Yalta Conference

Yalta Conference (1945).In 1945, the “Big Three” of World War II—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston S. Churchill, and Josef Stalin—had not met since December 1943. Because of Allied landings in France and the Soviet thrust across Poland and into Germany, by the summer of 1944 a second meeting of the three men was deemed necessary. But arguments over the time and place of their meeting delayed the conference until 4–11 February 1945, when they met at Yalta in the Crimea because Stalin refused to leave the Soviet Union.

Each man traveled to Yalta for different reasons. Roosevelt came because of his desire to create a United Nations before World War II ended. Churchill feared the growing power of the Soviet Union in a devastated Europe. Stalin was intent on protecting the Soviet Union against another German invasion. The major problems facing the three leaders included Poland, Germany, Soviet entry into the war against Japan, and the United Nations.

At Yalta, Roosevelt attained his goal in an agreement for a conference on the United Nations to convene in San Francisco, 25 April 1945. In addition, Stalin accepted the American proposal on the use of the veto in the Security Council and the number of Soviet states represented in the General Assembly.

Much time was spent on Poland because Stalin insisted on a “friendly” Poland. The three men agreed to move the Polish eastern boundary westward to the 1919 Curzon Line and to restore western Byelorussia and the western Ukraine to the Soviet Union. At Stalin's insistence, a Communist Polish provisional government would be reorganized to include primarily Polish leaders from within Poland, but he agreed to some from abroad to placate Roosevelt. Stalin promised free elections there within a month on the basis of universal suffrage and the secret ballot.

Stalin demanded $20 billion in reparations from Germany, half of this sum to be destined for the Soviet Union. Churchill rejected this amount while Roosevelt accepted the sum as a basis for future discussion. Germany would be temporarily divided into three zones of occupation, with France invited to become a fourth occupying power.

Stalin promised that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan after the fighting ended in Europe. Stalin's terms for this were accepted: the southern Sakhalin and adjacent islands to be returned to the Soviet Union; Darien to be internationalized; Port Arthur to be leased as a naval base to the Soviet Union; Chinese‐Soviet companies to operate the Chinese‐Eastern and the South Manchurian railroads; Outer Mongolia to remain independent of China; and the Kurile Islands to be handed over to the Soviet Union. China would be sovereign in Manchuria.

In a Declaration on Liberated Europe, proposed by Roosevelt, the three governments pledged jointly to assist liberated people in forming temporary governments representing all democratic elements and pledged to free, early elections. When the three governments thought action necessary, they would consult together on measures to fulfill their responsibilities. There could be no action without the agreement of all three governments.

Roosevelt probably hoped that in the United States, the Declaration would project an acceptable image of the Yalta Conference as the protector of the rights of liberated peoples. It could also be a standard against which Stalin's policies in Eastern Europe could be judged. However, when put to the test, Declaration proved ineffective. After the Yalta Conference, the Western powers accepted a Polish government in which two‐thirds of the members were Communists. When elections finally came in 1947, they were not democratic.

In the Far East, Soviet armies went to war against Japan two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The Soviet entry into the war accelerated the Japanese surrender. However, in February 1945, American military planners had expected the war against Japan to drag on into 1946 or even 1947.

As the Cold War heated up, anti‐Communist American critics, particularly in the Republican Party, condemned Yalta as a symbol of appeasement and a diplomatic defeat for the United States. Poland and Eastern Europe had been betrayed. The United States should avoid negotiating with the Soviet Union. Some critics later insisted that China had gone Communist because of the Yalta Conference. The severest claimed that Roosevelt was either too sick to deal with Stalin or was duped by him.

The reality of Yalta was that the location of armies determined the final outcome. Soviet armed forces decided the politics of Eastern Europe; Allied forces influenced politics in Western Europe. China became Communist because the armies of Chiang Kaishek were defeated, not because Roosevelt had abandoned Chiang.

Yalta was an attempt to transform a temporary wartime coalition into a permanent agency for peace. Roosevelt apparently hoped to modify Stalin's behavior through the United Nations and postwar U.S. policies. Agreements had been negotiated while war was in progress when unity was vital. After the enemies were vanquished, however, the victors quarreled and their fundamental disagreements emerged.
[See also Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bombings of; World War II: Postwar Impact; World War II: Changing Interpretations.]

Bibliography

Edward R. Stettinius, Jr. , Roosevelt and the Russians. The Yalta Conference, ed. Walter Johnson, 1949.
Foreign Relations of the United States. Diplomatic Papers. The Conference at Malta and Yalta, 1955.
John L. Snell, ed., The Meaning of Yalta: Big Three Diplomacy and the New Balance of Power, 1955.
Diane Shaver Clemens , Yalta, 1970.
Athan G. Theoharis , The Yalta Myth: An Issue in American Politics, 1945–1955, 1970.
Richard F. Fenno, Jr., ed., The Yalta Conference, 1972.
Russell D. Buhite , Decision at Yalta. An Appraisal of Summit Diplomacy, 1986.

Keith Eubank