Cam & Ray's Cold War Podcast

The last day of Yalta! We’re out, baby! Churchill fell asleep in the middle of an important debate and then woke up ranting about the wrong things. Iran wants everyone to leave their oil alone but no-one cares. Stalin wanted access to the Black Sea Straits. And Frank does the last big deal of his […]

Just when I thought I was out… they pulled me back in! To Yalta! Before the Big Three left Yalta, they signed a document that promised to allow the people of Europe “to create democratic institutions of their own choice”. Of course, at the time, the British were waging a war in Greece to prevent the people […]

As the Yalta conference comes to a close, the question of German reparations is settled on, but it’s obvious that Stalin still doesn’t trust the other two. And the feeling is mutual.

Stalin goes hard on the issue of German reparations but meets with pushback from Churchill, while Roosevelt can’t seem to make up his mind.

So after they agreed on Poland, the rest of the February 9 plenary session is spent talking about Germany.  Specifically – what to do with the Nazi big dogs.  Previously secret British War Cabinet papers released on 1 January 2006 have shown that Churchill had been advocating since 1942 for a policy of summary execution […]

We have a very special guest. Professor Serhii Plokhii is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, where he also serves as the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute. He’s the author of quite a few award-winning books including “The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine”, which in 2015 won the […]

Day 9 at Yalta! The official, famous photographs are taken, and someone worries that he’s going to be sent to the Gulag as a result. And the Polish question is finally settled to everyone’s relief. They can almost go home. Oh and there was no raping.

At the end of a long day full of hard bargaining, The Big Three could still relax in one another’s company. In this episode we discuss the most important dinner of the conference.

A deal was struck between FDR and Stalin: the Soviets will join the war with Japan in exchange for territorial acquisitions at Japan’s expense and the creation of a Soviet sphere of influence in northeastern China.