R
oosevelt, most frail of the
three leaders, had two main
aims at Yalta : securing
Soviet entry into the war
against Japan and endorse-
ment of his United Nations plans.
Roosevelt believed Soviet entry into
the Pacific war essential to save millions
of young American lives that might
other wise be lost in an invasion of the
Japanese home islands – fears held despite
the good progress then being made by the
Manhattan atomic bomb project (which
had not been disclosed to Stalin, though
he was well aware of it through his spies).
At a meeting with Stalin on the fifth day
of the conference, Roosevelt readily
agreed to most of Stalin’s requests,
including the cession of the southern half
of Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands,
then in Japanese hands, together with
warm-water ports and railway conces-
sions in Manchuria – the latter at the
unconsulted Chiang Kai-shek’s expense.
In return, Stalin committed to enter the
war against Japan within two or three
months of Germany’s surrender.
The United Nations was Roosevelt’s
brainchild, inspired by President
Woodrow Wilson’s efforts at the 1919
Versailles Conference to establish the
League of Nations (to which Congress
subsequently vetoed US entry). Roo-
sevelt believed such an organisation es-
sential to world peace – as was American
leadership of it, agreeing with Wilson
that the United States was “the only
nation that all feel is disinterested and all
trust”. The name ‘The United Nations’
had emerged from talks between Roo-
sevelt and Churchill over the winter of
1941–42. Following an international
meeting at Dumbarton Oaks, a mansion
in Georgetown, Washington DC, in1944, a broad structure had begun to
emerge, with a General Assembly and
a Security Council.
However, Roosevelt knew that much
remained to be clarified. On the journey
to Yalta, his aides became frustrated
that he seemed prepared to discuss only
one issue: the United Nations. During
the conference, he retained that focus –
something Stalin realised and exploited
to secure concessions elsewhere. By the
conference’s end, Roosevelt had achieved
most of what he wanted, including agree-
ment on the draft UN constitution and a
date for the first meeting of the organisa-
tion, in April 1945 in San Francisco.Aftermath of the conference
In a buoyant address to Congress after
the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt praised
the outcome as spelling “the end of the
system of unilateral action, the exclusive
alliances, the spheres of influence, the
balances of power... that have been
tried for centuries – and have always
failed”. And in London, Churchill told
colleagues that “Poor Neville Chamber-
lain believed he could trust Hitler. He
was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong
about [trusting] Stalin”.
Events soon contradicted both men’s
statements. In Poland, a puppet govern-
ment loyal to the Soviet Union began
arresting opponents and showed no
sign of upholding the agreement to hold
free elections. Churchill wrote bleakly
to Roosevelt that Poland was “the test
case between us and the Russians of the
meaning which is to be attached to such
terms as Democracy, Sovereignty, Inde-
pendence, Representative Government
and free and unfettered elections”. He
feared that on Poland they had “under-
written a fraudulent prospectus”.Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945.
That summer, at the final ‘Big Three’
conference in Potsdam, Harr y Truman,
Roosevelt’s successor, and Churchill –
then Clement Attlee, who replaced him
as prime minister during the conference- tried but failed to persuade Stalin to
honour the Yalta agreements. Over the
following months they watched help-
lessly as the Soviet Union tightened its
grip on eastern Europe and, as Churchill
described it in his speech in Fulton, Mis-
souri in March 1946, “an iron curtain”
descended. The “sunlit plains of peace
and happiness” proved illusory; instead,
millions in Europe were displaced by new
borders and ethnic violence, and a cold
war replaced a hot one.
Yalta also had long-lasting conse-
quences in Asia. Roosevelt’s agreement
with Stalin over Soviet entry into the
Pacific War enabled Soviet troops to
advance to Korea’s 38th parallel and to
occupy Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.
Had that not happened, the Korean War
might not have been fought, and Korea
might today be united and democratic.
Churchill and Roosevelt are often
blamed for not achieving more at Yalta.
Yet the challenges they faced over eastern
Europe have some analogies with the
west’s current dilemma over Crimea - annexed by Russia – and eastern
Ukraine. In both cases, western leaders
have few viable sanctions to apply against
Russia beyond moral pressure. Roo-
sevelt’s private verdict on Yalta, shared
by Churchill, was this: “I didn’t say the
result was good. I said it was the best
I could do”.
“I didn’t say the result was good.
I said it was the best I could do”
Diana Preston is the author of Eight Days at
Yalta: How Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin Shaped
the Post-War World (Picador, 2019)