The Yalta Conference

            Mutual distrust, suspicion, and misunderstandings can characterize the Cold War by two sides and their allies. The Cold War shortly followed the conference held between the leaders of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, which took place at the Black Sea resort of Yalta between the 4th and 11th of February 1945. This event held great significance as it led to the Cold War. At Yalta, the Allied leaders, known as the Big Three, met to plan the last stages of the Second World War and agree to the subsequent territorial division of Europe. Notable postwar settlements were discussed such as German disarmament and reparations, and the Curzon line was recognized as Poland's frontier with the Soviet Union. Also, by a secret agreement with Roosevelt, Stalin promised to declare war on Japan three months after the end of hostilities in Europe. Critics of the agreements that each nation's leaders negotiated hold that it partitioned the world into both communist and non-communist spheres. Americans viewed the Soviet denial of the Yalta agreements as enmity between the two nations, which could in effect develop into a war, with the power to destroy humanity, hence both the United States and the USSR shared responsibility for the origin of the Cold War.
             The Yalta agreements were based on several broad principles upon which the peace of Europe was supposed to rest. First of all, peace in Europe was to be guaranteed by the global cooperation of the United States, Britain, and Russia within the framework of the United Nations. Furthermore there were three specific policies according to which the peaceful reorganization of Europe was to proceed: friendship with Russia, hostility to Germany, and restoration of the pre-war nation-state system. Did Western diplomacy take for granted that these would be the principles of European peacemaking? As far as Soviet Russia goes, if tactics are distinguished from policy, it is obvious in retrospect that Soviet diplomacy had never emancipated itself from the fundamental principle of Bolshevik foreign policy: hostility to the West.