The Yalta Conference Begins
On this day · 4 February 1945
On a Crimean coast, three leaders sat down to redraw the map of a world the war had not yet finished breaking.
On February 4, 1945, with the Second World War still raging in Europe and the Pacific, the “Big Three” Allied leaders gathered at a Black Sea resort in the Crimea. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met to plan the postwar world during a week of talks that ran through February 11.
They came to shape the peace, but ended up sketching the dividing lines of the Cold War.
The leaders agreed on the occupation and demilitarization of Germany, the founding structure of the new United Nations, and the promise of free elections in liberated Europe. In a key bargain, Stalin pledged that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan in exchange for a sphere of influence in Manchuria — the conference’s major concrete result.
Many of Yalta’s promises, especially on free elections in Poland, went unfulfilled. Western powers soon accused Stalin of breaking the agreements, and the mistrust that followed helped harden the divisions of the looming Cold War.
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