He met with Molotov shortly after becoming President and dressed him down with such a tone as to make Molotov remark that no one had never been spoken to him like that before whereupon Truman said, "If Stalin kept his promises, he wouldn't be spoken to like that again."
Much criticism has been attached to FDR because of the Yalta agreements, but they do not address the realities of the situation.
The Soviet Union had far more to do with the defeat of Hitler than the Americans or the British and paid a much higher price than the Americans and British to do so. Soviet armies occupied all of Poland, including the Prussian wings later attached to Poland, all of the Baltic States, all of Romania, Bulgaria, and most of what was then Czechoslovakia (Patton held Prague), much of what was then Yugoslavia. The Soviets had millions of men and tens of thousands of tanks, including the T-34, which was the best tank in the world.
The situation at Potsdam was delicate, and Truman was just growing into the job, something he did spectacularly well.
The United States had nuclear weapons, which Stalin knew perfectly well, since the "British" German scientist Klaus Fuchs had been feeding his spies Manhattan Project information throughout the operations at Los Alamos, information that would allow the Soviets to develop a nuclear weapon only a few years after the US did.
The US and Britain, both engaged in war against the Japanese, facing their exhausted nations, simply did not have the strength to now take on the Soviet Union. The occupation of Eastern Europe by Stalin was a fait accompli. Nothing practical could have reversed it, at least not without even greater tragedy.
Even with nuclear weapons, a strong case could be made that the US needed a Soviet declaration of war on Japan to win the war, at least, this was the prevailing opinion in US circles in July of 1945. I don't think modern people can really appreciate the carnage of Iowa Jima and Okinawa, or what the expectation of casualties, Japanese and American for an invasion of the home islands was understood to be. It is probably the case that the US might have won without Soviet help, but the fact is that it wasn't clear at the time.
The US refused Soviet demands to place occupation troops in Japan, although it did allow them to take back the Kurile Islands that Russia had lost in 1905.
In 1948, Truman faced down Stalin in Berlin with the Berlin airlift, because he refused to be intimidated by Stalin. Because the US had nuclear superiority, which it maintained for most of the 20th century, the Soviets were forced to back down, as they would do in 1962 in the Cuban Missile Crisis. His actions in Korea, including the brilliant diplomatic move to make the war a United Nations effort rather than a wholly American effort, while extremely controversial, also were designed to reign in Stalin.
Radzinski, in his post Soviet biography of Stalin, claimed that Stalin was working toward and planning for nuclear war when he died in 1952. Whether this is true or not, Stalin never initiated one, I think because he understood that Truman had his measure.
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