Geoffrey Roberts – Yalta and the Myth of Spheres of Influence

The article is based on my presentation to a conference on the 80^th anniversary of  Yalta, held at the Livadia Palace on 27 March 2025

The February 1945 Yalta summit of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill is notorious as the harbinger of postwar Europe’s division into Soviet and Western spheres of influence.

Currently, there is a lot of chatter about the danger of a Yalta 2.0 – the fear that American-Russian talks about ending the Ukraine war could lead to another Great Power carve-up of Europe.

Yet there was no such discussion of spheres of influence at Yalta. Indeed, the conference was devoted not to dividing Europe but to unifying it under the combined tutelage of the three victorious great powers of the Second World War – Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States.

The key political resolution agreed by the Big Three – the Declaration on Liberated Europe projected a politically united continent based on democracy and anti-fascism.

The most important practical decision at Yalta was finalisation of agreement on the establishment of the United Nations as successor to the League of Nations. The key issue concerned the voting rights of permanent members of the UN Security Council, a matter resolved by giving each of them a veto on important decisions. The veto was a device to maintain great power unity. As Stalin stressed, the aim was to avoid divergences among the Great Powers and create an organisation that would keep the peace for at least 50 years.

The driving force behind the creation of the United Nations was the United States and President Roosevelt’s vision of the Big Three acting as an international policing force that would jointly impose peace and stability on a disorderly world that had spawned two world wars in the space of a generation. It was a prescription for a universal sphere of influence under the benign hegemony of the Great Powers – a kind of re-creation on a global scale of the 19^th century Concert of Europe.

President Roosevelt died not long after the Yalta conference and his project of a postwar grand alliance centred on Soviet-American collaboration and the integration of the socialist USSR into European and global politics soon crumbled. By 1947 an East-West cold war was in full swing.

The future of Germany was discussed at Yalta but not in any great detail because it had already been decided to occupy the whole country and to divide it into Soviet and Western zones of military occupation. Overall, occupied Germany was to be governed by a joint allied control commission with a view to unifying the separate occupation zones as soon as possible. However, Germany remained divided after the war, mainly because Britain, France and the United States decided to turn their occupation zones into a Western sphere of influence.

More complicated still was the case of Poland, most of which was under Soviet control by the time of Yalta. The Soviets were determined its postwar regime would be friendly to them, while the British and Americans also sought a degree influence within Poland. It was agreed to reorganise and broaden the provisional administration that had been installed by the Soviets but post-Yalta there was a lot of wrangling over the political composition of a new government. Territorially, it was agreed the Soviet Union would retain those formerly Polish territories that Stalin had acquired as part of his 1939 pact with Hitler. Nationalist, anti-Soviet Poles were not happy but since these territories (Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia) had been forcibly occupied by Poland during its 1919-1920 war with Russia, neither Roosevelt nor Churchill had much sympathy for their complaints. Churchill hoped Stalin would let Poland keep Lviv but he refused, because, said he, the Ukrainians would never forgive him. Besides, the Poles were to be compensated for their losses in the east by the acquisition of German territories in the west.

The Yalta deal that comes closest to a spheres of influence agreement was the Soviet commitment to enter the Far Eastern war against Japan in return for reversal of the terms of the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth. In effect, this entailed the restoration of Russia’s sphere of influence in China, Korea and the northern Pacific that been lost as a result of the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese war.

The Yalta conference was not seen at the time as a great-power carve-up. Not until the 1950s did the idea the conference had crystalised the postwar division of Europe begin to dominate Western narratives. A key influence was Winston Churchill’s memoir of the so-called percentages agreement.

At a meeting with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944, Churchill presented a piece of paper on which were written percentages of Soviet and British influence in several countries. Britain and Russia were allocated 90% influence in Greece and Romania, respectively, while Hungary and Yugoslavia were divided 50/50 and Bulgaria 75% in Russia’s favour. In subsequent discussion, Bulgaria and Hungary were divided 80/20 in favour of the Soviets.

In Churchill’s telling, when handed the piece of paper, Stalin ticked it to indicate his assent. Churchill then proposed to burn the page lest it appear they had cynically decided the fate of millions of people. ‘No, you keep it’ was Stalin’s response.

Churchill’s purpose in recalling this melodrama was to highlight how he, personally, had saved Greece from a communist takeover.

While it is true that in discussion, as well as by ticking Churchill’s ‘naughty document’, Stalin conceded Britain would be the dominant voice in Greek affairs, it wasn’t much of a concession. Soviet policymakers had long deemed the Eastern Mediterranean as lying within Britain’s sphere of influence and Stalin had no intention of marching the Red Army all the way to Greece.

As to the other percentages listed by Churchill, only in his mind were these spheres of influence. For the Soviets, the percentages related to degrees of influence within the allied control commissions established to oversee the military occupation of the former Axis states of Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. Basically, the ‘agreement’ rubber-stamped the reality that these commissions would be dominated by the Soviets because it was their armed forces that occupied these countries. The precedent for such arrangements had been established by the situation in Western-occupied Italy, where the Soviets participated in an allied control commission but wielded no actual power over the occupation regime.

The percentages agreement was a Churchillian myth and its practical irrelevance is shown by the fact that neither the two leaders nor their subordinates discussed the matter further, with the exception of a brief exchange between Churchill and Stalin at the Potsdam conference in July 1945. In regard to Yugoslavia, which was a liberated allied state not an occupied enemy country, Churchill had specified 50/50 British and Soviet influence. At Potsdam he complained the percentage was 99/1 against Britain. Stalin responded that the share was 90% British, 10% Yugoslav and zero for the Soviets. Marshal Tito, Stalin told Churchill “had the partisan mentality and had done several things he ought not to have done”.

It was not Yalta that led to Europe’s de facto division into military-political spheres of influence but the course of the war. If anything, the aim at Yalta was to develop a Great Power unity that would soften and erode that de facto division.

Europe was divided as a result of the cold war – ultimately into competing military-political blocs rather than spheres of influence. It was the failure of the Yalta perspective of a peacetime grand alliance that led to the cold war

In retrospect, one can see that it would have been far better to have had an explicit spheres of influence discussion at Yalta with a view to ameliorating the obvious danger of political polarisation and the hardening of military zones of occupation into separate blocs. Certainly, Stalin would have been amenable to such a discussion. As far back as December 1941, he had suggested a British-Soviet spheres of influence deal to Churchill’s Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, though the proposed deal’s main thrust was conservative – the restoration of Europe’s prewar political-territorial status quo. Given a free hand, Eden and Churchill might have been willing to make a deal, but Roosevelt and the Americans were adamantly opposed to all spheres of influence, except for the one that prevailed in their own backyard of South America.

Yalta 1.0 was not about spheres of influence. It was about Great Power unity and the creation of an integrated global order – a peaceful and politically diverse international system. A Yalta 2.0 that revived that peacemaking project would be no bad thing from the point of view of a permanent détente with Russia.

Geoffrey Roberts is Emeritus Professor of History at University College Cork and a member of the Royal Irish Academy