February 1, 2025

Anniversary of Controversial Conference

By WINSTON S. CHURCHILL

The Yalta Conference took place eighty years ago this month from 4 to 11 February 1945. Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt traveled to the Soviet Union to meet with Russian leader Joseph Stalin at the Black Sea resort on the Crimean peninsula. For a week, the Big Three discussed plans for the end of the Second World War and its aftermath. In the final volume of his war memoirs, Triumph and Tragedy, Churchill wrote about the unusual nature of the accommodations and wryly noted the attentive nature of Soviet hospitality.

The Soviet Headquarters at Yalta were in the Yusopov Palace, and from this centre Stalin and Molotov and their generals carried on the government of Russia and the control of their immense front, now in violent action. President Roosevelt was given the even more splendid Livadia Palace, close at hand, and it was here, in order to spare him physical inconvenience, that all our plenary meetings were held. This exhausted the undamaged accommodation at Yalta.

I and the principal members of the British delegation were assigned to a very large villa about five miles away which had been built in the early nineteenth century by an English architect for a Russian Prince Vorontzov, one-time Imperial Ambassador the Court of St. James.

2025 International Churchill Conference

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2025 International Churchill Conference

My daughter Sarah, Mr. [Anthony] Eden, Sir Alexander Cadogan, Sir Alan Brooke, Sir Andrew Cunningham, Sir Charles Portal, Field-Marshal Alexander, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, General Ismay, and Lord Moran were among those who stayed with me. The rest of our delegation were put up in two rest-houses about twenty minutes away, five or six people sleeping in a room, including high-ranking officers, but no one seemed to mind.

The Germans had evacuated the neighborhood only ten months earlier, and the surrounding buildings had been badly damaged. We were warned that the area had not been completely cleared of mines, except for the grounds of the villa, which were, as usual, heavily patrolled by Russian guards. Over a thousand men had been at work on the scene before our arrival. Windows and doors had been repaired, and furniture and stores brought down from Moscow.

The setting of our abode was impressive. Behind the villa, half Gothic and half Moorish in style, rose the mountains, covered in snow, culminating in the highest peak in the Crimea. Before us lay the dark expanse of the Black Sea, severe, but still agreeable and warm even at this time of the year. Carved white lions guarded the entrance to the house, and beyond the courtyard lay a fine park with sub-tropical plants and cypresses. In the dining-room I recognised the two paintings hanging each side of the fireplace as copies of family portraits of the Herberts at Wilton. It appeared that Prince Vorontzov had married a daughter of the family, and had brought these pictures back with him from England.

Every effort was made by our hosts to ensure our comfort, and every chance remark noted with kindly attention. On one occasion Portal had admired a large glass tank with plants growing in it, and remarked that it contained no fish. Two days later a consignment of goldfish arrived. Another time somebody said casually that there was no lemon peel in the cocktails. The next day a lemon tree loaded with fruit was growing in the hall. All must have come by air from far away.