The shape of the post-war world was hammered out in a Crimean resort town largely because Joseph Stalin refused to board an airplane. This episode examines the February 1945 Yalta Conference, where an ailing Franklin Roosevelt and an exhausted Winston Churchill traveled to the Livadia, Yusupov and Vorontsov palaces to negotiate with a Soviet leader whose Red Army stood 40 miles from Berlin and outnumbered Western forces in Europe three to one. As James F. Byrnes observed, the question was never what the Allies would let the Russians do, but what they could get the Russians to do.

We unpack the fight over Poland, from Churchill’s ideological commitment to free elections to Stalin’s demand for a buffer state, and the westward shift of Poland’s borders that left it permanently dependent on Moscow. The episode covers the toothless Declaration of Liberated Europe that Admiral Leahy warned could be stretched from Yalta to Washington, the price Stalin extracted for entering the Pacific war, the secret FDR-Stalin conversation about a Korean trusteeship, the Security Council veto and extra UN seats for Ukraine and Byelorussia, forced German labor as reparations, and the reciprocal repatriation clause that sent Cossacks and Soviet refugees back to execution or the Gulag. We close with the NKVD’s arrest of 16 Polish leaders, FDR’s admission that Averell Harriman was right, and Churchill’s shelved Operation Unthinkable.

• Why Charles de Gaulle was excluded and how he retaliated by occupying Stuttgart
• South Sakhalin, the Kurils, Mongolia and Chinese railways traded for Soviet entry against Japan
• Stalin’s demand for 16 separate UN votes and the compromise that followed
• Molotov’s worry about the wording and Stalin’s reply that they would do it their own way later
• Why Yalta is remembered in Eastern Europe as a Western betrayal