Where Yalta Took Place

Above, The Big Three at the Yalta Conference in 1945. Photo by Asya.

Asya made my day (since I am a World War II history buff) this morning when she sent me 13 photographs she took during a visit to Livadia Palace, where the Yalta Conference had taken place in Crimea. She is vacationing in Crimea.

According to Wikipedia:

The Yalta Conference, also known as the Crimea Conference and code-named the Argonaut Conference, held February 4–11, 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. The three states were represented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Premier Joseph Stalin, respectively. The conference was held near Yalta in Crimea, Soviet Union, within the Livadia, Yusupov, and Vorontsov Palaces.

The aim of the conference was to shape a post-war peace that represented not just a collective security order but a plan to give self-determination to the liberated peoples of post-Nazi Europe. The meeting was intended mainly to discuss the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn Europe. However, within a few short years, with the Cold War dividing the continent, Yalta became a subject of intense controversy.

Yalta was the second of three major wartime conferences among the Big Three. It was preceded by the Tehran Conference in November 1943, and was followed by the Potsdam Conference in July 1945.

Above, the courtyard of Livadia Palace. Photo by Asya.

It was the Yalta Conference where a dying Roosevelt purportedly "sold out" Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union.

Above, the conference table with figures of (from left)
Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt are seated. Photo by Asya.

I wasn't aware that the historic location of the Yalta Conference was open to the public.