Within a year or two after the Yalta Conference, the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union began to get worse. At the Yalta Conference, the leaders that attended included: President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom, and Premier Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union. Leaders of the Soviet Union, United States, and the United Kingdom developed The Declaration On Liberated Europe. This document planned to: • Establish conditions of internal peace • Carry out emergency relief measures for the relief of distressed peoples. • Form interim governmental authorities broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population and pledged to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people. • To facilitate where necessary the holding of such elections. The leaders also promised to: • Accept the structure of a world peace keeping organization that was to become the United Nations. • To reestablish order in Europe and to help the defeated countries create democratic governments. • To divide Germany into four zones that would be occupied by Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and France. • Support the Soviet-backed government and hold free elections in Poland, to extend the Soviet Union's territory into Poland. • To force Germany to give the Soviet Union equipment and other resources to make up for the Soviet's losses. The Soviet Union also agreed to enter the war against Japan in exchange for control of the Kuril Islands, the southern half of Sakhalin Island, and 2 strategic ports. Premier Stalin, wanted to keep Germany divided up into occupation zones. These areas are controlled by the military. Stalin wanted these occupation zones so that he knew Germany would never threaten the Soviet Union ever again. Winston Churchill disagreed with Stalin but Roosevelt persuaded him to agree with Stalin for the following reasons: • They both hoped that the Soviet Union would join forces with them in the war against Japan in the Pacific. • Roosevelt wanted Stalins support for a new peacemaking organization that he called the United Nations. Roosevelt got what he wanted and the Soviet Union agreed to join the United Nations along with the U.S. and fifty other countries in June of 1945.
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