In the Shadow of Ai-Dagh

0, geeminy, what a stir there is! What a calling of meetings! What an appointing of committees! What a furbishing up of swallowtail coats!

Such was Yalta when the late, great Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and his party of Yankee innocents abroad arrived to visit Tsar Alexander II at his summer estate, Livadia. In the same expanse of gardens and palaces, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill had their second meeting. Clemens said of the setting:

"The little village of Yalta nestles at the foot of an amphitheatre which slopes backwards and upwards to the wall of hills, and looks as if it might have sunk quietly down to its present position from a higher elevation. This depression is covered with the great parks and gardens of noblemen, and . . . the bright colors of their palaces bud out here & there like flowers. It is a beautiful spot."

A Place to Work. Yalta is bigger now (1936 pop. 29,000), and the Germans wrecked it so badly that Russian workmen had to rush temporary restorations to house some of the Big Three staffs. The white stone palace where President Roosevelt stayed was built in 1911 for the last of the Romanovs. But the smaller of the estate's two palaces, the gardens themselves and the famed Fountain of the Nymph--smuggled from Pompeii in 1834 --are pretty much as they were when Mark Twain saw them, clustered in the shadow of the great Ai-Dagh (Holy Mount).

In this lush setting, the conference was actually a medley of conferences: Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt conferred on overall plans; Eden and Molotov with Stettinius on preliminary plans for Germany and liberated Europe; Admiral Kuznetsov, the Red Army's Deputy Chief of Staff Antonev, Marshal of Aviation Kutyarov with Britain's General Brooke, Field Marshal Wilson, Admiral Cunningham and the U.S. military (see U.S. AT WAR) on final war plans. Stalin had much the smallest staff (the joint announcement listed twelve Britons, 13 Americans, only eight Russians in attendance on the Big Three).

Something to Remember. As at Teheran, the eight days at Yalta were not all work. Roosevelt and Churchill talked, ate, drank together before the Marshal joined them. Then, between working sessions, came the toasts. One of Stalin's toasts named the gathering for history: "The Crimea Conference."

As they did after Teheran, the stories of other toasts and high jinks would come later. After his gay visit to Yalta in 1867, Samuel Clemens noted in his diary:

"What happened in the park--and again in the court of the palace where the fountain was, and the flowers . . . these were rich--they must never be trusted to treacherous paper--memory will do--I guess no one in the world who could appreciate a joke would be likely to forget them."

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