"A colorful and gripping portrait of the three aging leaders at their historic encounter." -The Wall Street Journal

For eight fateful days in 1945, three of the towering figures of the twentieth century-FDR, Churchill, and Stalin-met at a resort town on the Black Sea to decide on a strategy to defeat Germany and Japan, and to carve up the world. For more than sixty years, opinion has been bitterly divided on what they achieved. Did Yalta pave the way to the Cold War? Did FDR give too much to Stalin? In this groundbreaking book, Harvard historian S. M. Plokhy draws on newly declassified Soviet documents and unpublished diaries and letters of the participants to set the record straight.