The Yalta Agreements, then, did not award the Soviet Union the monopoly of influence in Eastern Europe, that is, the kind of exclusive influence that the Americans and the British already enjoyed, with Stalin’s silent approval, in Western Europe, even though they assigned “controlling influence” in Eastern Europe to the USSR.
The Yalta Agreements thus represented a considerable success for the Western Allies. It has often been said of Churchill that he had grave misgivings about the “concessions” that Roosevelt allegedly had made in the Crimean resort. In reality, he was totally euphoric when the conference ended,[19] and with good reason, since the British and Americans had fared far better at Yalta than they would have dared to hope when it started.