series of "summit" conferences attended by Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, of which Yalta in 1944 is only the most famous. For both material and symbolic reasons, Poland was central to these discussions. On the material level, Poland was by far the largest nation in Eastern Europe; therefore the nature of the postwar settlement in Poland would tend to steer the shaping of the overall postwar settlement for the region as a whole. Poland was also as the events of the war itself made all too clear a central security question for the Soviet Union, and likewise for any postwar German state or states.
Poland was likewise central on the symbolic level as the casus belli of the Western allies' entry into World War II, and as the locale of the Soviets' most discreditable actions in the course of events that led to the war. To abandon Poland to totalitarianism and foreign domination after having supposedly gone to war to prevent just this would be a sort of negation of Western war aims. At the same time, in the view of Western observers such as George Kennan, a major Soviet motivation in shaping the postwar fate of Poland was to bury the evidence of Soviet misconduct since the Hitler Stalin Pact of 1938. Kennan made extended (if delicately worded, because Soviet agents might read them) remarks on this point on his diary as he passed through the Soviet Union in 1944 on his way back from the Middle East (Kennan, 1967: 203 205).
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