In February 1945, Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt met in the
Crimea to discuss how to bring about a swift end to the Second World War and shape
peace for Europe. Diana Preston explores the aims, achievements and legacy of that
conference from the viewpoints of the Soviet Union, the UK and the United States
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
The future of Europe
is decided at Yalta
In early February 1945, the Soviet,
UK and US leaders – the ‘Big Three’,
as the press had dubbed them –
arrived at the seaside resort of
Yalta in the war-ravaged Crimea
peninsula in Ukraine (at that time,
a Soviet republic). Over eight
days of bargaining, bombast and
intermittent bonhomie in the hastily
restored Livadia Palace, built by
the last tsar of Russia, these three
heads of government decided the
future of Europe.
Josef Stalin had led the Soviet Union
from the mid-1920s, first as general
secretary of the Communist Party and
then, from 1941, as premier. Winston
Churchill had replaced Neville
Chamberlain as prime minister in 1940,
and had been the UK’s wartime leader.
Franklin D Roosevelt was serving his
fourth term as US president, having firsttaken office in 1933, but by 1945 his
health was declining.
Yalta was the second of three major
wartime conferences involving the ‘Big
Three’ powers. The first had been held
in Tehran in 1943, and the final one was
in Potsdam, near Berlin, in July 1945.
Topping the agenda at Yalta was
one key conundrum: how to bring
the Second World War to a swift
conclusion – the only goal that all three
leaders truly shared. By the time of the
conference, western Allied forces had
liberated France and Belgium and were
advancing into Germany, and Red Army
forces were just 40 miles from Berlin.
Defeat for the Nazis was nigh assured –
but not the timing or aftermath.
Other issues discussed included the
government of a defeated and occupied
Germany and the reparations to be
extracted from it; the establishment ofa new government and new borders for
Poland, the country for which Britain
had gone to war; the establishment of
a new peacekeeping organisation, the
United Nations; the repatriation of
Allied prisoners of war; and, finally, but
by no means least, the price of Soviet
entry into the war against Japan.
In their negotiations, as in the poker
games Roosevelt so enjoyed, it was not
only the nature of the hand held that
was important, but also the players’
characters and the way they played their
cards and anticipated, interpreted and
manipulated their opponents’ moves.
Each leader had come
to Yalta with specific
aims and strategies
for achieving them –
and those goals and
tactics were by no
means identical.BRIDGEMANONE MOMENT, THREE VIEWPOINTS
Over the following
pages we explore
Soviet, British and
US views of Yalta...5