As they prepared to meet, the only objective the three leaders shared completely was the swift defeat of Nazi Germany. Otherwise each had his own agenda, his own priorities. Stalin wanted a swift end to the war, massive reparations from a defeated Germany and the establishment of a buffer zone of compliant states around the Soviet Union. Roosevelt hoped to agree to terms with Stalin for the Soviet Union’s swift entry into the war against Japan, and thus to save a million young American lives likely to be lost in an invasion of the Japanese home islands, to win Stalin’s approval for his plans for a United Nations organization, and to secure a democratic future for recently liberated countries. Churchill wanted to preserve a war-weakened Britain’s dwindling influence in the world, to safeguard its empire, and to ensure fair and free government in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, for whom in 1939 Britain had gone to war.
Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill not only defined a new world order but bequeathed a problematic legacy to our time.
Between February 4 and 11, 1945 the “Big Three”—as the press called them—made decisions that resonate to this day. Stalin’s price for Soviet entry into the war against Japan enabled the Red Army to advance into Korea and precipitated the Korean War, leading to the continuing partition of Korea and the ongoing confrontation with the Kim dynasty today. Yalta also seeded the ground for the Cold War. Within just weeks Stalin violated protocols signed at the conference that should have guaranteed democratic freedoms for the countries of Eastern Europe, and the Iron Curtain began to descend.
The new United Nations organization set up at Yalta should have been able to intervene, but the voting arrangements agreed there allowed the Soviet Union, as one of the five permanent members of the Security Council possessing a veto, to prevent action. With the UN hamstrung ever since by these voting rules, the world continues to struggle over how to contain Russian territorial ambitions such as their recent occupation of the Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, just as Roosevelt and Churchill battled in vain for the freedom of Eastern Europe, much of it already occupied by Soviet troops.
The decision of the “Big Three” to exclude the haughty Free French leader General Charles de Gaulle from Yalta also had far-reaching consequences. It fueled de Gaulle’s suspicion that the UK and US planned an Anglo-American hegemony and, in the 1960s, was a factor in his decision twice to veto Britain’s entry into the European Community. Arguably, had Britain entered earlier, it might have had greater influence, integrated better, and Brexit might not have happened.
This diary reveals—often in the words of those who were there—what happened on each of eight momentous days, exactly 75 years ago, as Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill not only defined a new world order but bequeathed a problematic legacy to our time.
Day One
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1945, A “WONDERFULLY MILD” DAY IN YALTA
10:30: Livadia Palace
With the conference about to begin, President Roosevelt confers with his senior advisers including silver-haired Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, US ambassador to Moscow Averell Harriman, and military chiefs Admiral William Leahy, General George Marshall, Admiral Ernest King, and General Laurence Kuter about US priorities. Harriman says Stalin will “very likely wish to raise the question of what the Russians would get” in return for entering the war against Japan.