The Yalta Conference (February 4–11, 1945) settled five questions, and unsettled almost everything else. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin reached agreement on the establishment of the United Nations, the future of defeated Germany, the fate of Poland, Soviet entry into the war against Japan, and a “Declaration on Liberated Europe” committing the three powers to free elections in countries occupied by Allied forces. None of the agreements was as clean as the public communiqué suggested, and almost every one of them became a source of dispute within months of the conference’s end.
The United Nations
Roosevelt had been working toward a postwar international organization since August 1941, when he and Churchill had first met at sea off Newfoundland. By Yalta, the basic structure was agreed: a General Assembly in which all members would be represented, and a Security Council of five permanent members (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China) with primary responsibility for peace and security.
The most contested feature was the veto. The Soviet Union insisted on a unanimity rule for substantive decisions in the Security Council; the United States, over the objection of its own State Department officials, agreed. The result was an organization in which the five permanent members could each block any substantive action, including against themselves. The compromise bought Soviet participation, but it also meant that the United Nations would not be the great-power enforcer of peace that Roosevelt had imagined. A founding conference was scheduled for San Francisco, April 25, 1945.
Germany
The three leaders agreed on the division of Germany into four occupation zones — American, British, French, and Soviet. Berlin, deep in the Soviet zone, would be similarly divided into four sectors, and an Allied Control Council would coordinate policy across the zones. The crucial questions — the amount of German reparations, the future political structure of Germany, the date at which the occupation might end — were left unresolved. Stalin wanted $20 billion in reparations, half to go to the Soviet Union; the Americans and British considered any fixed figure premature. A reparations commission was established to study the question and never reached agreement.
Poland
Poland was the most contentious issue. The London-based Polish government-in-exile had been a loyal British ally throughout the war, but the Soviet Union had broken off relations in 1943 after the discovery of the German massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest and the Soviet demand that the London Poles accept the Curzon Line as the eastern border. The Soviets had installed a rival communist-dominated government in Lublin.
The Yalta compromise was a face-saving formula: the Lublin government would be “reorganized on a broader democratic basis” to include democratic leaders from abroad and from Poland itself, and free elections would be held “as soon as possible.” The “as soon as possible” clause became the most disputed phrase in the entire agreement. Stalin interpreted it as referring to when the new government was ready; the Americans and British interpreted it as a fixed time limit. In the event, no meaningful free elections were ever held.
Soviet Entry into the Pacific War
Roosevelt was the most eager of the three to secure Stalin’s commitment to enter the war against Japan. The atomic bomb had not yet been tested, and American planners were estimating 500,000 or more American casualties in the planned invasion of Kyushu and Honshu. The Soviet promise to enter the war two to three months after Germany’s surrender was, in Roosevelt’s calculation, worth almost any price.
The price was paid in a secret protocol unknown to the Chinese Nationalist government. Stalin received the southern Kuril Islands, the southern half of Sakhalin Island, leasehold rights to the Port Arthur naval base, joint control of the Chinese Eastern and South Manchurian Railways, and recognition of the Mongolian People’s Republic. Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of China, learned of the arrangements only after the war. The Yalta deals, in his view and in Mao Zedong’s, established the Soviet position in East Asia that would shape the next half-century.
The Declaration on Liberated Europe
The Declaration on Liberated Europe, signed on February 11, 1945, committed the three powers to assist the peoples of Eastern Europe in “the formation of broadly representative governments” through “free elections.” It was the most idealistic of the Yalta agreements and the most quickly broken. Within months, Stalin had imposed communist governments in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, and was moving toward the same result in Czechoslovakia. The United States and Britain protested but had no leverage. For the broader context of the conference, see the Yalta and Potsdam conferences.