# Yalta Conference protocol is signed by Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill

Date: 1945

## The fact

On 11 February 1945 at Yalta, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill signed a protocol on the United Nations, occupation of Germany, Poland’s government and borders, and Soviet entry against Japan in exchange for Sakhalin and the Kurils. It is a three-power instrument.

Later speeches, the cult, and measured deaths are not mixed into this Fact.

## Context

The Red Army already stood in Poland and the Balkans. Yalta did not create that occupation; it bargained its political clothing. Potsdam in July–August is a later Fact.

Shared responsibility with the Politburo, Sovnarkom, NKVD, front commands, and later the State Defence Committee is part of the record. Sharing is not a reason to drop [Stalin](/people/joseph-stalin)’s signature or chairmanship, and it is not a reason to treat every local killing as a personal handwriting sample.

## Evidence and sources

Avalon publishes the protocol. FRUS and the State Department historian independently record the same text. Disputes are about moral meaning, not about whether the protocol exists.

Where later commissions publish death or deportee estimates, those estimates are attributed to the commission, not invented as a Factrail original count.

## Significance

Strengthens [territorial-revisionism](/drivers/territorial-revisionism) in Eastern Europe, shared with the Western Allies. Medium confidence because occupation preceded the signature.

The attached driver is territorial-revisionism. A decree does not harvest grain, a pact does not fire a rifle, and a conference protocol does not occupy a city by itself. Implementation, if dated, is a later Fact. Mixed welfare effects are separate paths.

## What is established and what is not

Established: the 11 February 1945 Yalta protocol. Not established: that Stalin ‘alone’ created the Cold War at Yalta, or that Roosevelt ‘gave away’ Poland in a vacuum of Soviet troops.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original protocol with a different date or signatory; a demonstrated forgery of the cited order; or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of war, weather, or unauthorized local action.

The documentary limit is the same for every Stalin instrument in this dossier. Central files can show that an order was issued; they cannot, by themselves, reconstruct every raion’s implementation. Memoir and literary evidence (Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Grossman) is used here only as independent texture, never as the sole causal source. Soviet published statistics of the 1930s are treated as official claims with known incentives to over-report industrial output and under-report famine. Post-1956 party revelations, the 1991–92 archival openings, the 2010 Russian [State Duma](/organizations/state-duma) statement on Katyn, Ukrainian Holodomor statutes, and USHMM/Wilson Center document publications are later independent or successor-state records. They do not convert this Fact into a personality score. They do not cancel the original instrument. Readers who want the welfare path should open the named driver, then the indicator that driver already reaches, rather than treating the portrait as the mechanism.

The documentary limit is the same for every Stalin instrument in this dossier. Central files can show that an order was issued; they cannot, by themselves, reconstruct every raion’s implementation. Memoir and literary evidence (Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Grossman) is used here only as independent texture, never as the sole causal source. Soviet published statistics of the 1930s are treated as official claims with known incentives to over-report industrial output and under-report famine. Post-1956 party revelations, the 1991–92 archival openings, the 2010 Russian State Duma statement on Katyn, Ukrainian Holodomor statutes, and USHMM/Wilson Center document publications are later independent or successor-state records. They do not convert this Fact into a personality score. They do not cancel the original instrument. Readers who want the welfare path should open the named driver, then the indicator that driver already reaches, rather than treating the portrait as the mechanism.

## People

- Joseph Stalin: https://factrail.ai/people/joseph-stalin

## Drivers

- Territorial Revisionism: https://factrail.ai/drivers/territorial-revisionism

## Sources

- https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/yalta-conf
- https://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/yalta.asp

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/su-yalta-conference-1945