The Yalta Conference: What Really Happened

Between February 4 and 11, 1945, in the Livadia Palace in Yalta, Crimea, the only three men who at that moment were deciding the fate of the world met: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. The war in Europe was already won, Berlin would fall within weeks, but the future of the continent and the entire planet was still unwritten. The Big Three sat around a table to redraw the postwar geographical and political map. Roosevelt, already seriously ill and with only two months to live, wanted above all to avoid a new world war and establish the United Nations. Churchill feared above all Soviet expansion in Europe. Stalin, who had the Red Army already encamped from Warsaw to Budapest, knew he held the best cards. Germany was condemned to division into four occupation zones: American, British, French, and Soviet. Berlin, although entirely within the future Soviet zone, would also be split into four sectors. There was talk of denazification, trials of war criminals, and reparations, but without going into too much detail. The most painful case was that of Poland. Stalin forced the entire nation's relocation westward: it lost the territories in the east to the Soviet Union and received in exchange Silesia, Pomerania, and part of East Prussia, wrested from Germany. Regarding the Polish government, Stalin promised "free and unconstrained" elections within a short time, but insisted that power remain in the hands of the puppet government already installed by the Soviets in Lublin. Roosevelt and Churchill protested, obtained some vague formulations regarding the "broadening of the democratic base," but in practice accepted the fait accompli. For the rest of Eastern Europe, there was little need for much discussion. The Red Army already occupied Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, part of Czechoslovakia, and was about to enter Austria. A "Declaration on Liberated Europe" was signed, full of phrases like democracy, free elections, and self-determination of peoples, but without any control mechanism. Everyone knew they were just words. Roosevelt managed to secure the agreement for the creation of the United Nations and the founding conference in San Francisco. In exchange, he granted Stalin three seats in the General Assembly (for Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus) and the right of veto on the Security Council for the five great powers. The last major deal was Japan. Roosevelt, worried about the enormous losses a landing in the Japanese islands would entail, asked Stalin to enter the war against Tokyo within two or three months of the end of the European conflict. Stalin agreed, obtaining in exchange the return of southern Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and recognition of Soviet influence in Manchuria and Mongolia. When the conference ended, Roosevelt returned to America convinced he had saved the future peace. Churchill was gloomy and worried. Stalin was the only one truly satisfied: he had achieved practically everything he wanted without moving another tank. Two months later, Roosevelt was dead, and within a few years, all the countries of Eastern Europe had communist governments imposed by Moscow. The Iron Curtain had fallen. Yalta became the symbol of what many in the West saw as the "sell-out" of half of Europe, even though in reality it was above all the recognition of a military situation that no one, at that time, was willing to change with weapons. The world that emerged from that building in Crimea was already the world of the Cold War.