Yalta Conference, (February 4–11, 1945), majorWorld War IIconference of the three chiefAllied leaders—Pres.Franklin D. Roosevelt of theUnited States, Prime MinisterWinston Churchill of theUnited Kingdom, and PremierJoseph Stalin of theSoviet Union—which met atYalta inCrimea to plan the final defeat andoccupation ofNazi Germany.

It had already been decided thatGermany would bedivided into occupied zones administered by U.S., British, French, and Soviet forces. The conferees accepted the principle that theAllies had no duty toward the Germans except to provide minimum subsistence, declared that the German military industry would be abolished or confiscated, and agreed that major war criminals would be tried before an international court, which subsequentlypresided at Nürnberg. The determination ofreparations was assigned to a commission.

How to deal with the defeated or liberated countries of easternEurope was the main problem discussed at the conference. The agreements reached, which were accepted by Stalin, called for “interim governmental authorities broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population…and the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people.”Britain and theUnited States supported aPolish government-in-exile inLondon, while theSoviets supported a communist-dominated Polish committee of national liberation inLublin. Neither the Western Allies nor the Soviet Union would change itsallegiance, so they could only agree that the Lublin committee would be broadened to include representatives of other Polish political groups, upon which the Allies would recognize it as a provisional government of national unity that would hold free elections to choose a successor government.Poland’s future frontiers were also discussed but not decided.

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Regarding thePacific Theatre, a secretprotocolstipulated that, in return for the Soviet Union’s entering the war againstJapan within “two or three months” after Germany’s surrender, the U.S.S.R. would obtain fromJapan theKuril Islands and regain the territory lost in theRusso-Japanese War of 1904–05 (including the southern part ofSakhalin Island), and the status quo in pro-SovietOuter Mongolia would be maintained. Stalin agreed to sign a pact of alliance and friendship withChina.

TheUnited Nations organization charter had already been drafted, and the conferees worked out a compromise formula for voting in theSecurity Council. The Sovietswithdrew their claim that all 16 Soviet republics should have membership in theGeneral Assembly.

After the agreements reached at Yalta were made public in 1946, they were harshly criticized in the United States. This was because, as events turned out, Stalin failed to keep his promise that free elections would be held inPoland,Czechoslovakia,Hungary,Romania, andBulgaria. Instead, communist governments were established in all those countries, noncommunist political parties were suppressed, and genuinely democratic elections were never held. At the time of the Yalta Conference, both Roosevelt and Churchill had trusted Stalin and believed that he would keep his word. Neither leader had suspected that Stalin intended that all thepopular front governments in Europe would be taken over by communists. Roosevelt and Churchill were further inclined to assent to the Yalta agreements because they assumed, mistakenly as it turned out, that Soviet assistance would be sorely needed to defeat the Japanese in the Pacific andManchuria. In any case, the Soviet Union was the military occupier of eastern Europe at the war’s end, and so there was little the Westerndemocracies could do to enforce the promises made by Stalin at Yalta. The formulation by American delegation memberJames F. Byrnes, soon to be secretary of state (1945–47), was apt: “It was not a question of what we wouldlet the Russians do, but what we couldget the Russians to do.”