The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War

Daughters of Yalta focuses on the Yalta Conference, an eight-day conference attended by the British, American, and Soviet leaders from February 4-11, 1945. The conference’s name comes from its location of Yalta, Crimea, a holiday town on the Black Sea which was then part of Soviet territory.

The Allied leaders Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had previously met in conferences in Quebec, Canada (August, 1943), and Cairo, Egypt (November, 1943). However, they had only met with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin once previously, at the Tehran Conference in November and December of 1943. In Tehran, the leaders found common ground on their military plans, agreeing on a timeline for a US and British-led invasion of Nazi-occupied France, which would relieve the pressure on the Soviet Red Army, which was fighting Nazi troops across the war’s Eastern front. However, they failed to clearly negotiate post-war policies and disagreed on several important political matters, such as Soviet borders and Poland’s sovereignty from the Soviet Union.

By the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Nazi Germany was retreating across Europe, and an Allied victory was all but certain. As such, the main topic of the Yalta Conference was not military strategy, but negotiating how the major Allied powers would manage Europe’s liberated nations in the post-war period. While technically allies, there was a deep distrust between the Soviets and the British and American governments. The British and American governments had forged a cooperative and even friendly working relationship: Churchill and Roosevelt in particular had become quite friendly. Relations between the Western Allied powers and the USSR were more strained, as the US had only established diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1933.

The Yalta conference resulted in various agreements and plans, such as the division of post-war Germany between the Allied powers and the establishment of the United Nations. However, the conference was later controversial because the Soviet Union reneged on its agreements regarding respecting elections in Eastern European countries, and instead solidified its control in the region. In light of these developments, the ideological and economic divisions between Western Europe and European Europe became starkly marked, initiating the Cold War era.