| |
More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
|
Yalta
|
|
|
Resort city in the Ukraine, on the Black Sea, where Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met during 4–11 February 1945 to plan the final strategies of *World War II and their postwar policy. Stalin and Churchill, meeting three months earlier in Moscow, had already agreed a relative share of influence for Britain and the USSR in the countries of eastern Europe (a deal which Churchill himself considered 'rather cynical'). The brutal fact, of which Roosevelt and Churchill were all too aware at Yalta, was that Russian armies would be in place throughout eastern Europe when the war ended.
|
|
|
|
|
The two western leaders had little option but to accept Stalin's assurance that the people of those countries would be free to decide their own futures. A secret deal which also tainted the image of Yalta was the promise that Russia could have certain Japanese territory (including the Kuril islands, still a major bone of contention today) if she declared war on Japan within two or three months of the end of the war in Europe. Stalin exercised this option two days after the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Discussion of similar topics was continued at *Potsdam.
|
|
|
|
|
One of the agreements made at Yalta was that Soviet citizens captured fighting on the German side should be returned to the Soviet Union. The term 'victims of Yalta', used broadly for all who were forcibly repatriated to almost certain death, applies more particularly to Russians wrongly returned under this agreement – those who had left Russia after the revolution of 1917 and had never been Soviet citizens.
|
|
|
|