February 1945

In February 1945, with Allied victory over Germany imminent, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin met in Yalta, Crimea to negotiate the postwar fate of Germany and the countries liberated by Allied armies. It was a conference that would sow the seeds of the Cold War.

Stalin’s principal demands at Yalta involved Poland. While the Soviets were allies of Nazi Germany, they had invaded and annexed eastern Poland. Stalin insisted that the Soviet Union would keep the part of Poland it had taken in 1939 and demanded that the U.S. and Great Britain acknowledge the Soviet claim as legitimate. Because Roosevelt and Churchill believed Stalin’s promise that he would permit free elections in Poland, because Roosevelt was desperate to get Stalin’s agreement to enter the war against Japan, and perhaps simply because they weren’t in a position to stop him, Churchill and Roosevelt acceded, to the shock and dismay of the Polish government in exile and the 200,000 Polish soldiers fighting in the Allied armies. To them, the agreement was a betrayal.

Of course, we now know that Stalin had no intention of allowing free elections in Poland or anywhere else in Europe under the control of Soviet forces. On behalf of their respective countries, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill issued at Yalta a “Declaration of Liberated Europe,” pledging that all the people of liberated Europe would be allowed free elections and “democratic institutions of their own choice.” Instead, the Soviets installed puppet communist governments in the countries under their control so that, as Churchill would put it a year later, a Soviet “Iron Curtain” descended across Europe, separating the democratic west and the communist east. The Cold War followed.

The Yalta Conference ended on February 11, 1945.