With Germany's defeat now a near certainty, the leaders of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union gathered at a former tsarist palace in Crimea to negotiate the shape of the postwar world. Their eight days of talks determined the division of Germany into occupation zones, the fate of Poland's borders, and the Soviet Union's entry into the war against Japan—decisions whose consequences would define the Cold War for decades.
The three Allied leaders convened at the Livadia Palace near Yalta, a resort on the Crimean coast that had been devastated by German occupation and hastily refurbished for the summit. Roosevelt, visibly gaunt and just two months from death, insisted on holding the conference in Soviet territory despite the arduous travel, partly to accommodate Stalin's refusal to fly and partly to keep the fragile alliance intact through its final, most consequential act.
Over eight days beginning February 4, the three leaders and their foreign ministers hashed out the postwar order. They agreed to divide a defeated Germany into four occupation zones, including one for France, and to prosecute Nazi war criminals. Stalin secured commitments on Poland's new borders, effectively ceding Soviet-occupied eastern Poland while shifting Polish territory westward at Germany's expense, and promised free elections there—a promise he would break within two years. In exchange for entering the Pacific war against Japan, the Soviets received territorial concessions in Asia.
Yalta later became a byword for betrayal in Cold War politics, criticized by many in the West as having sacrificed Eastern Europe to Soviet domination. Roosevelt and Churchill defended the deal as the best achievable given the reality of Soviet troops already occupying the region. Within weeks of the conference's optimistic spirit, the wartime alliance began fraying into the decades-long standoff that would follow.
Key people: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin