The Big Three carve up a postwar world before the war is even won
What happened
Meeting at a Crimean resort with an Allied victory in Europe all but certain but Japan's defeat still expected to take years, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin negotiated the shape of the postwar world at Yalta. Stalin agreed the Soviet Union would enter the Pacific war within three months of Germany's defeat, in exchange for territorial concessions in Manchuria and the Kuril Islands. The three leaders agreed the Security Council of the planned United Nations would have five permanent members, each holding a veto, and issued a declaration on Poland promising free elections while also providing for Communists to be included in its postwar government, terms Roosevelt hoped would preserve wartime cooperation into peacetime.
Why it matters
Roosevelt died just two months later, on 12 April 1945, and within weeks his successor Harry Truman was already clashing with the Soviets over exactly how Eastern Europe's free elections would actually work in practice, turning Yalta from a symbol of Allied unity into, for many later American critics, a symbol of having conceded too much to Stalin.
How we know
The conference's formal agreements were published shortly afterward, and US, British, and Soviet delegation records of the private negotiations, declassified in the following decades, let historians corroborate exactly what each leader conceded and what each merely implied.
Sources
- Office of the Historian, US Department of State. The Yalta Conference, 1945 · Reputable sourcehistory.state.gov · The domain "history.state.gov" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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