Agreements At The Yalta Conference

Yalta was the second of three major war conferences among the Big Three. It was preceded by the Tehran Conference in November 1943, followed by the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, preceded by a conference in Moscow in October 1944, in which President Roosevelt did not participate, during which Churchill and Stalin had spoken about European Western and Soviet spheres of influence. [1] The three heads of state and government tried to establish an agenda for the leadership of post-war Europe and to maintain peace between post-war countries. On the Eastern Front, the front line remained in the Soviet Union at the end of December 1943, but in August 1944, Soviet troops were in Poland and Romania as part of their journey west. At the time of the conference, Field Marshal Georgui Zhukov`s troops were 40 miles from Berlin. Stalin lowered himself so much at the conference that he could dictate conditions. According to James F. Byrne, a member of the U.S. delegation and future secretary of state, „it was not a question of what we would leave to the Russians, but what we could do to the Russians.” In addition, Roosevelt hoped that Stalin would commit to participating in the United Nations. The French head of state, General Charles de Gaulle, was not invited to the Yalta conference or to the Potsdam conference, a small diplomat who aroused deep and persistent resentment.

[5] De Gaulle attributed his exclusion from Yalta to Roosevelt`s long-standing personal antagonism against him, although the Soviet Union also refused his admission as a full participant. But the absence of a French representation in Yalta also meant that De Gaulle`s invitation to the Potsdam conference would have been very problematic. It would then have felt honourable to insist on the need to reopen all the issues agreed upon in Yalta in his absence. [6] Yalta was the second of three war conferences among the Big Three, preceded by the Tehran Conference in 1943, followed by the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, attended by Stalin, Churchill (replaced part-time by the new British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee) and Harry S. Truman, Roosevelt`s successor. The Yalta conference was a turning point in the Cold War. The aim of the conference was to organize a post-war peace that was not only a collective security order, but also a plan to give the liberated peoples of post-Nazi Europe self-determination. The meeting should focus on the restoration of the nations of war-torn Europe. But within a few years, as the Cold War divided the continent, Yalta became the subject of intense controversy. Each of the three heads of state and government had their own agenda for post-war Germany and liberated Europe.