Three leaders redrew Europe sixty-five kilometres from Berlin
For one week in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Yalta to decide what postwar Germany and liberated Europe would look like. Soviet forces already sat about sixty-five kilometres from Berlin. Within years the deals they struck became Cold War flashpoints, and the conference itself a lasting controversy.
The Crimean summit ran from 4 to 11 February 1945 and sat between Tehran in late 1943 and Potsdam the following July as the middle Big Three meeting. Churchill and Stalin had already sketched informal spheres at Moscow in October 1944 without Roosevelt present. By the time the three leaders gathered, Western armies had cleared France and Belgium and were pressing Germany’s western frontier, while the Red Army’s nearness to Berlin meant defeat was settled and only the postwar map remained in dispute.
French leader Charles de Gaulle received no invitation to Yalta or to Potsdam, a diplomatic bruise that lingered for decades. He blamed Roosevelt’s personal dislike; Soviet objections to treating France as an equal partner mattered too. Venue haggling showed the power imbalance: Roosevelt floated Malta, Cyprus, Sicily, Athens, or Jerusalem, yet Stalin pleaded doctors’ orders against long journeys and pulled everyone to Crimea instead.
Each man arrived with his own shopping list. Roosevelt wanted Moscow in the war against Japan and inside the planned United Nations; Churchill pressed for free elections in Poland and across Central and Eastern Europe; Stalin demanded a Soviet sphere of influence as a matter of national security. For promising to attack Japan three months after Germany fell, Stalin won South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, and he made American recognition of Mongolian independence from China a precondition. The Soviets also signed up to the United Nations once a secret formula gave permanent Security Council members a veto.
On Germany the leaders insisted on unconditional surrender, promised demilitarisation and denazification, and agreed to four occupation zones, with France's share cut out of the American and British areas. Poland's eastern frontier was to follow the Curzon Line, compensated by German land in the west, and the government Moscow had installed there was accepted on condition that it be widened. Papers declassified later revealed that on 8 February Roosevelt and Stalin privately floated a trusteeship for Korea lasting twenty to thirty years.
Source: Yalta Conference
