The Yalta conference was held in the Russian resort town of Crimea from Feb. 4 to 11, 1945.
At this conference was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin.
photo pulled from flickr
According to the Office of the Historian, a branch of the Department of State, Roosevelt and Churchill allied with Stalin to achieve control in the Pacific. In exchange for Soviet assistance, Stalin was promised a domain of power over the lands it had lost in the Russo-Japanese war, from 1904-05, after the defeat of Japan.
Not only did the three leaders tackle the war in the Pacific, but they also discussed what to do with Germany and Eastern Europe at the close of the second world war.
Part of those plans included Germany’s partial responsibility for reparations and the addition of communism to the national government. The main issue discussed at the conference, according to Britannica, was what to do with recently defeated or liberated parts of Europe, specifically Nazi-occupied Germany. The decision was come to, and agreed upon by all three world leaders, to establish an interim government which could host free elections to guide the rebuilding of eastern Europe based on what the people wanted.
According to Britannica, the decisions of the Yalta Conference were viewed with disapproval by people in the United States.Why? Because Stalin didn’t keep his promise of allowing free, democratic elections to establish new governments. Instead, communist governments were established and any inkling of democracy was crushed in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
Abbygail Vasas can be contacted at avasas@kscequinox.com
