Quick questions on Wartime conferences and the breakdown of the Grand Alliance explained: H2 History

At the Tehran Conference (November to December 1943) the Big Three (Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin) agreed the broad strategy for finishing the war, including a Western second front in France in 1944. The seeds of later disputes were already visible. Stalin pressed for a westward shift of Poland's borders and for recognition of Soviet security needs in Eastern Europe. The conference settled grand strategy but postponed the hard political questions about the postwar order.

The Yalta Conference produced apparent agreement that masked real division. The Big Three agreed to divide Germany into occupation zones, to establish the United Nations, and to issue the Declaration on Liberated Europe, which promised free elections in the countries freed from Nazi rule. On Poland they agreed only an ambiguous formula: the Soviet-backed Lublin government would be broadened with other democratic leaders, and free elections would follow.

By the Potsdam Conference the conditions had changed decisively. Roosevelt had died in April 1945 and was replaced by the more suspicious Truman; Churchill was replaced mid-conference by Attlee after losing the British election; and Germany had surrendered, removing the shared enemy. The United States had also successfully tested the atomic bomb, which Truman mentioned to Stalin during the conference.

The conferences sit at the centre of the debate over who was responsible for the Cold War. The orthodox interpretation, dominant in the West in the 1950s, holds that Soviet expansionism and Stalin's breach of the Yalta promises caused the conflict. The revisionist interpretation, prominent from the 1960s, argues that aggressive American policy, including atomic diplomacy and the demand for an open economic order, provoked legitimate Soviet security fears. The post-revisionist interpretation, associated with John Lewis Gaddis, treats the Cold War as the product of mutual misperception and a security dilemma in which each side's defensive moves looked aggressive to the other.

Explain why the Grand Alliance is often described as a "marriage of convenience." [4 marks]

To what extent did the Yalta and Potsdam conferences differ in their outcomes? [12 marks]

"The Cold War was caused by the breakdown of the Grand Alliance rather than by ideology." How far do you agree? [20 marks]