We cannot get away from the results of the war.

Joseph Stalin’s sentence “We cannot get away from the results of the war” gives a concise name to the past that the negotiators at Potsdam could neither set aside nor easily agree how to interpret. Spoken during a tense discussion of Germany, it also becomes a recurring frame in the book for the conditions inherited by Harry S. Truman at a pivotal moment in world history.

The phrase at Potsdam

As the conference resumed, outward friendship among the leaders coexisted with an edge of tension. Winston Churchill spoke at length, and the formal business before the conference was Germany. Yet the dispute was not simply over how to discuss the country: Churchill pressed for a definition of Germany that exposed the importance of its prewar geography, while the Red Army’s position shaped the boundaries under discussion.

Stalin insisted that Germany was what remained after the war; Truman proposed using Germany as constituted in 1937 as a starting point. When Truman asked what geographical section they meant, Stalin returned to the central difficulty: “We cannot get away from the results of the war.” The exchange shows the phrase operating both as a statement about the past and as an obstacle to treating that past as settled. The participants did agree to use Germany of 1937 as their starting point, but the agreement supplied a basis for discussion, not a way to undo the war’s consequences.

A conflict over what remains

The sentence’s force in this scene comes from the gap between diplomatic procedure and material reality. The conference could settle on a geographic reference point, but the boundaries under discussion were being determined by the position of the Red Army. The phrase therefore points beyond the wording of the proposed compromise to the conditions that constrained it.

The conversation then turned to Poland, another subject on which Churchill spoke at length. That transition keeps the German discussion from appearing as an isolated disagreement: the conference moved from one difficult postwar issue to another, while the consequences of the war remained present in the terms of debate.

The phrase as a frame for Truman’s moment

The book later recalls Stalin’s sentence while assessing the sweep of Harry S. Truman’s first three months in office. It links the phrase to the United Nations, the Red Army’s presence in Eastern Europe, Britain’s bankruptcy, the Holocaust’s revealed horrors, the devastation of Berlin, and the emergence of the nuclear age in New Mexico, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. These are presented as consequences of the war that converged on Truman’s new presidency, along with his succession after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death.

The expression also sharpens the contrast between Truman’s historical outlook and the world before him. He believed that human nature changed little and that history’s continuities mattered; yet the book emphasizes that nuclear power and the responsibility attached to it were new, in a world where the old rules no longer applied. Stalin’s words thus reach beyond a moment of disagreement at Potsdam. In the book’s account, they name the weight of inherited events even as Truman confronts circumstances without precedent.