Alger Hiss was a highly educated Soviet agent who held influential positions in the federal government during the 1940s. He was a very prominent aid that shaped the thinking at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, where a dying Roosevelt ceded Eastern Europe to Stalin. More notably, Hiss was proven to have passed top-secret documents off as a Soviet spy, but was spared the electric chair on a technicality. He served four years in prison for perjury. Hiss and the Rosenbergs, who the government executed for passing nuclear weapon designs to the Soviets, were the most famous cases of the Red Scare, all of which happened under the progressive tenures of Roosevelt and Truman.