Stalin gave his assurances that Poland and other countries of Eastern Europe then occupied by the Red Army would not be subjected to communist control witho!.
ut their free democratic consent. In spite of the friendship displayed at the time, however, the scene was set for the ensuing Cold War between the East and the West. .
After the agreements reached at Yalta were made public in 1946, they were harshly criticized in the United States. This was because, as events turned out, Stalin failed to keep his promise that free elections would be held in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Instead, communist governments were established in all those countries, noncommunist political parties were suppressed, and genuinely democratic elections were never held. At the time of the Yalta Conference, both Roosevelt and Churchill had trusted Stalin and believed that he would keep his word. Neither leader had suspected that Stalin intended that all Popular Front governments in Europe would be taken over by communists. Roosevelt and Churchill were further inclined to assent to the Yalta agreements because they assumed, mistakenly as it turned out, that Soviet assistance would be sorely needed to defeat the Japanese in the Pacific and Manchuria. In any case, the Soviet Union was the military occupier of Eastern Europe at the war's end, and so there was little the Western democracies could do to enforce the promised made by Stalin at Yalta. .
In America, the Polish-American public had to be appeased for popularity and voting purposes. In the end however, a bland statement was issued from the Yalta Conference that specified that the Eastern frontier of Poland would be based on the Curzon line, but it did not mention where it would leave the northern and western frontiers. The agreement specified that almost of half of Poland's prewar territory will be given to the Soviet Union "less that a quarter of the 1931 population of this area had been Polish, most were Ukrainians, "an unhappy and rebellious minority before the war- plus some "equally dissatisfied- Belorussians.