Yalta Conference

Based on Yalta Conference

The Week That Shaped the Cold War

In February 1945, three men sat down in a Crimean palace to carve up the world. Within a decade, the lines they drew would freeze into the Iron Curtain, and the agreements they reached—or failed to reach—would define global politics for the next half-century.

The Yalta Conference wasn't supposed to be controversial. At the time, it looked like a triumph of Allied cooperation. Only later would it become a byword for Western naïveté, Soviet duplicity, and the tragic abandonment of Eastern Europe to communist rule.

But that's getting ahead of the story.

Three Men, Three Agendas

The players were Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. They called themselves the Big Three, and for eight days in February 1945, they met at the Livadia Palace near Yalta, a resort town on the Black Sea coast of Crimea.

Each leader came with his own priorities, and those priorities would shape everything that followed.

Roosevelt was dying. Though few knew it at the time, he had only two months to live. His primary concern was ensuring Soviet participation in the war against Japan. The atomic bomb hadn't been tested yet. American military planners expected an invasion of the Japanese home islands that could cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. Soviet forces in Manchuria could change that calculus entirely.

Roosevelt also wanted Stalin to join his cherished project: the United Nations. He believed that the failures of the League of Nations after World War I stemmed from American absence. This time, he was determined to build an international organization with all the great powers inside it, including the Soviets.

Churchill's concerns were more immediate and more European. He wanted free elections and democratic governments in the countries being liberated from Nazi occupation—especially Poland. Britain had gone to war over Poland in 1939. Millions of Poles had fought alongside the Allies. Churchill felt a deep obligation to ensure their country emerged from the war as a genuinely free nation.

Stalin wanted something simpler and, from his perspective, more fundamental: security.

Twice in living memory, armies had invaded Russia through Poland. In 1812, Napoleon had marched his Grande Armée through Polish territory toward Moscow. In 1941, Hitler had done the same. Twenty-seven million Soviet citizens died in World War II—a number so staggering that it's difficult to comprehend. Stalin was determined that it would never happen again.

His solution was a buffer zone: a belt of friendly states between the Soviet Union and Western Europe, controlled by governments that would never threaten Soviet security. Whether those governments reflected the will of their people was, to Stalin, a secondary consideration.

The View from the Crimea

Why Yalta? The choice reveals something about the power dynamics at play.

Roosevelt had originally wanted a neutral Mediterranean location—Malta, Cyprus, Sicily, even Jerusalem. Stalin refused. He claimed his doctors had forbidden long trips. He also had a well-known fear of flying.

But these were excuses. The real reason was simpler: Stalin held the stronger hand, and he knew it.

By February 1945, the Red Army occupied virtually all of Poland and was just 65 kilometers—about 40 miles—from Berlin. Soviet forces controlled Romania and Bulgaria. They had pushed the Wehrmacht back across a thousand miles of territory that was now firmly under Soviet control.

The Western Allies, meanwhile, had only just liberated France and Belgium. They were fighting on Germany's western border, yes, but they were nowhere near Berlin. And their armies in Europe were significantly smaller than Stalin's.

As James F. Byrnes, a member of the American delegation who would later become Secretary of State, put it: "It was not a question of what we would let the Russians do, but what we could get the Russians to do."

The venue was a statement. Stalin was making the Americans and British come to him, to Soviet territory, to negotiate over lands his armies already held.

The Absent Ally

One major power was conspicuously absent from the table: France.

General Charles de Gaulle wasn't invited. This was a diplomatic insult that he never forgot and never forgave. De Gaulle blamed Roosevelt, with whom he had a notoriously difficult relationship. But the Soviets had objected to French participation too.

The exclusion created an awkward problem. France would eventually be given an occupation zone in Germany, carved out of the American and British zones. But de Gaulle, feeling dishonored, refused to accept that the zone's boundaries had been set without him. When French forces later occupied Stuttgart—a city outside their assigned zone—it nearly caused an Allied crisis. De Gaulle only withdrew when the Americans threatened to cut off essential economic supplies.

The snub also made it nearly impossible to invite France to the follow-up conference at Potsdam that summer. De Gaulle would have insisted on reopening every decision made at Yalta in his absence—which would have reopened wounds the Allies preferred to leave closed.

The Polish Question

Poland dominated the discussions. It was, Stalin told the conference, "a question of honor" for the Soviet government.

But what did that mean in practice?

It meant the Soviets would keep the eastern third of prewar Poland—territory they had annexed under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany in 1939. The border would follow something called the Curzon Line, named after a British foreign secretary who had proposed it as an ethnic boundary in 1919. Stalin presented this as historically just: the lands were predominantly Ukrainian and Belarusian, not Polish.

In compensation, Poland would be allowed to expand westward at Germany's expense. Vast stretches of German territory—Silesia, Pomerania, southern East Prussia—would become Polish. Millions of Germans would be expelled from lands their families had occupied for centuries.

The Western leaders accepted this. They had little choice. But the more contentious issue was political, not territorial.

There were two competing Polish governments. One was the government-in-exile in London, which had been recognized by Britain and the United States throughout the war. Many of its members had fought alongside the Allies. They represented the Poland that had existed before 1939.

The other was the communist Provisional Government that the Soviets had installed in Lublin as the Red Army advanced. This government answered to Moscow.

The compromise—such as it was—called for the Lublin government to be "reorganized on a broader democratic basis" and for free elections to be held as soon as possible.

Stalin pledged to permit those free elections.

He was lying.

Or rather—and this may be more accurate—he and the Western leaders understood the phrase "free elections" to mean entirely different things. In Stalin's view, any election that might produce an anti-Soviet government was, by definition, not truly free. It would represent the manipulation of the Polish people by reactionary forces hostile to the workers' state.

The elections, when they finally came in 1947, were rigged. Opposition candidates were arrested, murdered, or forced into exile. The communist-controlled bloc won 80 percent of the vote in a country where genuine free elections would likely have produced a very different result.

By then, Roosevelt was dead. The agreements of Yalta had become bitterly controversial. And Poland would remain under communist rule for another forty-four years.

The Pacific Bargain

While Poland consumed most of the conference's energy, Roosevelt was focused on a different theater entirely: the Pacific.

The war against Japan was far from over. American forces were engaged in brutal island-hopping campaigns across the Pacific. Iwo Jima and Okinawa still lay ahead. Military planners expected the invasion of Japan's home islands to be catastrophically costly—potentially hundreds of thousands of American casualties.

The atomic bomb existed only as a theoretical possibility. The first test wouldn't occur until July 1945, five months after Yalta. Roosevelt couldn't count on it working.

What he could count on was the Red Army. A Soviet declaration of war against Japan, combined with an invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria, could tie down a million Japanese soldiers and shorten the war significantly.

Stalin was willing to oblige—for a price.

He wanted the southern half of Sakhalin Island, which Russia had lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. He wanted the Kuril Islands chain. He wanted the port of Dalian internationalized and the Soviet lease on Port Arthur restored. And he wanted American recognition of Mongolia's independence from China—a formalization of what had been reality since 1924, when Mongolia became a Soviet satellite state.

Roosevelt agreed to all of it.

In return, Stalin pledged that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan within three months of Germany's defeat. He kept that promise, declaring war on August 8, 1945—exactly three months after Victory in Europe Day and, not coincidentally, two days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

The Secret Discussion About Korea

One conversation at Yalta remained hidden for years: a private discussion between Roosevelt and Stalin about the fate of Korea, which had been a Japanese colony since 1910.

With Churchill absent from the room, Roosevelt proposed placing Korea under a trusteeship—a temporary administration divided among the Soviets, Americans, and Chinese—for twenty to thirty years until the country was ready for independence.

Roosevelt was reluctant to include the British. Stalin reportedly laughed and warned that Churchill "would most certainly be offended. In fact, the Prime Minister might kill us."

The two leaders quickly agreed that their troops should not be stationed in Korea permanently. The trusteeship should be as short as possible.

They never discussed Korea again.

Five years later, Soviet-backed North Korean forces would invade the American-backed South, triggering a war that killed millions and left the peninsula divided to this day. The casual conversation at Yalta, forgotten almost as soon as it occurred, had planted the seeds of that division.

Dividing Germany

Germany's fate was, in some ways, the simplest matter to resolve. Everyone agreed that Germany had to be occupied, demilitarized, and denazified. War criminals would face trial. The Nazi leadership would be executed.

The three leaders ratified an earlier agreement establishing occupation zones—one for each of the major Allies. They also agreed to give France a fourth zone, carved from the American and British sectors.

A "Committee on Dismemberment of Germany" was established to consider whether Germany should be permanently divided into multiple nations. Various partition plans circulated: Churchill proposed splitting Germany into a northern state and a southern state (the latter including Austria and Hungary). The Morgenthau Plan, named after Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary, envisioned an even more radical dismemberment, with large territories stripped from Germany entirely and the remaining country reduced to an agricultural society incapable of waging modern war.

None of these extreme plans were implemented. Instead, Germany was divided into two states—East and West—that would reunify only in 1990, forty-five years after Yalta.

The conference also addressed reparations. Germany would pay—partly through the dismantling of industrial equipment and partly through forced labor. German prisoners of war and civilian workers were compelled to repair the damage their country had inflicted across Europe. Hundreds of thousands were sent to the Soviet Union, where many remained for years after the war ended, mining uranium and rebuilding bombed cities.

The Declaration of Liberated Europe

The conference produced a grand statement of principles: the Declaration of Liberated Europe.

It promised that the people of Europe would be able "to create democratic institutions of their own choice." It pledged "the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people." It echoed the Atlantic Charter's guarantee of "the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live."

Beautiful words. Largely meaningless ones.

The declaration contained no enforcement mechanism. During the negotiations, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had carefully inserted language that weakened any implication that the Allies might actually compel compliance.

The sphere-of-influence arrangements that Churchill and Stalin had sketched out in Moscow four months earlier—the infamous "percentages agreement" scribbled on a half-sheet of paper, dividing southeastern Europe into Western and Soviet spheres—remained in effect. Romania and Bulgaria, listed in that agreement as Soviet responsibilities, would not see free elections. Neither would Poland.

The Red Army held the ground. Words on paper couldn't change that.

The Question of Palestine

One discussion at Yalta foreshadowed conflicts that continue today: the future of Palestine.

Roosevelt supported creating a Jewish state in Palestine. He believed it would serve as a model of social justice and raise living standards throughout the Middle East. He cited the work of Walter C. Lowdermilk, an American conservation expert who argued that Palestine could absorb millions more people through proper land management and irrigation.

Secretary of State Edward Stettinius had urged Roosevelt not to make any decisions about Palestine without considering Soviet and British interests—and without acknowledging the concerns of the Arab population. He warned that unilateral American support for Zionism could give the Soviets an opening to expand their influence in the Middle East.

At the conference, however, Stalin raised no objections to Roosevelt's goals. Churchill gave informal support in exchange for American silence about the controversial White Paper of 1939, which had severely limited Jewish immigration to Palestine.

Three years later, Israel declared independence. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continues eight decades on.

The Birth of the United Nations

Roosevelt's most cherished goal at Yalta was securing Soviet participation in the United Nations—the international organization that would replace the failed League of Nations.

Stalin agreed to join, but not without conditions.

The key was the Security Council's voting structure. Stalin wanted assurance that the Soviet Union could block any resolution it opposed. The solution was the veto: permanent members of the Security Council—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China—would each have the power to block any substantive resolution.

This veto power remains in effect today, and it has shaped (and often paralyzed) the United Nations ever since.

Stalin also requested that all sixteen Soviet republics be granted individual United Nations membership. This would have given the Soviet Union sixteen votes in the General Assembly. Roosevelt and Churchill refused—but compromised by allowing separate membership for Ukraine and Belarus (then called Byelorussia). Roosevelt briefly considered requesting additional American votes to match, but ultimately the United States maintained only one seat.

The Aftermath

Roosevelt returned from Yalta exhausted but optimistic. He told Congress that the conference spelled the end of unilateral action, exclusive alliances, and spheres of influence. He was wrong on all three counts.

He died on April 12, 1945, two months after the conference ended.

Within two years, the agreements of Yalta had collapsed. The free elections promised for Poland and Eastern Europe never materialized. Soviet-backed communist governments seized power across the region. Churchill—out of office by then—delivered his famous Iron Curtain speech in 1946, warning that a shadow had fallen across the European continent.

In the United States, Yalta became a political epithet. Republicans accused Roosevelt (and by extension, the Democratic Party) of having "sold out" Eastern Europe to Stalin. Some charged that Soviet spies had infiltrated the American delegation, steering negotiations in Moscow's favor.

Was Yalta a betrayal? The question consumed American politics for a generation.

The more honest answer is that there was little the Western Allies could have done differently. The Red Army occupied Eastern Europe. Stalin had no intention of permitting genuinely free elections in countries along his border. No treaty language, however carefully drafted, could have changed that reality.

What Yalta did was create a framework—however flawed—for postwar cooperation. The United Nations endured. Germany was rebuilt. Europe, divided as it was, avoided another great-power war for half a century. The Cold War was bitter and dangerous, but it remained cold.

Whether that outcome justified the agreements made in a Crimean palace in February 1945 remains, eight decades later, a matter of debate.

The Long Shadow

The Yalta Conference lasted eight days. Its consequences lasted decades.

The division of Germany that began there persisted until 1990. The communist governments installed in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria survived until 1989. The United Nations Security Council, with its permanent five members and their vetoes, continues to function—and dysfunction—exactly as designed at Yalta.

The conference also shaped how nations think about summitry. The image of three leaders personally deciding the fate of millions—redrawing borders, trading territories, making deals about countries whose citizens had no voice in the discussion—became both an inspiration and a warning.

Some saw it as proof that great leaders, meeting face to face, could solve intractable problems. Others saw it as a cautionary tale about the arrogance of great powers and the dangers of secret diplomacy.

Both interpretations contain truth.

In the Livadia Palace, surrounded by the wreckage of the most destructive war in human history, three men tried to build a new world order. They succeeded only partially. The order they created was deeply flawed, morally compromised, and frequently unjust.

It was also, perhaps, the best that was possible at the time.

History rarely offers clean victories. Yalta is a reminder of that uncomfortable truth.