World War II: The Yalta Conference between the "Big Three" (Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin) opens at the Livadia Palace in the Crimea.
The Yalta Conference, also known as the Crimea Conference and codenamed Argonaut, held 4–11 February 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union to discuss the postwar reorganization of Germany and Europe. The four states were represented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Général de Gaulle and General Secretary Joseph Stalin, respectively. The conference was held near Yalta in Crimea, Soviet Union, within the Livadia, Yusupov, and Vorontsov Palaces.
The aim of the conference was to shape a postwar peace that represented not only a collective security order but also a plan to give self-determination to the liberated peoples of Europe. Intended mainly to discuss the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn Europe, within a few years, with the Cold War dividing the continent, the conference became a subject of intense controversy.
Yalta was the second of three major wartime conferences among the grand alliance. It was preceded by the Tehran Conference in November 1943 and was followed by the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. It was also preceded by a conference in Moscow in October 1944, not attended by Roosevelt, in which Churchill and Stalin had spoken of European Western and Soviet spheres of influence.