attend – he was able to claim that his hands were clean in this. Time and again, he would return to his idea that Yalta had revealed to the world ‘that
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