The Yalta Declaration on Liberated Europe of February 11, 1945 was a triumph of Allied drafting — and it lasted less than three years. In a public statement, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom committed to assist the peoples of Eastern Europe in establishing “broadly representative” governments through free elections. Within months, the Soviet Union had imposed communist governments in Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria and was moving toward the same result in Czechoslovakia. The Western powers protested but were unable to enforce a declaration that one of the three signatories had never intended to honor.
The Text
The declaration, sometimes called the “Declaration of the Three Powers Regarding Liberated Europe,” was roughly 250 words long. The three powers declared that they would, “in accordance with the principle of the Atlantic Charter,” facilitate the establishment of conditions in which “the liberated peoples” could exercise “the right to choose the form of government under which they will live” through “democratic processes.” They pledged to assist these peoples in “the restoration of democratic institutions,” to facilitate “the holding of free elections” as soon as possible, and to promote “the widest possible participation of the people” in the political process.
The declaration was, in form, a victory for the United States and Britain. Roosevelt and Churchill had insisted on the inclusion of the language on free elections. Stalin had resisted, knowing that the populations of Eastern Europe, given a real choice, would not install communist governments. The American and British argument was that the declaration was needed to maintain public support for the alliance in the West, especially in the 1944 and 1945 elections.
The Substantive Defects
The declaration was vague where it most needed to be precise. It did not specify what would count as a “broadly representative” government, what “democratic processes” would be acceptable, or what would happen if a participating power did not live up to its commitments. The phrase “in accordance with the principles of the Atlantic Charter” imported the language of 1941 into a very different context.
The declaration also failed to provide an enforcement mechanism. The Western powers had no military leverage in Eastern Europe; the Red Army was in occupation — the Western forces were committed to the Pacific. Stalin, in his view, was simply ratifying a military reality: in any contested Eastern European election, the Soviet Union would have the final word.
The Collapse of the Declaration
In Poland, the provisional government that was supposed to be “reorganized” never held meaningful free elections. The referendum of June 1946, conducted under the control of the security services, produced results in which the communist candidates “won” by large margins. The general election of January 1947 was preceded by the arrest of noncommunist political leaders and the suppression of opposition parties; the communist bloc claimed 80 percent of the seats.
In Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, the pattern was similar. The Soviet occupying authorities tolerated the existence of noncommunist political parties in 1945 and into 1946, but gradually eliminated them through police pressure, manipulation of electoral commissions, exclusion of opposition parties from coalition governments. The formal “free elections” produced communist victories; the informal reality was that no real opposition had been allowed to function.
In Czechoslovakia, the last functioning parliamentary democracy in Eastern Europe, the pattern held until February 1948, when a communist-led cabinet crisis, partly engineered from Moscow, produced the resignation of the noncommunist ministers. The coup, the last major Soviet takeover in Eastern Europe, completed the picture that the Yalta Declaration had failed to prevent.
Why It Matters
The Yalta Declaration on Liberated Europe has been a contested text ever since. Critics, both in 1945 and in the decades after, charged that Roosevelt and Churchill had accepted a document that Stalin never intended to honor. Defenders, including the surviving American and British participants, argued that the alternative to the declaration was no public statement at all, and that the language of free elections and democratic institutions at least gave the dissidents of the next four decades a vocabulary to which they could appeal. The most famous such appeal was Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, which directly invoked the Helsinki Accords of 1975 — a descendant, in spirit, of the Yalta Declaration — to challenge the regime that had been established in violation of it. For the broader context of the Yalta agreements, see the Yalta and Potsdam conferences.