What was decided at the Yalta Conference?

Three men at Livadia

The conference ran from February 4 to 11, 1945, at the Livadia Palace, built for the last tsar, near Yalta in Crimea, on the Black Sea. Roosevelt was sixty-three and gravely ill; Churchill was seventy; Stalin, the host, was sixty-six. The map favored the host. The Red Army stood on the Oder, about 65 kilometers (40 miles) from Berlin, while the Americans and British had not yet crossed the Rhine. Yalta was the middle one of three wartime summits. At Tehran, in November 1943, the three had settled the invasion of France. At Potsdam, from July 17 to August 2, 1945, Truman sat in Roosevelt’s chair and, halfway through, Clement Attlee replaced Churchill after Britain’s election, so only Stalin attended all three.

What they signed

• Germany. Unconditional surrender, occupation in zones with one carved out for France, a French seat on the Allied Control Council, and a commission in Moscow to work out reparations, which the Soviet Union wanted on a large scale.
• Poland. The eastern border would follow the Curzon Line, roughly where Soviet troops had stopped after invading eastern Poland in 1939, and Poland would gain German land in the north and west. The Moscow-backed provisional government would be “reorganized on a broader democratic basis” and pledged to elections.
• The rest of liberated Europe. A Declaration on Liberated Europe promised governments chosen through free elections.
• The United Nations. A founding conference in San Francisco from April 25, 1945, a veto for the great powers in the Security Council, and seats of their own for Soviet Ukraine and Belarus.
• Japan. In a separate secret agreement, the Soviet Union would enter the Pacific war “two or three months after Germany has surrendered,” in return for southern Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands and rights in Manchuria.

The heart of the Polish clause read:

This Polish Provisional Government of National Unity shall be pledged to the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot.

Two readings of one text

The text left out what mattered most: who would run the elections, and who would check them. At the table, Churchill had asked that Poland be “mistress in her own house.” Stalin’s reply, in the American minutes, reached back thirty years. Germany had come through Poland to attack Russia twice, so Poland was for him “not only a question of honor but of life and death for the Soviet State.” Moscow read the deal as recognition of a friendly government on its border. In Washington, Roosevelt told Congress on March 1 that Yalta ought to spell the end of “the spheres of influence.” Eleven days after Roosevelt’s death in April, at a meeting of Truman’s advisers, Admiral William Leahy called the agreement “susceptible to two interpretations.”

Did Roosevelt give Eastern Europe away?

In Poland and across much of the West, “Yalta” came to mean great powers settling a small country’s fate without it. American critics in the 1950s charged that a dying Roosevelt had been outmaneuvered and had handed Eastern Europe to Stalin. Defenders answer that Yalta gave away nothing the Red Army did not already hold, that Roosevelt’s military advisers feared heavy American losses in an invasion of Japan, and that Stalin kept his promise on Japan, declaring war on August 8, 1945, exactly three months after Germany’s surrender. When Poland finally voted, in January 1947, Western governments denounced the election as rigged. Thirteen months after Yalta, Churchill was describing a line across Europe (the Iron Curtain). The record shows a promise both sides could sign because each read it differently, and the start of the quarrel that became the Cold War (how the Cold War started).