Why It Was Difficult for Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin to Reach Satisfactory Agreements at the Yalta Conference

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Why it was difficult for Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin to reach satisfactory agreements at the Yalta Conference (6) There were several areas of dispute at the Yalta conference. The main one was Poland. Stalin wanted to keep the parts of Poland that he had won in the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939. He also wanted Poland expanded westwards by giving it pars of Germany. That would make Germany weaker and put a buffer zone between Germany and the Soviet Union, Germany had invaded the Soviet Union twice in 30 years and Stalin wanted to ensure that it would not happen again. He also wanted to guarantee that Poland had a pro-Soviet government. Stalin already had a government who were in exile: the Lublin Poles. But Roosevelt and Churchill supported another group, the strongly anti-Communist ‘London Poles’. These Poles had helped organize the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, aiming to gain part of Poland before Stalin’s Red Army took full control of the country. The uprising was defeated by the Nazis and nearly 300,000 Poles were killed. The Red Army was ordered not to help in the uprising. Stalin wanted to ensure that when his army cleared the Germans out of Poland, the Lublin Poles would have complete control (Stalin evidently had no intention of distributing power to the group of poles that Roosevelt and Churchill supported- the ‘London Poles’). Roosevelt and Churchill, understandably, did not want Stalin to have a free hand in Poland. At Yalta they made him agree (Stalin did not agree willingly) that some of the London Poles would be included in the government and that there would be free elections for a new government ‘as soon as possible’. the Yalta conference was not in fact as successful as it seemed as Stalin was determined to achieve his aim of an elected pro-Communist government whereas the London Poles had hardly any say in their government (what Stalin purposed
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