The Yalta Conference

FEB 11 1945 · 12:00

Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference, Livadia Palace, February 1945. Place: Livadia Palace, Yalta, Crimea Figures: Franklin D. Roosevelt, frail and twelve weeks from death · Winston Churchill · Joseph Stalin, the host · Edward Stettinius, Anthony Eden, Vyacheslav Molotov, the foreign ministers · Alger Hiss, US delegation note-taker Seven Days at Livadia The three heads of government meet at the former summer palace of Nicholas II. The Red Army is on the Oder, forty miles from Berlin; Anglo-American forces are still west of the Rhine. The military balance frames every conversation. The agenda runs to four principal questions: the structure of the United Nations, the postwar treatment of Germany, the political shape of liberated Eastern Europe, and the terms of Soviet entry into the Pacific war. On the UN, agreement is reached on the Security Council veto formula (see [[un-charter-1945]]) and the General Assembly. On Germany, agreement is reached on division into occupation zones, with a French zone carved from the Anglo-American sectors and a separately occupied Berlin. On Poland, the eastern border runs along the Curzon Line, the western along the Oder-Neisse; the Lublin Committee will be the basis of the provisional government, broadened by some London Poles. On the Pacific, Stalin commits to declare war on Japan within three months of Germany's defeat, in exchange for the Kurile Islands, southern Sakhalin, and a sphere of influence in Manchuria. The Constitutional Document of the Cold War The Declaration on Liberated Europe, signed on 11 February, commits the three powers to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people. The phrase is interpreted differently in Washington and in Moscow within months. By the Potsdam Conference in July the disagreement is open. By March 1946, Churchill is in Fulton, Missouri, speaking of an iron curtain. Yalta becomes the constitutional document of the Cold War, in the negative sense: the conference where, in the dominant Anglo-American reading, Eastern Europe was conceded; in the Soviet reading, Western recognition of facts already on the ground was secured. Both readings agree on the substance: Yalta sets the framework that San Francisco (see [[un-charter-1945]]) builds inside, and that the next forty-five years of bipolar Westphalia (the system the [[fall-of-the-berlin-wall-1989]] eventually ends) live under. Video: TimeGhost special on the 4 to 11 February 1945 conference at Livadia Palace, where Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin drew the postwar map.