Yalta Conference

Abstract

The Yalta Conference (4–11 February 1945) was the most important and, it transpired, the most controversial Allied summit of World War II. When the conference ended, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin issued a statement proclaiming their utmost commitment to peacetime unity and to the establishment of longterm security for all states. After the conference, there was much talk about the ‘spirit of Yalta,’ and the Allied press lauded the meeting of the ‘Big Three’ as an historic turning point in Soviet–Western relations. But when the Cold War broke out in the mid-1940s, Churchill and especially Roosevelt came under fire for conceding too much to Stalin and for encouraging the Soviet dictator’s appetite for expansion. In subsequent years leftwing and right-wing critics of the Yalta agreements vied with each other in defining these agreements as either a great power carve-up of Europe into spheres of influence that blocked the path to revolution or as the cynical betrayal of the peoples of Eastern Europe to Stalinist tyranny.