A report on World War II, Soviet Union and United Nations

The League of Nations assembly, held in Geneva, Switzerland, 1930

Adolf Hitler at a German Nazi political rally in Nuremberg, August 1933

Benito Mussolini inspecting troops during the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935

Lenin, Trotsky and Kamenev celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution

1943 sketch by Franklin Roosevelt of the UN original three branches: The Four Policemen, an executive branch, and an international assembly of forty UN member states

The bombing of Guernica in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, sparked fears abroad in Europe that the next war would be based on bombing of cities with very high civilian casualties.

The UN in 1945: founding members in light blue, protectorates and territories of the founding members in dark blue

Japanese Imperial Army soldiers during the Battle of Shanghai, 1937

The Russian famine of 1921–22 killed an estimated 5 million people.

Dag Hammarskjöld was a particularly active secretary-general from 1953 until his death in 1961.

Red Army artillery unit during the Battle of Lake Khasan, 1938

Construction of the bridge through the Kolyma (part of the Road of Bones from Magadan to Jakutsk) by the workers of Dalstroy.

Kofi Annan, secretary-general from 1997 to 2006

Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Ciano pictured just before signing the Munich Agreement, 29 September 1938

Five Marshals of the Soviet Union in 1935. Only two of them – Budyonny and Voroshilov – survived Great Purge. Blyukher, Yegorov and Tukhachevsky were executed.

Flags of member nations at the United Nations Headquarters, seen in 2007

German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (right) and the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, after signing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, 23 August 1939

The Battle of Stalingrad, considered by many historians as a decisive turning point of World War II.

Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet general secretary, addressing the UN General Assembly in December 1988

Soldiers of the German Wehrmacht tearing down the border crossing into Poland, 1 September 1939

From left to right, the Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill confer in Tehran, 1943.

Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, demonstrates a vial with alleged Iraq chemical weapon probes to the UN Security Council on Iraq war hearings, 5 February 2003

Soldiers of the Polish Army during the defence of Poland, September 1939

Map showing greatest territorial extent of the Soviet Union and the states that it dominated politically, economically and militarily in 1960, after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 but before the official Sino-Soviet split of 1961 (total area: c. 35,000,000 km2)

Current secretary-general, António Guterres

Finnish machine gun nest aimed at Soviet Red Army positions during the Winter War, February 1940

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (left) with US President John F. Kennedy in Vienna, 3 June 1961.

The ICJ ruled that Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008 did not violate international law.

German advance into Belgium and Northern France, 10 May-4 June 1940, swept past the Maginot Line (shown in dark red)

Nikolai Podgorny visiting Tampere, Finland on 16 October 1969

Under Sukarno, Indonesia became the first and only country to leave the United Nations.

London seen from St. Paul's Cathedral after the German Blitz, 29 December 1940

Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev and US President Jimmy Carter sign the SALT II arms limitation treaty in Vienna on 18 June 1979

A Nepalese soldier on a peacekeeping deployment providing security at a rice distribution site in Haiti during 2010

Soldiers of the British Commonwealth forces from the Australian Army's 9th Division during the Siege of Tobruk; North African Campaign, September 1941

Mikhail Gorbachev in one-to-one discussions with US President Ronald Reagan

The UN Buffer Zone in Cyprus was established in 1974 following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.

German Panzer III of the Afrika Korps advancing across the North African desert, April-May 1941

The Pan-European Picnic took place in August 1989 on the Hungarian-Austrian border.

Eleanor Roosevelt with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1949

European theatre of World War II animation map, 1939–1945 – Red: Western Allies and the Soviet Union after 1941; Green: Soviet Union before 1941; Blue: Axis powers

T-80 tank on Red Square during the August Coup

Three former directors of the Global Smallpox Eradication Programme reading the news that smallpox has been globally eradicated in 1980

German soldiers during the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Axis powers, 1941

Changes in national boundaries after the end of the Cold War

In Jordan, UNHCR remains responsible for the Syrian refugees and the Zaatari refugee camp.

Soviet civilians leaving destroyed houses after a German bombardment during the Battle of Leningrad, 10 December 1942

Internally displaced Azerbaijanis from Nagorno-Karabakh, 1993

The 2001 Nobel Peace Prize to the UN—diploma in the lobby of the UN Headquarters in New York City

Japanese soldiers entering Hong Kong, 8 December 1941

Country emblems of the Soviet Republics before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (note that the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (fifth in the second row) no longer exists as a political entity of any kind and the emblem is unofficial)

Marking of the UN's 70th anniversary – Budapest, 2015

The USS Arizona (BB-39) was a total loss in the Japanese surprise air attack on the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Sunday 7 December 1941.

Sukarno and Voroshilov in a state meeting on 1958.

US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British PM Winston Churchill seated at the Casablanca Conference, January 1943

1960s Cuba-Soviet friendship poster with Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev

Map of Japanese military advances through mid-1942

Soviet stamp 1974 for friendship between USSR and India as both nations shared strong ties, although India was a prominent member of Non-Aligned Movement

US Marines during the Guadalcanal Campaign, in the Pacific theatre, 1942

Gerald Ford, Andrei Gromyko, Leonid Brezhnev and Henry Kissinger speaking informally at the Vladivostok Summit in 1974

Red Army soldiers on the counterattack during the Battle of Stalingrad, February 1943

Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush signing bilateral documents during Gorbachev's official visit to the United States in 1990

American 8th Air Force Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombing raid on the Focke-Wulf factory in Germany, 9 October 1943

U.S. Navy SBD-5 scout plane flying patrol over USS Washington (BB-56) and USS Lexington (CV-16) during the Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaign, 1943

Military parade on the Red Square in Moscow, 7 November 1964

Red Army troops in a counter-offensive on German positions at the Battle of Kursk, July 1943

The Grand Kremlin Palace, the seat of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, 1982

Ruins of the Benedictine monastery, during the Battle of Monte Cassino, Italian Campaign, May 1944

Nationalist anti-government riots in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, 1990

American troops approaching Omaha Beach during the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944

A medium-range SS-20 non-ICBM ballistic missile, the deployment of which in the late 1970s launched a new arms race in Europe in which NATO deployed Pershing II missiles in West Germany, among other things

German SS soldiers from the Dirlewanger Brigade, tasked with suppressing the Warsaw Uprising against Nazi occupation, August 1944

From left to right: Yuri Gagarin, Pavel Popovich, Valentina Tereshkova and Nikita Khrushchev at the Lenin's Mausoleum in 1963

General Douglas MacArthur returns to the Philippines during the Battle of Leyte, 20 October 1944

Yalta Conference held in February 1945, with Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin

The DneproGES, one of many hydroelectric power stations in the Soviet Union

Ruins of the Reichstag in Berlin, 3 June 1945.

Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.

Workers of the Salihorsk potash plant, Belarus, 1968

Ruins of Warsaw in 1945, after the deliberate destruction of the city by the occupying German forces

Volzhsky Avtomobilny Zavod (VAZ) in 1969

Defendants at the Nuremberg trials, where the Allied forces prosecuted prominent members of the political, military, judicial and economic leadership of Nazi Germany for crimes against humanity

Soviet stamp depicting the 30th anniversary of the International Atomic Energy Agency, published in 1987, a year following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster

Post-war border changes in Central Europe and creation of the Communist Eastern Bloc

Soviet stamp showing the orbit of Sputnik 1

David Ben-Gurion proclaiming the Israeli Declaration of Independence at the Independence Hall, 14 May 1948

Population of the Soviet Union (red) and the post-Soviet states (blue) from 1961 to 2009 as well as projection (dotted blue) from 2010 to 2100

Bodies of Chinese civilians killed by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Nanking Massacre in December 1937

Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, visiting the Lviv confectionery, Ukrainian SSR, 1967

Schutzstaffel (SS) female camp guards removing prisoners' bodies from lorries and carrying them to a mass grave, inside the German Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, 1945

Young Pioneers at a Young Pioneer camp in Kazakh SSR

Prisoner identity photograph taken by the German SS of a Polish Catholic girl who died in Auschwitz. Approximately 230,000 children were held prisoner and used in forced labour and Nazi medical experiments.

Polish civilians wearing blindfolds photographed just before their execution by German soldiers in Palmiry forest, 1940

Svaneti man in Mestia, Georgian SSR, 1929

Soviet partisans hanged by the German army. The Russian Academy of Sciences reported in 1995 civilian victims in the Soviet Union at German hands totalled 13.7 million dead, twenty percent of the 68 million persons in the occupied Soviet Union.

An early Soviet-era poster discouraging unsafe abortion practices

B-29 Superfortress strategic bombers on the Boeing assembly line in Wichita, Kansas, 1944

Cover of Bezbozhnik in 1929, magazine of the Society of the Godless. The first five-year plan of the Soviet Union is shown crushing the gods of the Abrahamic religions.

A V-2 rocket launched from a fixed site in Peenemünde, 21 June 1943

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow during its demolition in 1931

Nuclear Gadget being raised to the top of the detonation "shot tower", at Alamogordo Bombing Range; Trinity nuclear test, New Mexico, July 1945

A paranja burning ceremony in the Uzbek SSR as part of Soviet Hujum policies

World War II military deaths in Europe by theater and by year. Nazi Germany suffered 80% of its military deaths in the Eastern Front.

2001 stamp of Moldova shows Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space

People in Donetsk celebrate the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, 9 May 2018

Soviet singer-songwriter, poet and actor Vladimir Vysotsky in 1979

Valeri Kharlamov represented the Soviet Union at 11 Ice Hockey World Championships, winning eight gold medals, two silvers and one bronze

One of the many impacts of the approach to the environment in the USSR is the Aral Sea (see status in 1989 and 2014)

Landscape near Karabash, Chelyabinsk Oblast, an area that was previously covered with forests until acid rainfall from a nearby copper smelter killed all vegetation

Ethnographic map of the Soviet Union, 1941

Ethnographic map of the Soviet Union, 1970

The UN was established after World War II with the aim of preventing future wars, succeeding the rather ineffective League of Nations.

- United Nations

The organization's mission to preserve world peace was complicated in its early decades by the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union and their respective allies.

- United Nations

Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union had partitioned Poland and marked out their "spheres of influence" across Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania.

- World War II

With the outbreak of World War II following the German invasion of Poland, the formally neutral Soviet Union invaded and annexed the territories of several states in Eastern Europe.

- Soviet Union

The United Nations (UN) was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts, with the victorious great powers—China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States—becoming the permanent members of its Security Council.

- World War II

It was a founding member of the United Nations as well as one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council; it was also a member of the OSCE and the WFTU, and the leading member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.

- Soviet Union

6 related topics with Alpha

Chiang Kai-shek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met at the Cairo Conference in 1943 during World War II.

United Nations Security Council

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British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet general secretary Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference, February 1945

Church House in London where the first Security Council Meeting took place on 17 January 1946

US Secretary of State Colin Powell holds a model vial of anthrax while giving a presentation to the Security Council in February 2003.

United Nations Security Council members of September 2021 by political orientation of the country's head of government. Dark red: International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties Red: Progressive Alliance Yellow: Liberal International Blue: International Democrat Union Gray: No international affiliation or independent.

US President Barack Obama chairs a United Nations Security Council meeting.

The meeting room exhibits the United Nations Security Council mural by Per Krohg (1952).

South African soldiers patrolling as part of MONUSCO in 2018

The G4 nations: Brazil, Germany, India, Japan

The Uniting for Consensus: Italy, Pakistan, Spain, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Turkey, South Korea and others

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations (UN) and is charged with ensuring international peace and security, recommending the admission of new UN members to the General Assembly, and approving any changes to the UN Charter.

Like the UN as a whole, the Security Council was created after World War II to address the failings of the League of Nations in maintaining world peace.

However, the League lacked representation for colonial peoples (then half the world's population) and significant participation from several major powers, including the US, the USSR, Germany and Japan; it failed to act against the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Second Italo-Ethiopian War in 1935, the 1937 Japanese occupation of China, and Nazi expansions under Adolf Hitler that escalated into World War II.

Allies of World War II

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The Allied leaders of the European theatre (left to right): Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill meeting at the Tehran Conference in 1943

The Allied leaders of the Asian and Pacific Theater: Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill meeting at the Cairo Conference in 1943

Wartime poster for the United Nations, created in 1941 by the U.S. Office of War Information

Wartime poster for the United Nations, created in 1943 by the U.S. Office of War Information

British Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft (bottom) flying past a German Heinkel He 111 bomber aircraft (top) during the Battle of Britain in 1940

British Crusader tanks during the North African Campaign

British aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal under attack from Italian aircraft during the Battle of Cape Spartivento (27 Nov 1940)

British soldiers of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry in Elst, Netherlands on 2 March 1945

Free French forces at the Battle of Bir Hakeim, 1942

FAFL Free French GC II/5 "LaFayette" receiving ex-USAAF Curtiss P-40 fighters at Casablanca, French Morocco

The French fleet scuttled itself rather than fall into the hands of the Axis after their invasion of Vichy France on 11 November 1942.

The fall of Damascus to the Allies, late June 1941. A car carrying Free French commanders General Georges Catroux and General Paul Louis Le Gentilhomme enters the city, escorted by French Circassian cavalry (Gardes Tcherkess).

Soviet soldiers and T-34 tanks advancing near Bryansk in 1942

Soviet soldiers fighting in the ruins of Stalingrad during the Battle of Stalingrad

Soviet Il-2 ground attack aircraft attacking German ground forces during the Battle of Kursk, 1943

American Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bomber aircraft attacking the Japanese cruiser Mikuma during the Battle of Midway in June 1942

U.S. Marines during the Guadalcanal Campaign in November 1942

American Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber aircraft during the bombing of oil refineries in Ploiești, Romania on 1 August 1943 during Operation Tidal Wave

U.S. soldiers departing landing craft during the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944 known as D-Day

Philippine Scouts at Fort William McKinley firing a 37 mm anti-tank gun in training

Soldiers of the National Revolutionary Army associated with Nationalist China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War

Soldiers of the First Workers' and Peasants' Army associated with Communist China, during the Sino-Japanese War

Victorious Chinese Communist soldiers holding the flag of the Republic of China during the Hundred Regiments Offensive

Members of the Belgian Resistance with a Canadian soldier in Bruges, September 1944 during the Battle of the Scheldt

Norwegian soldiers on the Narvik front, May 1940

Pilots of the No. 303 "Kościuszko" Polish Fighter Squadron during the Battle of Britain

Polish partisan of the Home Army (AK), "Jędrusie" unit, holding a Browning wz.1928 light machine gun

Partisans and Chetniks escorting captured Germans through Užice, autumn 1941

Partisan leader Marshal Josip Broz Tito with Winston Churchill in 1944

Chetniks leader General Mihailovic with members of the U.S. military mission, Operation Halyard, 1944

Romanian soldiers in Transylvania, September–October 1944

The dead bodies of Benito Mussolini, his mistress Clara Petacci, and several Fascist leaders, hanging for public display after they were executed by Italian partisans in 1945

The first version of the flag of the United Nations, introduced in April 1945

A British poster from 1941, promoting the greater alliance against Germany

U.S. government poster showing a friendly Soviet soldier, 1942

The Allies were an international military coalition formed during the Second World War (1939–1945) to oppose the Axis powers, led by Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy.

Its principal members by 1941 were the United Kingdom, United States, Soviet Union, and China.

After the war ended, the Allies, and the Declaration that bound them, would become the basis of the modern United Nations; one enduring legacy of the alliance is the permanent membership of the U.N. Security Council, which is made up exclusively of the principal Allied powers that won the war.

Allied troops in Vladivostok, August 1918, during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War

Cold War

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The "Big Three" at the Yalta Conference: Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, 1945

Post-war Allied occupation zones in Germany

Clement Attlee, Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, 1945

Post-war territorial changes in Europe and the formation of the Eastern Bloc, the so-called "Iron Curtain"

Remains of the "Iron Curtain" in the Czech Republic

C-47s unloading at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin during the Berlin Blockade

President Truman signs the North Atlantic Treaty with guests in the Oval Office.

Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin in Moscow, December 1949

General Douglas MacArthur, UN Command CiC (seated), observes the naval shelling of Incheon, Korea from USS Mt. McKinley, 15 September 1950

US Marines engaged in street fighting during the liberation of Seoul, September 1950

NATO and Warsaw Pact troop strengths in Europe in 1959

From left to right: Soviet head of state Kliment Voroshilov, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and Finnish president Urho Kekkonen at Moscow in 1960.

The maximum territorial extent of Soviet influence, after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and before the official Sino-Soviet split of 1961

Western colonial empires in Asia and Africa all collapsed in the years after 1945.

1961 Soviet stamp commemorating Patrice Lumumba, assassinated prime minister of the Republic of the Congo

The United States reached the Moon in 1969.

Che Guevara (left) and Fidel Castro (right) in 1961

Soviet and American tanks face each other at Checkpoint Charlie during the Berlin Crisis of 1961.

Aerial photograph of a Soviet missile site in Cuba, taken by a US spy aircraft, 1 November 1962

NATO and Warsaw Pact troop strengths in Europe in 1973

US combat operations during the Battle of Ia Drang, South Vietnam, November 1965

A manifestation of the Finlandization period: in April 1970, a Finnish stamp was issued in honor of the 100th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin's birth and the Lenin Symposium held in Tampere. The stamp was the first Finnish stamp issued about a foreign person.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union in 1968 was one of the biggest military operations on European soil since World War II.

Suharto of Indonesia attending funeral of five generals slain in 30 September Movement, 2 October 1965

Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat with Henry Kissinger in 1975

Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet shaking hands with Henry Kissinger in 1976

Cuban tank in the streets of Luanda, Angola, 1976

During the Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot, 1.5 to 2 million people died due to the policies of his four-year premiership.

Mao Zedong and US President Richard Nixon, during his visit in China

Leonid Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter sign the SALT II treaty, 18 June 1979, in Vienna

Iranian people protesting against the Pahlavi dynasty, during the Iranian Revolution

Protest in Amsterdam against the deployment of Pershing II missiles in Europe, 1981

The Soviet invasion during Operation Storm-333 on 26 December 1979

President Reagan publicizes his support by meeting with Afghan mujahideen leaders in the White House, 1983.

President Reagan with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during a working luncheon at Camp David, December 1984

The world map of military alliances in 1980

US and USSR/Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles, 1945–2006

Delta 183 launch vehicle lifts off, carrying the Strategic Defense Initiative sensor experiment "Delta Star".

After ten-year-old American Samantha Smith wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov expressing her fear of nuclear war, Andropov invited Smith to the Soviet Union.

Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan sign the INF Treaty at the White House, 1987.

The beginning of the 1990s brought a thaw in relations between the superpowers.

"Tear down this wall!" speech: Reagan speaking in front of the Brandenburg Gate, 12 June 1987

Otto von Habsburg, who played a leading role in opening the Iron Curtain.

Erich Honecker lost control in August 1989.

The human chain in Lithuania during the Baltic Way, 23 August 1989

Since the end of the Cold War, the EU has expanded eastwards into the former Warsaw Pact and parts of the former Soviet Union.

A map showing the relations of Marxist–Leninist states after the Sino-Soviet split as of 1980:
The USSR and pro-Soviet socialist states
China and pro-Chinese socialist states
Neutral Socialist nations (North Korea and Yugoslavia)
Non-socialist states

The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, which began following World War II.

The 1945 Allied conference in San Francisco established the multi-national United Nations (UN) for the maintenance of world peace, but the enforcement capacity of its Security Council was effectively paralyzed by the ability of individual members to exercise veto power.

Yalta Conference

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Soviet, American and British diplomats during the Yalta conference

Yalta American Delegation in Livadia Palace from left to right: Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Maj. Gen. L. S. Kuter, Admiral E. J. King, General George C. Marshall, Ambassador Averell Harriman, Admiral William Leahy, and President F. D. Roosevelt. Livadia Palace, Crimea, RSFSR

Leaders of the Big Three at the negotiating table at the Yalta conference

Allied-occupied territories (red) on 15 February 1945, four days after the end of the conference

Poland's old and new borders, 1945 – Kresy in light red

The eventual partition of Germany into Allied Occupation Zones: {{legend|#69AB69|British zone}} {{legend|#2464D8|French zone (two exclaves) and beginning in 1947, the Saar protectorate}} {{legend|#FCA93E|American zone, including Bremen}} {{legend|#FF5555|Soviet zone, later the GDR}} {{legend|#FFFFCF|Polish and Soviet annexed territory}}

Partition plan from Winston Churchill: {{legend|#C9A091|North German state}} {{legend|#9195C9|South German state, including modern Austria and Hungary}} {{legend|#92C991|West German state}}

Morgenthau Plan: {{legend|#FF6464|North German state}} {{legend|#6464FF|South German state}} {{legend|#64ff64|International zone}} {{legend|#C8C8C8|Territory lost from Germany (Saarland to France, Upper Silesia to Poland, East Prussia, partitioned between Poland and the Soviet Union)}}

From left to right: Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin. Also present are Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (far left); Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Cunningham, RN, Marshal of the RAF Sir Charles Portal, RAF, (standing behind Churchill); General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the United States Army, and Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, USN, (standing behind Roosevelt)

The Yalta Conference (codenamed Argonaut), also known as the Crimea Conference, held 4–11 February 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union to discuss the postwar reorganization of Germany and Europe.

Roosevelt wanted Soviet support in the Pacific War against Japan, specifically for the planned invasion of Japan (Operation August Storm), as well as Soviet participation in the United Nations.

The Allied leaders of the European theatre: Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill meeting at the Tehran Conference in 1943

Four Policemen

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Postwar council with the Big Four that US President Franklin Roosevelt proposed as a guarantor of world peace.

Chiang Kai-shek, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill meet at the Cairo Conference in 1943 during World War II.

1943 sketch by Franklin Roosevelt of the United Nations' original three branches. The branch on the right represents the Four Policemen.

Their members were called the Four Powers during World War II and were the four major Allies of World War II: the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China.

When the United Nations was officially established later in 1945, France was in due course added as the fifth permanent member of the Security Council because of the insistence of Churchill.

League of Nations

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The first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace.

Anachronous world map showing member states of the League during its 26-year history.

The 1864 Geneva Convention, one of the earliest formulations of international law

The League to Enforce Peace published this full-page promotion in The New York Times on Christmas Day 1918. It resolved that the League "should ensure peace by eliminating causes of dissension, by deciding controversies by peaceable means, and by uniting the potential force of all the members as a standing menace against any nation that seeks to upset the peace of the world".

On his December 1918 trip to Europe, Woodrow Wilson gave speeches that "reaffirmed that the making of peace and the creation of a League of Nations must be accomplished as one single objective".

In 1924, the headquarters of the League was named "Palais Wilson", after Woodrow Wilson, who was credited as the "Founder of the League of Nations"

Palace of Nations, Geneva, the League's headquarters from 1936 until its dissolution in 1946

Child labour in a coal mine, United States, c. 1912

A map of the world in 1920–45, which shows the League of Nations members during its history

Chinese delegate addresses the League of Nations concerning the Manchurian Crisis in 1932.

Emperor Haile Selassie I going into exile in Bath, England via Jerusalem

The Gap in the Bridge; the sign reads "This League of Nations Bridge was designed by the President of the U.S.A."
Cartoon from Punch magazine, 10 December 1920, satirising the gap left by the US not joining the League.

World map showing member states of the League of Nations (in green and red) on 18 April 1946, when the League of Nations ceased to exist.

The main organization ceased operations on 20 April 1946 but many of its components were relocated into the new United Nations.

The credibility of the organization was weakened by the fact that the United States never joined the League and the Soviet Union joined late and was soon expelled after invading Finland.

The onset of the Second World War in 1939 showed that the League had failed its primary purpose; it was inactive until its abolition.