Quick questions on Origins of the Cold War, Yalta and Potsdam 1945: HSC Modern History

The Grand Alliance was formed by necessity, not ideology. The Anglo-Soviet Treaty (26 May 1942) and the Declaration by United Nations (1 January 1942) bound the three powers to the defeat of the Axis. Roosevelt described the relationship as "the four policemen" who would keep the post-war peace. The alliance contained latent tensions from the start: Soviet resentment at the delayed Second Front (Anglo-American forces landed at Normandy on 6 June 1944, three years after Operation Barbarossa), Anglo-American suspicion of Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe, and ideological enmity dating to the 1917 revolution and the 1918 to 1920 Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War.

The Big Three met at the Livadia Palace in Crimea. The war was effectively won in Europe; Soviet armies were 65 kilometres from Berlin.

Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945. Harry Truman, vice-president for 82 days, had been excluded from the Manhattan Project and from much foreign policy. He was briefed on the bomb on 25 April. His instinctive view of Stalin was harsher than Roosevelt's.

The Big Three met at the Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, outside ruined Berlin. Truman replaced Roosevelt; Attlee replaced Churchill on 28 July after Labour's election win. Stalin alone remained.

Stalin's reading: the war had cost 27 million Soviet dead; "friendly governments" in Eastern Europe were a security necessity; the Anglo-American powers had delayed the Second Front for three years; the atomic bomb had not been shared.

Marxism-Leninism predicted the collapse of capitalism and the inevitability of conflict between the systems. Stalin's February 1946 election speech revived this view, predicting that capitalist contradictions would produce a new war.

The orthodox view (Schlesinger, Feis) blamed Stalin's expansionism. The revisionist view (Williams, Kolko) blamed American economic imperialism and atomic diplomacy. The post-revisionist view (Gaddis) treats the breakdown as the structural product of two superpowers in the vacuum left by Germany and Japan. Gaddis's later work after the Soviet archives (We Now Know, 1997) returned weight to Stalin's ideology and personal paranoia.

Yalta was a compromise; Potsdam was where the compromises failed. The structural causes predated both.

The 12 April 1945 succession matters. Roosevelt's flexibility was replaced by Truman's bluntness.

Trinity was 16 July 1945. The bomb was not yet operational at Yalta.