Yalta Conference

From 4 to 11 February 1945, the leaders of the three main Allied powers met at Yalta, a resort on the Crimean coast of the Soviet Union, to settle the shape of Europe after the defeat of Germany. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin agreed on the occupation of Germany, the future of Poland, the founding of the United Nations and Soviet entry into the war against Japan. Because the promises made there about free elections in eastern Europe were not kept, Yalta became one of the most argued-over meetings of the twentieth century.

Yalta was the second of the three wartime summits of the "Big Three", after Tehran in late 1943 and before Potsdam in the summer of 1945. By February 1945 the Western Allies had freed France and Belgium and stood on Germany's western border, while Soviet armies had driven the Germans out of Poland, Romania and Bulgaria and were some 65 kilometres from Berlin. Germany's defeat was certain; the question was what would follow. Roosevelt had wanted a meeting somewhere in the Mediterranean, but Stalin, citing his doctors' advice against long journeys, insisted on the Crimea. The leaders and their delegations stayed in the Livadia, Yusupov and Vorontsov palaces. France's leader, Charles de Gaulle, was not invited, which he long resented.

Roosevelt's priorities were Soviet help against Japan, to shorten the Pacific war and spare American lives, and Soviet participation in a new United Nations. Churchill's main concern was that the countries of central and eastern Europe, and Poland above all, should be able to choose their own governments in free votes. Stalin sought a Soviet sphere of influence in the region as a guarantee of security, and his armies' presence on the ground gave him a strong hand.

The three leaders confirmed that Germany must surrender unconditionally and would afterwards be disarmed, purged of Nazism and divided into zones of occupation, with a fourth zone for France carved from the British and American ones. Berlin would be divided too. Germany would pay reparations, partly in forced labour, and war criminals would be tried.

On Poland, they agreed to fix its eastern frontier along the Curzon Line, returning to the Soviet Union the eastern territory it claimed, while Poland would be compensated with German territory in the west. The communist provisional government already installed by the Soviets would be reorganised "on a broader democratic basis" and was pledged to hold free elections. A Declaration on Liberated Europe promised the peoples of the continent democratic institutions of their own choosing.

Stalin undertook to enter the war against Japan two or three months after Germany's surrender, in return for southern Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands and rights in Manchuria. He also agreed to join the United Nations, after a voting formula giving the great powers a veto in the Security Council, and Ukraine and Byelorussia were promised seats of their own. Agreements were also signed for the return of each country's liberated prisoners and displaced people, which later led to controversial forced handovers, such as that of Cossacks who had fought for Germany.

Roosevelt told Congress on 1 March that a start had been made on the road to peace, and Churchill won a confidence vote in Parliament, though some MPs protested about Poland. Within weeks, however, it became clear to Western leaders that the promised free elections in Poland were not going to happen; in late March the Soviet secret police arrested sixteen Polish opposition leaders invited to negotiate. Roosevelt died in April, and the remaining questions passed to the Potsdam Conference. As communist governments took power across eastern Europe and the Cold War began, many Poles came to see Yalta as a betrayal by their allies.

Our 1945 map shows Europe at the end of the war, with the new frontiers and spheres of influence that the conference helped to shape.