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 o ...