Yalta Conference (1945): Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin

The Yalta Conference was the second wartime summit of the “Big Three” Allied leaders, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, held at the Livadia Palace near Yalta in Crimea from 4 to 11 February 1945. With Germany close to defeat, the three men decided how it would be occupied, where Poland’s borders would lie, how the new United Nations would vote and when the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan.

Few conferences have been argued over so long. For some, Yalta was a realistic settlement between allies who had to keep working together; for others, especially in Poland and Central Europe, it became a byword for the abandonment of small nations to Soviet control.

Background

The Big Three had met once before, at the Tehran Conference in late 1943, where military strategy dominated. By early 1945 the situation had changed completely. The Western Allies had landed in Normandy, liberated France and Belgium, and just turned back the German offensive in the Ardennes. In the east, the Red Army had overrun Poland in the Vistula–Oder offensive and stood on the Oder River, roughly 70 km from Berlin.

Political questions could no longer be postponed. The Allies had to agree on what to do with a defeated Germany, how to treat the countries the Red Army was liberating, and how to build the international organisation that Roosevelt saw as the foundation of a lasting peace. The Americans also wanted firm Soviet help against Japan, since their military planners expected an invasion of the Japanese home islands to be long and costly.

Stalin, citing his doctors and the demands of the war, refused to travel far. Roosevelt, already visibly ill, made a long journey by warship and plane to Crimea. Before the summit he and Churchill met briefly at Malta between 30 January and 2 February to coordinate their positions.

The conference at Livadia

The conference, code-named Argonaut, opened on 4 February 1945. The Americans were housed at the Livadia Palace, built for Tsar Nicholas II, which also hosted the plenary sessions so that Roosevelt, who used a wheelchair, would not have to travel. The British stayed at the Vorontsov Palace and the Soviets at the Yusupov Palace.

Each leader was accompanied by his foreign minister: Edward Stettinius for the United States, Anthony Eden for Britain and Vyacheslav Molotov for the Soviet Union. Roosevelt’s close adviser Harry Hopkins and the American ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, also played important roles. Foreign ministers met separately each day to prepare texts for the leaders.

The atmosphere was cordial on the surface, with lavish banquets and many toasts, but the bargaining was hard. Stalin held the strongest hand: his armies occupied most of the territory under discussion, and both Western leaders wanted his cooperation for the rest of the war and afterwards.

Decisions on Germany and Poland

Germany

The leaders confirmed that Germany must surrender unconditionally. It would then be disarmed, purged of Nazism and divided into zones of occupation, with Berlin under joint administration. At Churchill’s insistence, France was given a zone carved out of the British and American areas and a seat on the Allied Control Council that would govern Germany as a whole.

Reparations caused sharp disagreement. The Soviet Union, devastated by the German invasion, wanted large payments in kind. The protocol took a total of 20 billion dollars, half of it for the Soviet Union, as a “basis for discussion” for a reparations commission in Moscow, but Britain refused to accept any figure. The idea of dismembering Germany into several states was discussed and referred to a committee, where it quietly died.

Poland

Poland took up more time than any other subject. The Western powers had gone to war in 1939 after the German invasion of Poland, and a Polish government-in-exile sat in London. Stalin, however, had already recognised a communist-dominated provisional government formed in Lublin and refused to give up the eastern territories the Soviet Union had annexed in 1939.

The final agreement fixed Poland’s eastern frontier roughly along the Curzon Line, with small adjustments in Poland’s favour. Poland was to receive “substantial accessions” of German territory in the north and west, with the final western frontier left to a peace conference. The Lublin government was to be “reorganised on a broader democratic basis” by including democratic leaders from inside Poland and abroad, and it was pledged to hold “free and unfettered elections” as soon as possible.

The wording was vague, and the Western leaders knew it. There was no international supervision of the promised elections, and the Soviet authorities interpreted the formula in their own way. When elections were finally held in January 1947, they were marked by intimidation and fraud.

The United Nations and the Declaration on Liberated Europe

Yalta resolved the main question left open at the Dumbarton Oaks talks of 1944: how voting would work in the Security Council of the planned United Nations. The leaders agreed that the five permanent members would each have a veto on substantive matters. Stalin had asked for all sixteen Soviet republics to have seats in the General Assembly; he settled for two extra seats, for Ukraine and Byelorussia. A founding conference was called for San Francisco on 25 April 1945.

The leaders also signed a Declaration on Liberated Europe, promising to help the peoples of formerly occupied countries “create democratic institutions of their own choice”. It had no enforcement mechanism, and in the following years it was largely ignored in the countries under Soviet control.

The secret agreement on Japan

One of the most consequential decisions was kept secret at the time. Stalin promised that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan “two or three months” after Germany’s surrender. In return, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that the Soviet Union would recover southern Sakhalin, which Russia had lost in the Russo-Japanese War, and receive the Kuril Islands.

The agreement also gave the Soviet Union a lease on Port Arthur as a naval base, a pre-eminent interest in the port of Dairen and joint operation of the Manchurian railways with China. These concessions involved Chinese territory and rights, yet China’s leader Chiang Kai-shek was not consulted. The Soviet Union kept its side of the bargain on 8 August 1945, three months to the day after the German surrender.

The leaders also agreed to repatriate each other’s liberated prisoners of war and civilians. In practice this led to the forced return of many Soviet citizens, including some who had never been Soviet nationals, to face punishment under Stalin.

Key people

Franklin D. Roosevelt, the US president, hoped above all to secure Soviet participation in the United Nations and against Japan. He was seriously ill, and he died at Warm Springs, Georgia, on 12 April 1945. Historians still debate how much his health affected his judgement; most conclude that his decisions reflected his long-held aims rather than mental decline.

Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, fought hardest over Poland and for a revived France as a counterweight in Europe. He had already reached an informal “percentages agreement” with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944 on spheres of influence in the Balkans.

Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, sought security for the Soviet Union’s western border, a friendly government in Poland, reparations from Germany and territorial gains in the Far East. He obtained most of what he wanted.

Consequences and legacy

In the short term, Yalta was hailed as a success in Britain and the United States. Roosevelt reported to Congress on 1 March 1945 that it marked the end of the system of spheres of influence. Within weeks, however, disputes over the composition of the Polish government and Soviet behaviour in Romania showed how differently the allies read the agreements.

At the Potsdam Conference in July and August 1945, with Harry Truman in place of Roosevelt and Clement Attlee replacing Churchill midway, the Allies confirmed the occupation of Germany and the new Polish borders. By 1946 Churchill was warning of an “iron curtain” across Europe, and Yalta became a central argument in the early Cold War.

In the United States, critics later accused Roosevelt of a sell-out, and the presence at Yalta of the State Department official Alger Hiss, later convicted of perjury in connection with espionage allegations, fuelled those claims. In Poland, the Baltic states and much of Central Europe, “Yalta” became shorthand for the post-war division of the continent.

Myths and facts

Myth: Yalta divided Europe into East and West. The conference did not draw the Iron Curtain. The broad shape of post-war Europe was determined above all by where the armies stood in 1945 and by Soviet policy in the countries it occupied. Yalta’s agreements on free elections and democratic institutions were, on paper, the opposite of what happened.

Myth: Roosevelt gave Stalin Eastern Europe because he was too ill to resist. The Red Army already controlled most of the region when the conference met. The Western leaders had few practical means of changing that, and their concessions were shaped by military realities and by their wish to win Soviet help against Japan.

Timeline

• 1943, 28 November – 1 December: The Big Three meet for the first time at the Tehran Conference.
• 1945, 30 January – 2 February: Roosevelt and Churchill confer at Malta.
• 1945, 4 February: The Yalta Conference opens at the Livadia Palace.
• 1945, 11 February: The leaders sign the protocol and the secret agreement on the Far East.
• 1945, 1 March: Roosevelt reports on Yalta to the US Congress.
• 1945, 12 April: Roosevelt dies; Harry Truman becomes president.
• 1945, 25 April: The United Nations founding conference opens in San Francisco.
• 1945, 8 August: The Soviet Union declares war on Japan, as promised at Yalta.

Why it matters

Yalta was the last meeting of the wartime alliance at the height of its power and the moment when the post-war order began to take shape. Its agreements created the framework for the occupation of Germany, Poland’s modern borders and the Security Council veto, while its broken promises on free elections made it one of the most contested episodes in modern European history.