Yalta Conference

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Yalta Conference opened on the 4th of February 1945, inside three palaces overlooking the Black Sea in Soviet Crimea. Outside, the war in Europe was not yet over, but it was close enough that three of the most powerful men alive had come together to decide what came next. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met at Livadia, Yusupov, and Vorontsov palaces near the resort town of Yalta for eight days that would shape the postwar world. The questions hanging over those talks were vast: who would govern Poland, how would Germany be divided, and whether the promise of free elections across Europe could be made to hold. The answers given at Yalta, and the answers that were quietly ignored, are the story of how the Second World War gave way to the Cold War.

• 2. The Road to Crimea

  ›

  Roosevelt was the one who pushed hardest for a second gathering of the Big Three. He had hoped to hold it before the American presidential elections in November 1944, but that proved impossible. He wanted a neutral site somewhere in the Mediterranean. Malta, Cyprus, Sicily, Athens, and Jerusalem were all floated as options. Stalin rejected every one of them, citing his doctors' objections to long travel. His fear of flying was also a factor. So the meeting came to him, at the Black Sea resort he proposed, on Soviet soil. Yalta was the second of three wartime summits. It followed the Tehran Conference of November 1943 and would be followed by the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. There had also been a separate Moscow meeting in October 1944, attended only by Churchill and Stalin, in which the two had quietly sketched out Western and Soviet spheres of influence in Europe, without Roosevelt present. That prior agreement cast a long shadow over what was discussed at Yalta.

• 3. Three Men, Three Agendas

  ›

  Roosevelt arrived at Yalta with a specific priority: he wanted Soviet troops in the Pacific War. The planned invasion of Japan, known as Operation August Storm, was expected to cost enormous numbers of American lives, and Roosevelt calculated that Soviet entry into the fight could shorten the war. He also wanted Stalin's commitment to join the United Nations. Churchill's main concern was Poland and Central and Eastern Europe. He pressed for free elections and democratic governments across the region. Stalin's goals were more bluntly territorial. He demanded a Soviet sphere of political influence in Eastern and Central Europe, which he framed as a matter of national security. A member of the American delegation, James F. Byrnes, who later became Secretary of State, captured the real balance of power at the table in a single sentence: it was not, he said, a question of what the Allies would let the Russians do, but of what they could get the Russians to do. Soviet forces at that moment stood 65 kilometers from Berlin and occupied most of Eastern Europe with a military presence three times the size of Allied forces in the West.

• 4. Poland and the Language of Vagueness

  ›

  Stalin called Poland the first item on the Soviet agenda and described it as a matter of honor. He acknowledged that the Russians had, in his words, greatly sinned against Poland, and framed Soviet interest in a strong Polish state as a form of atonement. In practice, that meant accepting Soviet-backed communist governance in Warsaw and drawing Poland's borders to benefit Moscow. The eastern border would follow the Curzon Line, with Poland compensated by shifting its western frontier into German territory. Stalin pledged free elections in Poland, and the final declaration called for elections to be held on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot as soon as possible. But the language that emerged from Yalta was, in Roosevelt's own admission, weighted toward the Soviet-installed Lublin government. Admiral William D. Leahy, who served under Roosevelt, later said the wording was so vague that the Soviets could stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without ever technically breaking it. During the talks, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had quietly inserted language that weakened the enforcement teeth of the declaration. After the conference, when Molotov worried aloud that the agreement's wording might be a problem, Stalin replied simply: never mind, we will do it our own way later.

• 5. The Pacific Bargain

  ›

  The secret terms Roosevelt accepted in exchange for Soviet entry into the Pacific War were substantial. Stalin wanted American recognition of Mongolian independence from China, where the Mongolian People's Republic had functioned as a Soviet satellite state since 1924. The Soviets also sought recognition of their interests in the Chinese Eastern Railway and Port Arthur. Japan was to cede the Kuril Islands and return South Sakhalin, which Russia had lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. In exchange, Stalin pledged that Soviet forces would join the fight against Japan within three months of Germany's surrender. On the 8th of February, while Churchill was absent from the room, Roosevelt and Stalin discussed Korea privately. Roosevelt raised the idea of a trusteeship shared among the Soviets, the Americans, and the Chinese for a period of 20 to 30 years. He expressed reluctance to include Britain. Stalin replied that the British would most certainly be offended and that Churchill might, in Stalin's words, kill them both. Roosevelt agreed, and the two concurred that foreign troops should not be stationed in Korea. Korea was not raised again during the conference. The agreement on Soviet UN membership also carried a secret element: the Soviets joined in part because of a private understanding about veto power for permanent members of the Security Council, ensuring no country could be outvoted on decisions it opposed.

• 6. What the Declaration Promised

  ›

  Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin jointly issued the Declaration of Liberated Europe at Yalta, promising the peoples of the continent the right to create democratic institutions of their own choice. The text echoed language from the Atlantic Charter, pledging the earliest possible establishment of governments responsive to the will of the people through free elections. Germany was to be divided into four occupied zones, with France receiving a zone carved from the American and British portions. Germany would undergo demilitarization and denazification, war criminals would be tried in the territories where their crimes occurred, and war reparations would be partly extracted through forced labor. A Committee on Dismemberment of Germany was to be established to explore whether Germany should be broken into several separate nations. The declaration also addressed Palestine. Roosevelt supported the creation of a Jewish state there, citing the views of Walter C. Lowdermilk that the region could absorb many millions more people, and believed it could serve as a model of social justice. Stalin raised no objection. Churchill gave informal backing in exchange for keeping discussions away from the British White Paper of 1939.

• 7. Collapse of the Agreement

  ›

  Churchill returned to London and defended Yalta in a three-day parliamentary debate beginning on February 27. The vote ended in a confidence win, but 25 members of parliament drafted an amendment protesting the deal. Churchill at that point still believed Stalin would keep his word. He drew a pointed contrast with Neville Chamberlain and Hitler, saying he did not think he was wrong about Stalin the way Chamberlain had been wrong about Hitler. The confidence did not hold. By March 1, Roosevelt was assuring Congress he had come from Crimea with a firm belief that peace was within reach. Within weeks, the picture changed. Churchill wrote Roosevelt a desperate letter about Soviet deportations and executions of pro-Western Poles, including former members of the Armia Krajowa resistance. Roosevelt replied on March 11 that neither the American government nor its people would support what he called a fraud or a whitewash of the Lublin government. By March 21, Roosevelt's ambassador to Moscow, Averell Harriman, cabled that the Soviet program was the establishment of totalitarianism, ending personal liberty and democracy as understood in the West. Two days later, Roosevelt admitted that Harriman was right and that his own view of Stalin had been excessively optimistic. On March 27, Soviet secret police, the NKVD, arrested 16 Polish opposition leaders who had been invited to participate in provisional government talks. They were flown to Moscow for a show trial and sentenced to a gulag. The Polish elections held on the 16th of January 1947, completed Poland's transformation into a communist state by 1949.

• 8. Legacy and Long Controversy

  ›

  Churchill had commissioned a contingency plan for a military operation against the Soviet Union to secure what he called a square deal for Poland. Known as Operation Unthinkable, the plan was delivered in a May 22 report that concluded the odds of success were unfavorable, citing risks including a possible Soviet-Japanese alliance that could shift Japanese troops back to the home islands, and threats to Iran and Iraq. The plan was shelved. At Potsdam, held from July to August 1945, the three powers reconvened with different personnel: Clement Attlee had replaced Churchill, and Harry Truman had succeeded the late Roosevelt. Potsdam produced the declaration demanding Japan's surrender and the agreement formalizing Soviet annexation of Polish territory east of the Curzon Line, along with parts of Germany east of the Oder-Neisse line. In American politics, Yalta became a contested symbol. Roosevelt's concessions to Stalin, followed so quickly by the Cold War under his successor Truman, made the conference a target for Republicans, conservative Democrats, and Americans with ties to Eastern Europe. When Eisenhower won the presidency on the Republican ticket, there were expectations in some quarters that his administration would repudiate the Yalta agreements. Senate majority leader Robert A. Taft and Republican members of the Foreign Relations Committee pushed in that direction, but the effort collapsed after Stalin's death. The Polish Resettlement Act of 1947, passed in Britain in direct response to the fate of Polish soldiers who refused to return to Soviet-controlled Poland, became Britain's first mass immigration law, a domestic consequence the conference planners never anticipated.