Description

Serhii Plokhii (Plokhy) is Mykhailo Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University and the author of several award-winning books on Ukrainian and Russian history, including The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford, 2001), The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (Cambridge, 2006), and Ukraine and Russia: Representations of the Past (Toronto, 2008). His revisionist account of the 1945 Yalta conference, Yalta: The Price of Peace was released by Viking Press on 4 February 2010, to mark the 65-th anniversary of the start of the Yalta Conference.

The Second World War was still raging when Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met at a resort town on the Black Sea one step ahead of their rapidly advancing armies. This was February 1945: American and British troops had just emerged from the Battle of the Bulge, and the Red Army was 40 miles outside Berlin. Germany was far from defeated, but the advantage had decisively swung in the Allies’ favor. In the Pacific theater, the Japanese were holding firm.
YALTA tells the story of the eight extraordinary days when the fate of the world was decided by three of the towering figures of the twentieth century, each a legend who transformed his country. The Big Three used every tool in their arsenal, as they all came to the conference with something to lose. Alliances shifted as they partitioned Germany, approved the most aggressive aerial bombing campaign in history, redrew the borders of Eastern Europe and created a new organization to settle future disputes. Two months later, Stalin was strengthening his grip on Eastern Europe, Roosevelt was dead and Churchill on the cusp of a humiliating electoral defeat.

For 65 years, opinion has been bitterly divided on whether FDR and Churchill failed. In America, the conservatives who hated Roosevelt’s New Deal accused him of selling out to the Soviet dictator. Was he too sick? Did he give away too much in exchange for Stalin’s promise to join the war against Japan? Had he played his hand differently, could Poland have escaped Soviet domination? Both Left and Right have argued that Yalta paved the way to the Cold War.

In this groundbreaking book, S. M. Plokhy gives the first comprehensive reassessment of the Yalta Conference since the end of the Cold War. Combing through archives in the US and the UK, he found new documents recording Roosevelt’s exchanges with his advisors, and obtained British internal memos and minutes of cabinet meetings. He is the first historian of Yalta to have made use of previously inaccessible Soviet documents that became available after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He also draws extensively from published and unpublished diaries of secondary players, including Churchill’s doctor and Roosevelt’s daughter, to bring all of the characters to life.

Eight years ago, Margaret MacMillan’s PARIS 1919 redefined our understanding of the path from the First to the Second World War. Plokhy’s YALTA is a riveting successor. It puts us in the room with three of the most fascinating figures of all times and challenges us to imagine what we might have done in their place. Yalta is a word, like Munich, that is bigger than the conference it stands for. It is time to wade through the myth and disinformation surrounding this historic meeting and to reveal what really happened in those eight fateful days on the Black Sea.