Yalta: The Price of Peace - Softcover

Plokhy, S. M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143118927 ISBN 13: 9780143118923

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2011

Synopsis

"A colorful and gripping portrait of the three aging leaders at their historic encounter." -The Wall Street Journal

For eight fateful days in 1945, three of the towering figures of the twentieth century-FDR, Churchill, and Stalin-met at a resort town on the Black Sea to decide on a strategy to defeat Germany and Japan, and to carve up the world. For more than sixty years, opinion has been bitterly divided on what they achieved. Did Yalta pave the way to the Cold War? Did FDR give too much to Stalin? In this groundbreaking book, Harvard historian S. M. Plokhy draws on newly declassified Soviet documents and unpublished diaries and letters of the participants to set the record straight.

About this title

About the Author

Serhii Plokhii (Plokhy) is Mykhailo Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University and the author of several award-winning books on Ukrainian and Russian history, including The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford, 2001), The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (Cambridge, 2006), and Ukraine and Russia: Representations of the Past (Toronto, 2008). His revisionist account of the 1945 Yalta conference, Yalta: The Price of Peace was released by Viking Press on 4 February 2010, to mark the 65-th anniversary of the start of the Yalta Conference.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Harvard historian Plokhy (Unmaking Imperial Russia) enhances his stature as a scholar of modern Russia in this convincing revisionist analysis of the February 1945 Yalta conference. Plokhy makes sophisticated use of Soviet sources to make a case that Yalta was anything but the diplomatic defeat for the West so often depicted in cold war literature. He describes Yalta in the context of a clash between different approaches to international relations. FDR was a liberal internationalist. Churchill and Stalin saw the world in terms of power and interests. And with the Red Army only 50 miles from Berlin, Stalin held the trump cards. Plokhy's detailed and highly engrossing narrative of the negotiations shows that the West did reasonably well. Roosevelt's agenda was global. He secured Stalin's commitment to join the war against Japan and participate in the U.N. Churchill, focused on Europe, preserved British interests in the Mediterranean. Stalin achieved recognition of the U.S.S.R.'s great-power status and a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. The Yalta agreement was not the first conflict of the cold war but just a step toward a cold war that emerged only after three more years of failed negotiations. Maps. (Feb.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0143118927
• ISBN 13: 9780143118923
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 451