Observer - Observer 2005 №8 (187)
THREE BIG THREE SUMMITS: TEHRAN, YALTA, POTSDAM
Yu.Kashlev,
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary,
Professor
In the context of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, thoughts often return to how relations developed between the Soviet Union, the USA and Great Britain at that time, and especially personal contacts between I.V. Stalin, F.D. Roosevelt and W. Churchill at conferences in Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam.
It is clear that the defeat of fascist Germany was ensured primarily thanks to the heroism of the Soviet Army and the close military-political interaction of the three great powers. This interaction took place regularly: through diplomats such as Molotov, Hull, Eden and others, through the military, and so on. However, the meetings of the Big Three leaders played a decisive role.
The Tehran Conference of 1943 was preceded by lengthy agreements, including the venue. The British and Americans offered different cities - Tangier, Cairo and even Iceland. At the same time, the Americans referred to their legislation, which did not allow the US president to leave the country for more than two weeks. However, Stalin insisted on Tehran, since he, too, could not leave the country for long in the midst of the war.
Given that at that time the capital of Iran was full of German agents and the threat of an assassination attempt on the "Big Three" was not ruled out (Hitler even created a special team led by Skorzeny), Stalin offered Roosevelt to stay in Tehran in the building of the Soviet Embassy. Roosevelt agreed. This was a good step, allowing the two leaders to move on to close, even warm relations. In fact, the entire Tehran conference was held in the building of the USSR embassy.
In Tehran, the main issue was the opening of a second front against Germany in Western Europe. Stalin said bluntly: "We must decide here, in fact, the main question - whether the United States and Britain will help us in the war." Roosevelt was inclined towards this. Even on the eve of Tehran, Generals Marshall and Eisenhower prepared a plan for the landing of allied troops across the English Channel already in 1942. Roosevelt, after some hesitation, agreed with these plans. But the British (W. Churchill and General Brooke) declared that this plan was not feasible.
Churchill's line consisted in delaying the opening of a second front, in the maximum exhaustion of the forces of the Soviet Army and in an attempt to solve Britain's own interests at this expense. Instead of opening a second front in Europe, he proposed intensifying military operations either in North Africa, or in southern Italy, or even in the Bay of Bengal. In other words, he wanted to preserve British interests through proxy. Churchill's cynical statement is known: "I would like to see Hitler in a coffin, and the Soviet Union on the operating table."
This line of Churchill was no secret to the Americans either; It is no coincidence that Roosevelt once told Stalin in Tehran that the United States did not enter the war to save the British Empire.
Churchill's attempts to achieve special benefits for London did not pass. And there have been such attempts. For example, at one of his meetings with Stalin, Churchill, apparently without first consulting Roosevelt, proposed dividing spheres of influence in the Balkans; he even drew on a piece of paper the percentage division of spheres in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Stalin looked at this sheet, did not say anything, and only put a tick on it with a blue pencil*.
At a certain moment, Churchill's maneuvering on the issue of the second front, delaying under any pretexts, aroused the indignation of Stalin, who got up from the negotiating table and said to Molotov and Voroshilov: "Let's get out of here. We have too much to do at home to waste time here. Nothing worthwhile, As far as I can see it doesn't work."
Churchill, bewildered that the conference was in fact breaking down, said: "Marshal misunderstood me. The exact date can be called - May 1944."
And Roosevelt told his son back in Tehran that if things continue at the front like this, then the Russians may not need a second front.
As a result, Operation Overlord was carried out on June 6, 1944, when simultaneously 6,000 warships and transport ships moved from British ports across the English Channel; two weeks later, 100,000 soldiers and officers of the allied armies began fighting in Western Europe.
Other important issues were also discussed in Tehran, in particular, the dismemberment of Germany, the post-war world order, the entry of the USSR into the war with Japan, and the borders of Poland. In one of the conversations, Roosevelt asked Stalin a strange, at first glance, question: would the Soviet system be suitable for India? That is, he allowed for the expansion after the war of the sphere of influence of the USSR in South Asia, where Britain had dominated until then. True, Stalin replied that this was not necessary.
The Yalta (Crimean) conference was very different from the Tehran one. It took place at the final stage of the war (February 4-11, 1945). By that time, as a result of the successful offensive actions of the Soviet Army, the territory of our country, most of Poland, had been completely liberated, our divisions had entered the territory of Germany. By February 1945, the fascist bloc finally collapsed, the former allies of Germany entered the war on the side of the anti-Hitler coalition. No statements by Hitlerite propaganda about a new "weapon of retaliation," no attempts by the Nazis to enter into a separate conspiracy behind the back of the Soviet Union could save the "Third Reich" from inevitable collapse.
At the Yalta Conference, questions of the further conduct of the war were discussed, plans for the final defeat of Germany were agreed, the attitude of the Allied powers towards it after the surrender was determined, a decision was made to manage Greater Berlin, and reparations from Germany to compensate for the damage caused by the fascist army.
The policy of the three powers towards Germany was based on the principles of its democratic structure and denazification, the creation of guarantees that Germany would never again be able to disturb the peace in Europe. At the same time, confidence was expressed that after the eradication of Nazism and militarism, the German people would take their rightful place in the community of nations.
The position of the Soviet side was determined by the formula: "Hitlers come and go, but the German people, the German state remain." (By the way, back in Tehran in 1943, Stalin said that there was no such force that could keep Germany from unification in the future).
The historical merit of the Yalta Conference was the adoption of the decision to create an international institution for the preservation of peace - the United Nations and a permanent body under it - the Security Council. At the same time, it was established that in resolving the coordinating issues of peace, the UN would proceed from the principle of unanimity of the great powers, the permanent members of the Security Council. This decision is especially relevant now, when some countries are trying to resolve critical issues bypassing the UN Charter and challenging the principle of unanimity of the great powers.
The Conference adopted a number of other decisions, among which the "Declaration on a Liberated Europe" should be mentioned. In particular, it provided for the destruction of the remnants of fascism in the liberated countries and the creation of democratic institutions there. Thanks to the decisive position of the Soviet delegation, very favorable decisions were made for Poland, including the establishment of its borders in the north and west, a significant increase in its territory at the expense of East Prussia. A separate agreement between the leaders of the three powers, in the spirit of the preliminary agreement reached at the Tehran Conference, was the decision on the entry of the Soviet Union into the war with Japan 2-3 months after the surrender of Germany. This decision was stipulated by the need to maintain the existing status of the Mongolian People's Republic, as well as the transfer to the Soviet Union of South Sakhalin with all the islands adjacent to it and the Kuril Islands. The right to these territories was won by the Soviet Union due to the decisive role and subsequent active hostilities against Japan.
In general, the Yalta Conference went down in history as the largest international event during the Second World War. The decisions adopted at the conference contributed to the mobilization of the forces of the anti-Hitler coalition for the final defeat of fascist Germany and militaristic Japan, contained a program for the democratic organization of the world in the post-war period. At the same time, the conference demonstrated the importance of mutual understanding, partnership business cooperation of states in solving the cardinal problems that arise before mankind at one or another segment of its history. Attempts made today in connection with the 60th anniversary of the Great Victory in a number of countries, especially in Poland, Latvia and Estonia, to misinterpret the consequences of the Yalta Conference are not only regrettable, but also represent a line towards rewriting the history of the Second World War and revising its results, to undermine the basic principles regarding the post-war world order.
In early 1945, a memorandum from the US State Department stated: The US needed the help of the USSR to defeat Germany. They need the absolutely necessary assistance of the USSR in the war against Japan. We need cooperation with the USSR in organizing the post-war world. On the eve of Yalta, the Committee of Chiefs of Staff reported to Roosevelt: there have been cardinal changes in the world in the military strength of states, a phenomenal growth in the power of the Soviet Union, it is impossible to conflict with the USSR, we will find ourselves in a war that cannot be won. Further, the Committee of Chiefs of Staff concludes: after the defeat of Germany and Japan, only the USA and the USSR will remain first-class military powers due to the combination of their geographical position and huge military potential.
US business interests, including such giants as DuPont and others, showed considerable interest in trade relations with the Soviet Union after the war. They were already negotiating long-term agreements. There was a popular opinion in Washington that participation in the reconstruction of the Soviet Union was good for the United States of America and would help ease the post-war depression. It is no coincidence that on the table at Roosevelt lay the proposal of the Minister of Finance Morgenthau: to provide the Soviet Union after the war with a loan of 10 billion dollars at 2% for 35 years.
Roosevelt's wife, Eleanor, later wrote that before the Yalta Conference, Franklin had high hopes that he could make real progress in strengthening his personal relationship with Marshal Stalin. These hopes were justified. As their meeting in Yalta shows, it really was a special relationship, not only respectful, but also trusting. Roosevelt's confidant and closest friend Harry Hopkins wrote after Yalta: the president had no doubt that we could get along with the Russians and work with them peacefully for as long as one could imagine.
In Yalta there was an incident that clearly offended Churchill. He went to Roosevelt's office, but the guard wouldn't let him in. He waited half an hour, and then suddenly Roosevelt and Stalin appeared from the office, who were talking separately, without Churchill. And people close to Roosevelt said to Molotov: we do not advise you to conduct separate negotiations with Churchill; there are no problems in Europe that could not be solved together: the USSR and the USA.
The summits in Tehran and Yalta and other contacts showed that Stalin and Roosevelt and their closest aides treated each other constructively, assessed the prospects for their cooperation at the last stage of the war positively.
Unfortunately, these hopes did not come true.
The Berlin (Potsdam) conference took place on July 17 - August 2, 1945 under completely different conditions than the Tehran and Yalta conferences.
The war in Europe ended with the complete defeat and capitulation of Nazi Germany. The conference was called upon to consolidate in its decisions the historic victory won by the peoples of the USSR and other allied countries, and to work out a program for a just and lasting peace on the continent. The beginning of the Berlin conference was preceded by a lot of preparatory work - correspondence, consultations in the capitals, meetings. The venue (codenamed "Terminal") was not immediately determined until they settled on the Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam. Yes, and around the date there was a behind-the-scenes struggle: the Americans calculated the time so that the conference would begin after they exploded the atomic bomb.
The conference documents show that our delegation in Potsdam, which, under the leadership of I.V. Stalin, included V.M. Molotov, Admiral N.G. Kuznetsov, General A.I. Antonov, A.Ya. Vyshinsky, ambassadors A. A. Gromyko, F. G. Gusev and several other people, sought to preserve the spirit of cooperation between the three great powers for the post-war period.
Initially, it seemed that Washington was ready to move in the same direction. G. Truman, who became President of the United States after the death of F. Roosevelt, in his first conversation with Stalin said that he would like to establish with him "the same friendly relations that the Generalissimo had with President Roosevelt." When the question of who would chair the conference arose at the first meeting, Stalin suggested Truman.
However, the course of consideration of the issues on the agreed agenda showed the presence of serious differences in positions. W. Churchill, who led the British delegation until July 27, 1945, and then gave way to C. Attlee, who was elected as the new prime minister, played a mainly negative role. Churchill's line was no secret to Moscow. Already a few days after the surrender of Germany, in his message to Truman, he frightened with the prospect of the Red Army moving into the center of Europe, wrote about the "Iron Curtain", and so on. A little later, the US president's special envoy, John Davis, became convinced of Churchill's "extremely hostile position towards the USSR."
Even later, Churchill did not abandon his function as "the chief hater of Soviet Russia." There was a speech in Fulton, where he actually declared a "cold war" to Moscow. And in Washington, J. Kennan, who returned from the post of US envoy to Moscow, at about the same time developed and promoted the doctrine of "containment" of communism, which soon grew into the doctrine of "deterrence" and "rejection" of communism. Truman, intoxicated by the monopoly on the atomic bomb, increasingly slipped into an aggressive course against the USSR, which finally plunged international relations into a long period of confrontation.
All this happened, however, a little later, and in Potsdam the meetings looked decent, there were no sharp clashes between the members of the Big Three, since all issues were carefully agreed in advance, at the level of experts and foreign ministers. The transcript of the meetings shows that Stalin's comments and statements were distinguished by their conciseness and clarity, and were, as a rule, positive. He also could not help feeling gratitude to the American people for the Lend-Lease program, under which the USSR received thousands of military vehicles and trucks, aircraft, food, etc. from overseas during the war years. for a fantastic amount for those times - about 11 billion dollars (although the UK received assistance for 30 billion dollars).
On the whole, the Berlin (Potsdam) conference ended successfully on the entire spectrum of the problems considered. But most importantly, they demonstrated the possibility of successful cooperation between great powers not only in waging war against a common enemy, but also in organizing a post-war world.
Today, summits of heads of state and government have become almost commonplace and are held regularly. Thus, Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush have already met 14 times in recent years (and the foreign ministers of the Russian Federation and the United States - more than 40 times). All these meetings are very eventful and are of great importance. And 60 years ago, these were the rarest events, like beacons that shone far ahead.
Three summits of the "Big Three" during the Second World War were the peaks of the military-political and diplomatic interaction between the USSR, the USA and Great Britain. Their decisions and transcripts are invaluable material for new generations of international affairs experts.
Notes
* Historians to this day argue what this tick meant and where this leaflet is; although the scheme proposed by Churchill was largely implemented after the end of the war.
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Tehran - Yalta - Potsdam
Collection of documents
FOREWORD
A quarter of a century separates us from the events described in the documents collected in this book. Over the past two and a half decades, new houses and entire cities have not only risen from the ruins and ashes of the war years, but a generation of people has grown up and become adults, for whom the war, fortunately, is only paragraphs of a textbook, pages of fiction, frames of films. But time has no power over people's memory. Attention to the period of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people with the Nazi invaders does not weaken, and each new truthful and informative book about this time finds a wide and warm response.
In 1967, the publishing house "International Relations" published the book "Tehran - Yalta - Potsdam" - a collection of documents from the conferences of the leaders of the three countries of the anti-Hitler coalition, held in Tehran (November 28 - December 1, 1943), Yalta (February 4-11, 1945). ) and Potsdam (July 17 - August 2, 1945) The book was met with great interest, translated into a number of foreign languages and quickly sold out. And this is despite the fact that for the first time in our country, the Soviet records of the meetings of the conferences (as is known, no coordinated notes or transcripts were kept at the conferences; each delegation took notes independently) of the three powers in Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam were published as early as 1961– 1966 in the journal International Affairs.
After the publication of the first edition of the book "Tehran - Yalta - Potsdam", the editors received many letters.
“Although the documents included in the Collection were published earlier in the journal International Affairs,” wrote a reader from Cheboksary, “publishing them as a separate book makes it possible for a wider circle of people to get acquainted with these important materials.”
One of the Leningrad readers, noting the great impression made on her by the publication of documents, believes that such a book as "Tehran - Yalta - Potsdam", "it would be nice to have every worker on his desk."
The authors of numerous letters are people of different generations, professions and fields of knowledge. All of them note the relevance and significance of the Collection of Documents, ask to republish it, providing it with a preface and releasing it in a large circulation.
The second edition of the book "Tehran - Yalta - Potsdam" offered to the attention of readers is supplemented with records of several conversations of I. V. Stalin with F. Roosevelt and W. Churchill, which took place in 1943 in Tehran.
This book is published in the significant year 1970, when the Soviet people and all peace-loving people celebrate the 25th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. The documents presented in the Collection speak eloquently of the colossal work that the CPSU and the Soviet government did in the field of foreign policy and diplomacy in order to ensure complete victory over the enemy and establish a just and stable peace.
* * *The great interest in the published documents is explained by the fact that the Tehran, Crimean (Yalta) and Potsdam conferences of the leaders of the Soviet Union, the United States of America and Great Britain occupy a special place in the history of diplomacy, in the history of the Second World War. The materials of the meetings of the "Big Three" testify that the conferences greatly contributed to the unification of the efforts of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition in their struggle against fascist Germany and militarist Japan. These significant conferences not only brought the day of victory over the common enemy closer, but at the same time, the foundations of the post-war order of the world were laid in Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam. The conferences of the heads of the three powers clearly demonstrated the possibility of successful cooperation between states, regardless of their social system.
In the postwar years, many attempts were made in the West to falsify the spirit and content of the Allied conferences and distort the meaning of their decisions. This was facilitated, in particular, by various kinds of "documentary publications", numerous memoirs, books, brochures, articles by "eyewitnesses". In the USA, the FRG, England, a number of authors, seeking to justify the reactionary course of the ruling circles of these countries with their research, are trying to present in a false light certain aspects of the foreign policy and diplomacy of the Soviet Union - the country that took the brunt of the war against Nazi Germany and contributed decisive contribution to the victory over fascism.
Of course, the speculations around the conferences of the Allied Powers are not the only attempt by bourgeois scientists and politicians to present the history of the Second World War in a distorted form.
In order to distort the role of the Soviet Union in the war and belittle the significance of the victories of the Soviet Army, the bourgeois falsifiers of history put into play various kinds of theories about Hitler's "fatal mistakes", give a chronology of the "turning points" of the war that contradicts historical truth, etc.
So, some in every possible way impose the idea that the defeat of Germany was of an accidental nature. Hitler's Field Marshal Manstein, in his book Lost Victories, tries, in particular, to prove that if Hitler had followed the advice of military experts (and, of course, the advice of Manstein himself), then the course and outcome of the war would have been completely different.
Other researchers extol the victories of the Anglo-American troops in Africa and the Far East, and only in passing, by the way, talk about the battles on the Soviet-German front. Thus, it turns out that the turning points of the Second World War were not the heroic defense of Moscow, not the historical Battle of Stalingrad and the Battle of Kursk, which made a radical change in the course of the war, but the battle of El Alamein in October 1942, when British troops in the Northern Africa, they defeated the Italo-German grouping of Rommel, as well as the battle in the Coral Sea and at about. Midway.
The English historian J. Fuller, for example, names the victories over Nazi Germany in the following sequence: first, a naval battle near about. Midway in the Pacific, then the victory at El Alamein and the landing of the Anglo-American troops in Africa, and finally the Battle of Stalingrad.
Such "concepts", of course, do not stand up to scrutiny. The course of negotiations at inter-allied conferences is described with the same, to put it mildly, dishonesty. Thus, in an attempt to reconsider the essence and significance of the Tehran Conference, bourgeois scholars put forward a version of Roosevelt's "compliance with Stalin", as a result of which Churchill allegedly found himself isolated with his military-political program.
If in the first post-war years the Crimean Conference was called in the United States “the highest point of the unity of the Big Three” and its results were approved, then later Yalta, in the mouths of reactionary American historians, became synonymous with betrayal, portrayed by them as a kind of new “Munich”, where the United States and England capitulated to the Soviet Union. Russia.
In November 1944, an uprising was raised on the territory of Slovakia, as a result of which some areas were liberated. But for the most part it was suppressed by the Nazis. Austria was liberated by Soviet troops.
Liberation of the countries of Central and South-Eastern Europe.
On June 6, 1944, the Allies opened the Second Front in Western Europe. The Germans left Normandy, in August 1944 Finland withdrew from the war, and the Baltic states were liberated. The Soviet Army entered the territory of Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia.
In 1943-44, the Allies carried out military operations that brought Italy out of the war.
Warsaw uprising. On August 1, 1944, the Polish Committee of National Liberation, headed by Wladyslaw Sikorsky, raised an uprising in Warsaw. This forced our troops to speed up the liberation of Poland. On September 14, units of the Soviet army captured the eastern bank of the Vistula. The 1st Army of the Polish Army, together with the 1st Belorussian Front (commander K.K. Rokossovsky), crossed the Vistula, but they were late.
On October 2, the uprising in Warsaw was brutally suppressed by the Nazis, who destroyed the old districts of Warsaw, monuments of Polish architecture.
Liberation of Romania was carried out during the Iasi-Kishinev operation by the 2nd Ukrainian Front. On August 23, the Soviet government addressed a statement to the Romanian troops to end resistance.
Liberation of Bulgaria. While the troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front were preparing for hostilities, they suddenly encountered the absence of any resistance. The Bulgarians greeted the Russian army as an army - a liberator with bread and salt. Together with the Soviet army, the Bulgarian army reached the borders of Yugoslavia.
Liberation of Yugoslavia was carried out at the end of September 1944 jointly by the troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front and the People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia. At the request of Josip Broz, Tito Belgrade was liberated by units of the Yugoslav army.
Liberation of Hungary. The Hungarian fascists, led by Horthy and then Salashi, put up fierce resistance to units of the Soviet army. From November 1944 to April 1945, battles were fought here by the 3rd Ukrainian Front.
The Karelian Front (commander Meretskov K.A.) liberated Northern Norway.
From November 28 to December 1, 1943, the Tehran Conference took place. It became possible after Stalin ordered the dissolution of the Comintern in May 1943.
The main issue in Tehran was the opening of a Second Front in Europe. Stalin and Roosevelt insisted on opening the front in May 1944 in Northern France (Operation Overlord) Churchill in the Balkans.
Other important issues were the problems of Koenigsberg and Poland (due to the break in diplomatic relations with the London government of Sikorsky, connected with the “Katyn case”). Only in 1990 did the USSR recognize the responsibility of the NKVD for the execution in the Katyn Forest. In September 1942, the 40,000th Polish army was withdrawn from the USSR, leaving only the division named after. Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who became the core of the Polish Army.
In Tehran, it was decided to establish the border between the USSR and Poland along the "Curzon Line", according to the ethnic border.
Stalin accepted the obligation to join the war with Japan. Questions were raised about the post-war structure of Germany and the creation of the United Nations.
In February 1945, the Yalta Conference took place.. It adopted the "Declaration on a Liberated Europe" on the support of democratic institutions, assistance to the liberated peoples, and the destruction of traces of fascism. Questions were raised about the UN; the war with Japan (the USSR sought to return southern Sakhalin, the Kuriles, the rights to Port Arthur, Dairen, the joint Soviet-Chinese operation of the CER); reparations (Stalin agreed to receive industrial production for 10 years from East Germany); about Poland (it was decided to hold democratic elections).
In April-June 1945, a conference was held in San Francisco, at which the United Nations was created.
At the end of December 1944, the Germans crossed into offensive in the Ardennes in Belgium in order to force the allies to conclude a separate peace. This forced the Soviet troops to speed up the liberation of Germany.
January 12, 1945, 8 days ahead of schedule, the Soviet army launched an offensive. On January 17, Warsaw was liberated. In February, the Oder was forced ( Vistula - Oder operation).
Location, time,
members
Major Decisions
Tehran Conference
November-December 1943
Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt
Declaration on Joint Actions in the War Against Nazi Germany Adopted
The issue of opening a second front in Europe has been resolved
Treaty on the territorial structure of post-war Europe:
The Baltics are recognized as part of the USSR
USSR surrendered part of East Prussia
Restored independent Poland within the pre-war borders
Austrian and Hungarian independence declared
The USSR promised to declare war on Japan no later than three months after the end of
military operations in Europe
The decision on the future structure of Germany has been postponed
Yalta Conference
February 1945
Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt
The plan of defeat and the conditions for the unconditional surrender of Germany were agreed
The issue of dividing defeated Germany into four occupation zones has been resolved: British,
American, Soviet and French.
The demand of the USSR for reparations from Germany in the amount of 10 billion dollars (50%
from all of us)
The main principles of politics in the post-war world were outlined, it was decided to convene the Constituent
conference for the development of the UN Charter, in which the USSR received three seats - for the RSFSR,
Ukraine and Belarus
The right of the USSR to influence the situation in the countries of Eastern Europe was confirmed: in Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia
The USSR confirmed its promise to enter the war with Japan and received the consent of the allies to
annexation of the Kuril Islands and South Sakhalin
Potsdam (Berlin)
conference
July-August 1945 Stalin,
Truman, Churchill, then
Attlee is the new Prime Minister
The question of the quadripartite occupation of Germany and the administration of Berlin has been resolved
Resolved the issue of reparations from Germany in favor of the USSR in the form of industrial equipment
Principles of demilitarization, denazification, democratization and demonopolization developed
Germany (plan 4D)
International Military Tribunal established to try top Nazi military personnel
criminals
The western border of Poland was determined (the transfer of part of German territory to it up to the line of rivers
Oder - Western Neisse)
East Prussia with the city of Koenigsberg was transferred to the USSR
Political regime
Liquidation of T-bills
Strengthening the autocracy of Stalin
Transformation of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR into the Council of Ministers of the USSR,
people's commissariats - to the ministries
Strengthening the positions of the administrative-repressive
apparatus
The growing role of the CPSU (b) (since 1952 - the CPSU) in life
societies
A new round of political repression:
"Leningrad business"
"The Case of Shakhurin-Novikov"
"Doctors' Case"
"Mingrelian case"
"The Case of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee"
Development of the draft of the third program of the CPSU (b)
The needs and hopes of different segments of the population in
democratization of public life
Change in state-church relations
Struggle for power among Stalin's entourage
Economic sphere
IV five-year plan for the restoration and development of the national
economy (1946-1950)
Famine of 1846
Restoration work and new industrial
construction
Monetary reform and the abolition of the card system
(December 1947)
Labor heroism of the Soviet people
Increasing liability for infringement
state and collective farm property
Restoration of the destroyed collective farms, MTS and state farms
Use in the national economy of labor
prisoners and special prisoners
Creation of collective farms in the western regions of Ukraine and
Belarus, in the Baltic republics.
Preservation of administrative-command methods
management of the economy Education and science. Cultural development
Restoration and strengthening of the material and technical base of culture
Decrees of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks 1946-1948 on the issue
literature and art
Completion of the transition to a universal seven-year
learning
Campaign against "bourgeois cosmopolitanism" in
science and culture
Development of forms of evening and correspondence education
higher
Discussions on philosophy, linguistics and political
savings
Achievements of scientists in the creation of nuclear weapons and
rocket technology
Promotion of the benefits of socialism (genuine and imaginary)
in fiction
Strengthening party-state control over
cultural development
Foreign policy
Potsdam Conference of the Heads of the Three Great Powers
Formation of the world socialist system
The split of Europe
Assistance in the creation of regimes of "people's
democracy"
The emergence of confrontation between two world socio-political systems: socialism and capitalism
Bilateral treaties of friendship and mutual assistance
Beginning of the Cold War
Creation of the Cominformburo
Ideologization of international relations
Organization of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance
(CMEA), 1949
World Peace Movement
Soviet-Yugoslav conflict
The emergence of the anti-Hitler coalition was due to the objective need to unite the efforts of states and peoples in a just struggle against the aggressors who enslaved many states of Europe and Asia in the first years of the war and threatened the freedom and progressive development of all mankind. The main core of the anti-Hitler coalition was the three great powers - the USSR, the USA and Great Britain. The contribution of its individual participants to the defeat of the enemy was very different. The decisive force of the coalition was the Soviet Union, which played a major role in achieving victory. The contribution of the United States and Great Britain also played a significant role in this.
During the war years, three conferences were held with the participation of heads of government: Tehran in 1943, Crimean (Yalta) and Berlin (Potsdam) in 1945. At the first two, the USSR, the USA and England were represented by I. Stalin, F. Roosevelt and W. Churchill, at the Berlinskaya - I.V. Stalin, G. Truman and W. Churchill.
The Tehran Conference began on November 28, 1943. It was decided that the Allied landings in northern France would take place in May 1944. The Soviet Union undertook to time the major offensive of the Red Army by that time. The conference discussed the problems of the post-war structure of Germany, ensuring security in the future through the United Nations. Stalin, on behalf of the Soviet Union, pledged after the defeat of Germany to join the struggle against her ally Japan.
In February 1945 in Yalta, the "big three" gathered in the same composition as in Tehran. The atmosphere of the coming victory, as it were, overshadowed the differences and the desire of each side to strengthen its position in the post-war world. Real agreements were reached on many issues. These included, first of all, the coordination of the principles of the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany: the elimination of such institutions as the Nazi Party, the repressive apparatus of the Hitler regime, the dissolution of the armed forces, the establishment of control over the German military industry, the punishment of war criminals.
The adopted "Declaration on a Liberated Europe" provided for a coordinated policy in the liberated European countries. An important achievement of the conference was the decision to establish the International Organization of the United Nations. The question of the participation of the Soviet Union in the war with Japan was also resolved.
A little more than two months after the signing of Germany's surrender, the leaders of the USSR, the USA and Great Britain met again in Potsdam. Potsdam succeeded in agreeing on a number of positions and adopting decisions that, if consistently implemented, could ensure the peaceful development of Europe for many years to come. The parties decided not to temporarily create a centralized German government, but to exercise supreme power in Germany by the forces of a control council consisting of the commanders-in-chief of the occupying forces of the USSR, the USA, Great Britain, and also France, which was allocated a special zone of occupation. The conference participants agreed on the establishment of an international military tribunal for the main war criminals, which began its activities in November 1945. The historical significance of the anti-Hitler coalition lies in the fact that within its framework, for the first time in history, political and military cooperation between states belonging to different socio-economic systems was ensured in the name of the highest universal interests. A historical precedent was created, which was of great importance for the future development of international relations, and at the same time the correctness of the idea of a collective rebuff to the aggressors was confirmed.
