Yalta Conference

Yalta Conference. The World War II conference of top Allied leaders held at the Black Sea resort of Yalta in the Crimea on 3–12 February 1945 developed from an Anglo‐American perception that, with their own and Soviet forces rapidly converging on Berlin, postwar political issues needed urgent attention.Two potentially incompatible views of the postwar world order had already appeared: the American conception of a universalistic United Nations, and the scenario defined by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin at Moscow in October 1944 envisioning British (or Western) and Soviet spheres in postwar Europe. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, alarmed by growing domestic criticism of British and Soviet conduct as they consolidated power in their respective spheres, pressed for a meeting. He hoped to bind the Allies to the United Nations framework and also win Soviet agreement to enter the Pacific war. In preliminary diplomatic maneuvering, Stalin made clear that he in return wanted territorial acquisitions in East Asia, recognition of Soviet paramountcy in eastern Europe, and substantial reconstruction aid.

At Yalta, Roosevelt found Stalin determined to dominate eastern and central Europe, already largely under Soviet military control. On the crucial Polish issue, discussed at seven of the eight plenary sessions, Roosevelt and Churchill conceded much of prewar eastern Poland to the Soviets with territorial compensation envisaged for Poland at Germany's expense. Stalin refused a freely elected Polish government, though he accepted a tripartite commission to facilitate the addition of non‐communists to the pro‐Soviet Lublin regime. In other significant agreements, Stalin accepted the American United Nations formula and promised, in return for territorial concessions at Chinese expense, to declare war on Japan within three months of Germany's surrender. Churchill won an enhanced role for postwar France.

In retrospect, however, the real drama lay elsewhere, in Roosevelt's casual introduction of an ostensibly cosmetic Declaration on Liberated Europe promising “free and unfettered elections” and “democratic institutions” in eastern Europe. Stalin, characteristically insensitive to Western public opinion and/or relying on the political ambiguity of these phrases in the existing context, signed it. He was doubtless upset to find Roosevelt emphasizing it after the conference as the centerpiece of a stunning American diplomatic success.

Stalin reacted angrily to this image‐making. He frustrated the operation of the tripartite commission in Poland, arrested Polish resistance leaders, mounted a procommunist coup in Rumania, and refused to send Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov to the founding conference of the United Nations. Roosevelt and Churchill, and especially President Harry S. Truman after taking office on 12 April, responded with increasing vigor. The crisis dragged on until late May when Roosevelt's former aide, Harry Hopkins, sent by Truman on a conciliatory mission to Moscow, settled the Polish government issue on Stalin's terms.

Yalta long remained deeply controversial. Many Europeans and American conservatives saw the conference as a “betrayal”of Poland, eastern Europe, and China. This image, notwithstanding Roosevelt's spirited liberal defenders, helped stimulate the excesses of the McCarthy era. Later revisionists portrayed a successful negotiation subsequently undermined by Truman's belligerence. Yalta marks the first full American political engagement with Europe's postwar problems. Although some saw it as the high‐water mark of American‐Soviet cooperation, it also began a process that by stages led to the Cold War. In retrospect, it appears to have ended the “Grand Alliance” and any prospect of a consensual, cooperative approach to postwar issues.
See also Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Europe; World War II: Postwar Impact.

Bibliography

John Snell ed., The Meaning of Yalta, 1956.
Diane S. Clemens , Yalta, 1970.

Fraser J. Harbutt