Yalta Conference
Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met at a Crimean resort in February 1945 and settled much of the shape of the postwar world. The Red Army was on the Oder, a hundred kilometres from Berlin, and the western allies were still west of the Rhine, which is the fact that governed everything discussed. The agreements were: Germany to be divided into occupation zones with a French zone carved from the British and American ones, reparations in principle, war criminals to be tried, the United Nations to be founded at San Francisco with a Security Council veto, and free elections in liberated Europe under a declaration whose language was left vague. Poland was the hardest question and took the most time. Its eastern border was moved west to roughly the Curzon Line, giving the Soviet Union what it had taken in 1939, and Poland was compensated with German territory to the Oder; the government was to be the Soviet-installed one broadened by democratic politicians from abroad, with elections to follow. Stalin agreed to enter the war against Japan within three months of Germany's surrender, in exchange for the Kuriles, southern Sakhalin and interests in Manchuria. Roosevelt, who was four months from death, has been criticised ever since for conceding eastern Europe, and the counter-argument is that the Red Army was already there and nothing on paper was going to move it. The elections in Poland were held in 1947 and were not free. Churchill had wanted a firmer text and did not have the leverage to insist on one. The conference has become shorthand for a betrayal in the countries it disposed of, and the more careful criticism is not of the concessions but of the declaration on liberated Europe, which promised free elections in terms so loose that Stalin could sign it without intending anything.
- Year: 1945 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
