The 60th anniversary of the Yalta Conference was a low-key affair in the Crimea. There was a rally and a flypast of airplanes from participating countries at Saki Airfield, two exhibitions at the Livadiya Palace Museum – “The Diplomacy of a Great Victory” and “The 1945 Crimean (Yalta) Conference and Founding of the United Nations Organization,” – and two exhibitions called “Saki, the Gateway of the 1945 Crimean Conference” at Saki’s Historical and Ethnographic Museum and “The 1945 Crimean Conference” at Yevpatoriya’s Ethnographic Museum. Among the more than thirty items on display were photos, copies of newspapers reporting on the Yalta Conference, postcards, as well as archival documents and the personal effects of pilot Ivan Poliakh, who patrolled the skies over Yalta during the conference. He flew one of the warplanes that guarded the Yalta Conference, 100-170 during the day and 48 at night. After the war, Poliakh settled in Yevpatoriya and was awarded a medal and citation for ensuring security during the Yalta Conference.
Meanwhile, the celebration of the anniversary of the Yalta Conference failed to become a global affair, as the Crimean organizers had hoped, because the UN, which was founded at the Yalta Conference by the “Big Three,” was also marking its 60th anniversary this year. No foreign ambassadors were present even for the opening ceremony in Livadiya.
The organizers of the celebration announced that the ambassadors of Russia, Belarus, the US, Britain, and France to Ukraine could not take part in the festivities for political reasons (that day Ukraine’s new Cabinet of Ministers was being confirmed in office), and because of bad weather conditions.
Instead of unveiling a monument to the “Big Three,” featuring the figures of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin (the latter’s statue, designed by the well known sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, has already been cast in Russia) the organizers confined themselves to installing a bust of Roosevelt on a Yalta street named in his honor. The idea of immortalizing Stalin in bronze had the rabid support of Yalta communists and the Crimean League of Soviet Officers. After a number of politicians criticized the project, the Council of Ministers of the Crimea announced that it had made no decisions on erecting a monument to the leaders of the anti-Nazi coalition. The announcement led to a number of public actions in the Crimea, both in protest against the project and in favor.
The idea to build a monument triggered a vigorous protest among the Crimean Tatars, both in the Crimea and elsewhere. The Crimean Tatar community of Moscow issued a strongly-worded statement against erecting a monument to the dictator, claiming this would signal the revival of Stalinism. “The attempt to erect a monument to this villain looks especially sacrilegious where the Crimea is concerned,” the statement says, “for during the war it was Stalin and his henchmen who carried out the horrendous deportation of more than one-quarter of the peninsula’s population: Crimean Tatars, Germans, Greeks, Bulgarians, and Armenians. It was Stalin’s generals and the would-be generalissimo himself who surrendered the Crimean peninsula to the enemy at the very beginning of the war in 1941, in fact abandoning the civilian populace to its fate and later accusing it of collaborating with the Germans. It should be also remembered that Stalin was personally responsible for the repressions and purges of the 1920s — 1930s as well as for the manmade famine in the Crimea in the early 1930s. Therefore, any attempt to put Stalin back on the pedestal, with or without Churchill and Roosevelt, is intentional or unintentional rehabilitation of this bloody tyrant, which cannot but arouse righteous indignation not only in the victims of Stalin’s terror and their descendants but also all people of sound mind.”
In the meantime, Volodymyr Kazarin, deputy chairman of the Crimean government and one of the celebration organizers, announced that the monument to the “Big Tree” would be unveiled later, in March or April. Liudmyla Kovaliova, curator of the Livadiya Palace Museum, says that so far there are no legal grounds for erecting this monument. The monument’s opponents in Yalta and Simferopol have set up Anti-Stalin Committees to block the transport of Tsereteli’s creation to the Crimea and its installation near Livadiya Palace.
