num_pages: 416
description: While some of the last battles of WWII were being fought U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin--the so-called Big Three--met from February 4-11 1945 in the Crimean resort town of Yalta. Over eight days of bargaining bombast and intermittent bonhomie while Soviet soldiers and NKVD men patrolled the grounds of the three palaces occupied by their delegations they decided among other things on the endgame of the war against Nazi Germany and how a defeated and occupied Germany should be governed on the constitution of the nascent United Nations on the price of Soviet entry into the war against Japan on the new borders of Poland and on spheres of influence elsewhere in Eastern Europe the Balkans and Greece. With the deep insight of a skilled historian drawing on the memorable accounts of those who were there--from the leaders and high level advisors such as Averell Harriman Anthony Eden and Andrei Gromyko to Churchill's clear-eyed secretary Marian Holmes and FDR's insightful daughter Anna Boettiger--Diana Preston has on the 75th anniversary of this historic event crafted a masterful and vivid chronicle of the conference that created the post-war world out of which came decisions that still resonate loudly today.Ever since who won Yalta has been debated. Three months after the conference Roosevelt was dead and right after Germany's surrender Churchill wrote to the new president Harry Truman of an iron curtain that was now drawn upon [the Soviets'] front. Knowing his troops controlled eastern Europe Stalin's judgment in April 1945 thus speaks volumes: Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system.
language: English
title: Eight Days at Yalta: How Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin Shaped the Post-War World
publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press