Sixty-five years ago this week, Joseph Stalin, who fiercely distrusted physicians, played host to Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt because, he claimed, doctors had warned him that travel outside the U.S.S.R. would endanger his health. To accommodate his partner in the Grand Alliance against Hitler, an ailing FDR further endangered his own health by traveling 14,000 miles for a meeting at an old Russian spa on the Crimean coast.
For nearly half a century, any talk about the Yalta Conference had the potential to devolve into a shouting match between conservatives and liberals. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the corrosion of the Iron Curtain have taken the edge off of such ideologically charged confrontations, but questions still remain about this controversial conference meant to speed the end of World War II and prepare for the postwar world.
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