ABSTRACT
In a literal sense, “Yalta” was the 4–11 February 1945 meeting of the “Big Three”—Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin—which took place in the Crimea in a holiday resort near Yalta. This meeting had been preceded by a 1943 conference in Teheran and was soon to be followed by the third, and last, summit of the War Alliance in Potsdam. Even the most seemingly value-free and matter-of-fact description of the agenda at Yalta is likely to deepen that bitter discord that was to characterize subsequent evaluations of the conference. The wave of “revisionist historiography” in the 1960s in the United States rejected both New Deal optimism and bitter British criticism concerning Yalta. The East European assessment of Yalta underwent distinct phases. It is from the melding of this East European “oral public opinion” with certain western extremist positions that the “Yalta myths” have emerged.
