The Livadiya Palace in Yalta, which hosted the 1945 Yalta Conference of the Big Three, has opened a memorial room dedicated to Sir Winston Churchill, the great Prime Minister of Great Britain and Nobel Prize laureate. The palace is thus commemorating the 59th anniversary of the Allied leaders’ conference. The exposition of the memorial room has added over thirty new documents, two documentaries, twenty CDs, along with over sixty books by and about Churchill. The centerpiece of the exposition is a bust of the prime minister presented to the Livadiya Palace by Churchill’s daughter, Lady Mary Soames, as well as works by Sir Winston Churchill, in which he offers his ana lysis of world politics of his day. The British have also donated a computer, video cassette player, and television to view documentaries. The museum offers researchers such books by Churchill as a five-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples, a six-volume World Crisis, as well as the complete set of six volumes of Churchill’s major book, The Second World War, which earned him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953.
Speaking in an interview, Livadiya Palace Director Liudmyla Kovaliova called the documents presented to the museum “a priceless gift.” They are a major acquisition for the Yalta Conference exposition. As Mrs. Kovaliova put it, the doors of the Churchill Room are always open to historians and political scientists.
February 1945 was a time when, to quote Churchill, “the world was at our feet, twenty-five million people marched to our orders, and it seemed that we were friends.” As we know, later Churchill, who was perhaps the most consistent fighter against both Nazism and Communism, declared a Cold War against the Soviets and said in his Fulton speech, The Sinews of Peace, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” Historians, however, point out that “despite all the authoritarianism for which Churchill was known as a leader, it never occurred to him to question such fundamental British values as democracy and parliamentarism.” As he liked to say, “The task of the parliament is to replace fists with arguments.”
The idea to open the Churchill Room in the Livadiya Palace belongs to the widow of former British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who visited Livadiya in 2002. It was she who proposed this to Lady Soames, noting that in 1998 the palace opened a room dedicated to another participant of the conference, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Churchill Room has been created by the British Foreign Office with the assistance of Churchill’s family, the Archives Center at the Churchill College, the International Churchill Association, the British Council, and other organizations.
The opening ceremony was attended by British Ambassador to Ukraine Robert Brinkley, Ukrainian and British diplomats, Crimean Parliament Deputy Speaker Vasyl Kyseliov, and Crimean Premier Serhiy Kunitsyn. According to Ambassador Brinkley, Churchill’s daughter Lady Soames could not be present for the opening ceremony, because she is now attending commemorative events in London dedicated to her late father. As Robert Brinkley put it, Sir Winston Churchill has been named the “Greatest Briton of all time,” according to a BBC poll.
According to Palace Museum Director Liudmyla Kovaliova, a museum reorganization is underway, which will be completed in February 2005, timed to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the Yalta Conference of the Big Three. A similar Stalin Room will be opened, along with a United Nations exposition. Incidentally, the decision to create the UN was also made at this palace by the Allied leaders. The old exhibition of the Livadiya Palace was more of a showcase and did not allow historians, political scientists, and researchers full access to the documents. Now the Livadiya Palace stores unique documents of those days, which can help many authors of future historical, art, and social studies articles and books.
