The Daughters of Yalta

When I was given this book I thought Catherine Grace Katz (CGK) might be a bit potty.

Turning the attendance of Anna Roosevelt, Sarah Churchill and Kathy Harriman at the Yalta Conference with their fathers seemed likely to be a lame attempt at writing a feminist history of the last gasp of the Second World War. As often happens I was dead wrong. CGK uses a double time frame to tell her story. She didn’t invent this handy literary device – Shakespeare uses a triple time frame in Othello. What this means in The Daughters of Yalta is she tells in detail the deliberations at Yalta over the first eleven days of February 1945. Roosevelt does not want to make it a US and UK versus Russia meeting; he goes out of his way to cultivate a friendship with Stalin often to Churchill’s exclusion and frustration. An important objective for FDR was to establish a world organisation to bring all the great nations to the table to talk and not fight. The United Nations was founded in 1945 shortly after his death.

Another American preoccupation was the war in the Pacific that seemed likely to drag on at great cost to American lives. It was not certain that the atomic bomb would work and FDR wanted Stalin to commit to joining the US against Japan. Meanwhile Churchill was anxious about the future of countries in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland – the country Britain went to war for.

I found the practical arrangements for the conference utterly fascinating. Who knew, the Americans and British certainly didn’t, that Russia had developed bugs without any metal (to avoid detection) and had bugs placed in the grounds of the palaces used by Roosevelt and Churchill. Paths were mown through the gardens at the Livadia Palace for FDR to use in his wheelchair and for Stalin to listen to his supposedly private conversations.

Then there are “the sons of Yalta”. Lavrentiy Beria brought his twenty year-old son, Sergo. “He was a quiet student at a Leningrad military academy with an affinity for electronics. … While Lavrentiy Beria spoke only Georgian and Russian, Sergo also spoke English and German” (CGK). He was assigned the crucial role of listening in on Roosevelt’s conversations. Harry Hopkin’s twenty-two year-old son Robert was a photographer with the US Army Signal Corps and travelled with the American delegation as the principal American photographer.

“Through powerful directional microphones, he (Sergo) listened in on the two western leaders’ chatter at the airfield. Sergo smugly noted that Roosevelt refused to engage with Churchill in any kind of meaningful conversation. … the younger Beria developed a certain respect for t5he American President and his political acumen. … But to Churchill, Sergo extended no courtesy. He compared the prime minister to a pathetic ‘poodle wagging its tail’. Sergo listened as FDR made derisive remarks about Churchill and the British. An ardent anti-imperialist, Roosevelt particularly mentioned that he was in favour of the inevitable breakup of the British Empire after the war.” (The Daughters of Yalta, CGK)

What makes her book so interesting is that the daughters of Yalta wrote long letters home. Anna wrote to her mother and her husband; Sarah also wrote to her mother; Kathy wrote to Pamela Churchill who had been her father’s lover and years later was to be his wife. These letters give an insight into the conference lacking in the official transcriptions of the meetings. They were not present at the meetings but they observed a lot – sometimes of substance and sometimes fascinating trivia. I felt as if I too was living, in some discomfort, on the shores of the Black Sea for eleven days in February 1945.