The Red Army recovered much of occupied Soviet territory in the autumn of 1943 and in the winter of 1943/44. On April 8, 1944, Marshal Ivan Konev crossed the Pruth into Rumania. In the following months Soviet armies advanced rapidly in eastern and central Europe, while other armies continued to wipe out the remaining German pockets on Soviet soil. Rumania and Bulgaria quickly changed sides and joined the anti-German coalition. The Red Army was joined by Tito partisans in Yugoslavia and in September 1944 entered Belgrade. After some bitter fighting, Red forces took Budapest in February 1945 and Vienna in mid-April. In the north, Finland had to accept an armistice in September 1944. The great offensive into Germany proper began in the autumn of 1944 when Red forces, after capturing Vilna, penetrated East Prussia. It gained momentum in January 1945 when large armies commanded by Konev in the south, Zhukov in the center, and Marshal Constantine Rokossovsky in the north invaded Germany on a broad front. On April 25, 1945, advanced Russian units met American troops at Torgau, on the Elbe, near Leipzig. On the second of May, Berlin fell to Zhukov's forces after heavy fighting. Hitler had already committed suicide. The Red Army entered Dresden on the eighth of May and Prague on the ninth. On that day, May 9, 1945, fighting ceased: the Third Reich had finally surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, first in Rheims on the seventh of May and then formally in Berlin on the eighth.
Urged by its allies and apparently itself eager to participate, the Soviet Union entered the war against Japan on August 8, 1945, three months after the German surrender. By that time Japan had already in fact been defeated by the United States and other powers. The American dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on the sixth of August and on Nagasaki on the ninth eliminated the need to invade the Japanese mainland, convincing the Japanese government that further resistance was useless. In spite of subsequent claims of Soviet historians and propagandists, the role of the U.S.S.R. in the conflict in the Far East and the Pacific was, therefore, fleeting and secondary at best. Yet it enabled the Red forces to occupy Manchuria, the Japanese part of the island of Sakhalin, and the Kurile islands, and to capture many prisoners - all at the price of considerable casualties, for the Japanese did resist. The formal Japanese surrender to the Allies took place on board the U.S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945. It marked the end of the Second World War.
Wartime Diplomacy
Diplomacy accompanied military operations. In the course of the war the Soviet Union established close contacts with its allies, in particular with Great Britain and the United States. It accepted the Atlantic Charter formulated by Roosevelt and Churchill in August 1941, which promised freedom, self-determination, and equality of economic opportunity to all countries, and it participated fully in the preparation and the eventual creation of the United Nations Organization. It concluded a twenty-year agreement with Great Britain "for the joint achievement both of victory and of a permanent peace settlement" in June 1942 and later made a treaty with France also.
Of the various high-level conferences of the Allies during the war, the three meetings of the heads of state were the most impressive and important. They took place at Teheran in December 1943, at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945, and at Potsdam near Berlin in July and August 1945. Stalin, who had assumed the position of prime minister and generalissimo, that is, chief military commander, while remaining the general secretary of the Party, represented the Soviet Union on all three occasions. Roosevelt headed the American delegation at Teheran and Yalta, and Truman, after Roosevelt's death, at Potsdam. Churchill and later Attlee spoke for Great Britain. The heads of the three world powers devoted large parts of their conferences to a discussion of such major issues of the Second World War as the establishment of the "second front" and the eventual entry of the Soviet Union into the struggle against Japan. But, especially as victory came nearer, they also made important provisions for the time when peace would be achieved. These included
among others: the division of Germany into zones of occupation, with Berlin receiving special status; the acceptance of the incorporation of the Konigsberg district of East Prussia into the Soviet Union; the determination of the Polish eastern frontier, which was to follow roughly the Curzon Line, Poland being granted an indefinite compensation in the west; the decision to promote the establishment of democratic governments based on free elections in all restored European countries; and provisions concerning the formation of the United Nations. Considerable, if largely deceptive, harmony was achieved. Roosevelt in particular exuded optimism.
Yet even during the war years important disagreements developed among the Allies. The Soviet Union was bitterly disappointed that the Western powers did not invade France in 1942 or in 1943. In spite of the importance of contacts with the West and the enormous aid received from there, Soviet authorities continued to supervise closely all relations with the outside world and to restrict the movement and activities of foreigners in the Soviet Union. Perhaps more important, early difficulties and disagreements concerning the nature of postwar Europe became apparent. Poland served as a striking case in point. After Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Soviet authorities established relations with the Polish government in exile in London. But the co-operation between the two broke down before long. The Polish army formed in the Soviet Union was transferred to Iran and British auspices, while the Soviet leadership proceeded to rely on a smaller group of Left-Wing Poles who eventually organized the so-called Lublin government in liberated Poland. The historic bitterness between the Poles and the Russians, the problem of the frontier, and other controversial issues were exacerbated by the events of the war years. In April 1943, the German radio announced to the world the massacre by the Reds of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk before the capture of that area by German troops. This charge, which led to the break in relations between Moscow and the Polish government in London, has now been confirmed. Again, when the Red Army reached the Vistula in August 1944, it failed to assist a desperate Polish rebellion against the Germans in Warsaw, which was finally crushed in October. In this manner it witnessed the annihilation of the anti-German, but also anti-Soviet, Polish underground. The official assertion that Red troops could not advance because they had exhausted their supplies and needed to rest and regroup had its grounds. But Soviet authorities would not even provide airstrips for Allied planes to help the Poles. Under the circumstances the Yalta decision to recognize the Lublin government expanded by several representatives of the London Poles and to hold free elections and establish a democratic regime in Poland proved unrealistic and amounted in the end to a Western surrender to Soviet wishes. This and