YALTA CONFERENCE

YALTA CONFERENCE. In early February 1945, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Marshal Joseph Stalin met in the Black Sea port city of Yalta to discuss the postwar administration of Europe. At the time of the conference, Allied forces had pushed Nazi Germany to the brink of collapse, and all sides recognized that the end of World War II was imminent. Roosevelt hoped to use the conference not only as a planning meeting for the postwar period but also as a forum to establish a warmer personal relationship with Stalin. Although weakened by a deteriorating heart condition that took his life two months later, Roosevelt believed he could use his charm and skills of persuasion to win Stalin's confidence in American goodwill, thereby ensuring a peaceful postwar world order.

Despite Roosevelt's efforts, however, Stalin drove a hard bargain at Yalta. Roosevelt's physical weakness as a dying man and Churchill's political weakness as head of a dying empire left Stalin in the strongest bargaining position of the three. The fact that Soviet forces had numerical superiority over their American and British allies on the continent of Europe further strengthened Stalin's hand. After a week of negotations, the three leaders announced agreement on (1) the occupation of Germany by the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France in four separate zones; (2) a conference of the signatories of the United Nations Declaration to open at San Francisco on 25 April 1945, for the purpose of establishing a world peace organization; (3) a (then-secret) large-power voting formula in the new organization; (4) an eastern boundary of Poland mainly following the Curzon Line (which gave the Soviet Union about one-third of prewar Poland), for which Poland was to be compensated by unspecified German territory in the north and west, and a new, freely elected, democratic Polish government; and (5) freely elected democratic governments for other liberated European nations. A supplementary secret agreement provided for Soviet entry into the war with Japan in two or three months after Germany surrendered, and, in return, British and American acceptance of (1) the status quo of Outer Mongolia; (2) restoration to the Soviet Union of its position in Manchuria before the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), with safeguarding of Soviet

interests in Dairen, Port Arthur, and the Manchurian railways; and (3) the cession to the Soviet Union of the Kurile Islands and the southern half of Sakhalin Island.

Contrary to Roosevelt's hopes, the conference failed to establish a spirit of trust between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the months and years following Germany's capitulation in May 1945, relations between Moscow and Washington steadily deteriorated, and a Cold War developed between the two rival superpowers. The Yalta conference became a major point of friction, as Americans charged the Soviets with systematically violating the Yalta agreements. Although at Yalta Stalin had agreed to support freely elected democratic governments in the liberated territories, he broke his pledges and brutally suppressed incipient democratic movements across Eastern Europe. The establishment of pro-Soviet puppet regimes in Eastern Europe led Churchill in a 1946 speech to accuse Moscow of having divided the continent with an Iron Curtain. In the United States, Republican critics accused the Roosevelt administration of having cravenly capitulated to Stalin's demands at Yalta. The controversy over Roosevelt's diplomacy at Yalta later became a major part of Senator Joe McCarthy's crusade of ANTICOMMUNISM in the early 1950s. The Republicans' accusation that Democratic administrations were "soft" on communism remained a significant feature of American presidential campaigns until the end of the Cold War.

YALTA CONFERENCE

BIBLIOGRAPHY