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New Europe
Day Seventy-nine: Yalta
In February 1945, around this table at the Livadia Palace, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin decided what post-war Europe was going to look like.
The treaty may have been signed in an English-style billiard room but the advantage went largely east. Roosevelt died of a cerebral haemorrhage two months after the conference ended. Churchill was voted out of office in Britain three months after that. The Soviet Union was allowed to continue occupying countries like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and the Polish government-in-exile in London was excluded from elections in Warsaw. Almost exactly a year after the back-slapping and the hugs in the Livadia Palace, Churchill, in a speech at a small college in Fulton, Missouri, declared that 'from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.'
Forty-three years later the iron curtain was lifted and today it's girls in miniskirts who are being photographed in the garden where Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt once sat.
By a neat coincidence the very last act of the drama was played out not ten miles from here. If you follow the winding coast road south and west you will come to the little headland village of Foros. Here Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who more than anyone else was responsible for lifting the iron curtain, had a summer cottage. His house arrest here in August 1991 precipitated the final collapse of the Soviet Union.
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PALIN'S GUIDES
- Series: New Europe
- Chapter: Day Seventy-nine: Yalta
- Country/sea: Ukraine
- Place: Yalta
- Book page no: 190
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