FEATURED the churchills, roosevelts, and harrimans 14 | HARRIMAN 174121_R1_TEXT.indd 14 11/2/20 11:59 PM a story of love and war by catherine grace katz n the winter of 1945, Livadia Palace, its once snow-white façade now covered in grime, stood empty on its perch above the Black Sea. The furniture and priceless art wereI long gone. Sinks, toilets, and lamps had been ripped from their fittings and pulled from the walls. The Nazis had stolen everything, even the brass doorknobs. Situated less than three miles down the coast from the resort town of Yalta, on the southern tip of the Crimean Peninsula, this palace had once been the summer home of the tsar and tsarina, Nicholas II and Alexandra. They had torn down the old Livadia Palace where Alexander III had died and replaced it with a new 116-room imperial retreat better suited to family life. The Mediterranean climate and black pebble beaches offered the tsar, tsarina, and their five children a respite from the humidity and opulence of Saint Petersburg. Palms and cypress trees filled the lush gardens surrounding the neo-Renaissance Italianate palace constructed from white Crimean stone. The tsar and his children bathed in the sea, played tennis, and rode horses over rocky trails while the tsarina sold her needlework at the bazaar, to raise funds for the Editor’s note: Excerpted from chapter 1 ofThe Daughters of local hospital. But amid the relative simplicity, there Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love remained splendor. In the white ballroom, where and War by Catherine Grace Katz. Copyright © 2020 by French doors opened onto a courtyard, the tsar’s Catherine Grace Katz. Used by permission of Houghton eldest daughter, Grand Duchess Olga, celebrated her Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. sixteenth birthday with a grand soiree. She swirled Pictured from left to right: Sarah Churchill Oliver, Anna through the night in her pink gown, her hair swept Roosevelt Boettiger, and Kathleen Harriman at the Yalta high on her head for the first time, while her first Conference (Livadia Palace, February 1945). Photos of jewels—a necklace made of 32 diamonds and pearls— Kathleen Harriman courtesy of David H. Mortimer. sparkled in the chandeliers’ light. HARRIMAN | 15 174121_R1_TEXT.indd 15 11/2/20 11:59 PM The tsar and his family visited of 1944, the Soviets finally reclaimed Livadia only four times before they the Crimea and pushed the Nazis out, were murdered, in 1918, in a basement but not before the retreating enemy outside the city of Yekaterinburg. plundered Livadia Palace, taking This brutality marked the end of the everything they could carry. Romanov dynasty and imperial Russia. It was here, in this despoiled palace in The Bolsheviks soon transformed the February 1945, that Kathleen Harriman, palace into a sanatorium for favored the glamorous, twenty-seven-year-old Soviet workers needing rest, quiet, daughter of the fourth-richest man and treatment for tuberculosis. The in America, now stood. Thousands of comrades sterilized the gleaming white workers crowded the palace and the palace and removed or covered all signs gardens, sawing, hammering, painting, of the Romanov family, just as they fumigating, polishing, and planting, tore down monuments to royalty across not to mention installing much-needed Russia, replacing them with monuments plumbing. Cots had been set up for the to themselves. Then came the war, the conscripted laborers and the Romanian second in a quarter century. In 1942, the POWs the Soviets had brought in to Nazis overran the Crimea after a months- clear the area of the wreckage the long onslaught of the nearby port city of war had left behind, but there were Sevastopol, part of the grisly and ultimately still hardly enough places to sleep for ill-fated Operation Barbarossa, when the everyone toiling away across the once Nazis broke their non-aggression pact with imperial grounds. the Soviets and charged east across the steppe. Kathy and her father, W. Averell Only the tsar’s summer palace would do Harriman, the United States for the Nazis’ Crimean headquarters, so the ambassador to the Soviet Union, invaders commandeered Livadia. In the spring had arrived several days earlier from Moscow, where they had lived for the past fifteen months. They had intended to fly, as they had little more than ten days to oversee final preparations for one of the most crucial conferences of the war, but bad weather had kept them grounded. In the end, their eight-hundred- mile journey by train had taken nearly three days as they crawled past the bombed- out villages and trampled countryside to which Kathy had grown accustomed over these past months. Every train station she saw was in ruins. “The needless destruction is something appalling,” Kathy wrote to her childhood 16 | HARRIMAN 174121_R1_TEXT.indd 16 11/2/20 11:59 PM FEATURED governess and friend, Elsie Marshall, their aristocratic friends, still held a nicknamed “Mouche,” back in New certain allure among high-ranking York. (Whether or not this observation comrades. Though the Soviets decried would make it to Mouche was up to the the corruption of the imperialist age, censor.) To her older sister, Mary, she they apparently had no moral qualms wrote, “My God but this country has a about using these luxurious palaces job on its hands—just cleaning up.” themselves. After assessing various locations around the Black Sea, from Though the war was by no means Odessa to Batum, the Soviets and the won, by late 1944, British and American Americans deemed Yalta and Livadia forces had liberated Rome, Paris, Palace the best of several options; the Brussels, and Athens from German and other choices were too damaged by war Italian occupation, while the Red Army to accommodate large delegations or marched westward across Poland and were less accessible by ship or plane. Romania. The British prime minister, Harriman and the American embassy Winston Churchill; the president of in Moscow begrudgingly agreed, even the United States, Franklin Roosevelt; though, as Churchill underscored, the and the Soviet general secretary, Joseph Black Sea was still littered with mines, Stalin, realized they had reached a making it impossible for the leaders to critical juncture in Europe. As their risk traveling to Yalta by ship—though armies raced to Berlin, the three some of their support staff would have leaders were facing complicated to do so. By the New Year of 1945, it questions about the end of the war on was decided: Roosevelt and Churchill the continent, questions they could would rendezvous on the island of resolve only face to face. Malta, sixty miles off the southern It was not the first time they tip of Italy, and fly the remaining had called such a meeting. In late distance to the Crimea to meet Stalin November 1943, the “Big Three,” as at the former tsar’s summer palace. they were known, had conferred in Though Livadia was an imperial Tehran to lay the foundations for the residence, it was smaller than the long-awaited second front, which 100,000-square-foot mansion in they launched just seven months the Hudson River Valley where later, on the beaches of Normandy. Kathy Harriman had grown up. At the time, in an effort to appeal to It was also too small to house all Opposite page: Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had three of the delegations, which First U.S. food generously made the arduous journey seemed to swell exponentially ship in Britain to Tehran, a location significantly with every passing day. Playing under Lend- closer to Moscow than to London or the genial, accommodating host, Lease. Kathleen Washington. Now it was only fair that Stalin had graciously offered Harriman on Stalin should come to them. [. .] Livadia to President Roosevelt. far right with The Black Sea coast was as far west As the largest palace of the Lord Woolton as Stalin was willing to travel, and several nearby, its ballroom and Averell the string of resort towns along the was perfectly suited to hosting Harriman (1941). southern coast of the Crimea, a stretch the formal meetings of the Above: Portrait of nicknamed the “Romanov Route” for Big Three and their advisers, Kathleen Harriman the number of residences that once and, given that Roosevelt was by Cecil Beaton. belonged to the imperial family and paralyzed from the waist HARRIMAN | 17 174121_R1_TEXT.indd 17 11/2/20 11:59 PM down and confined to a wheelchair, conveniently situated between the In theory, Averell Harriman was Stalin thought the president would be American and British residences. [. .] responsible for the conference’s most comfortable if he did not have Once it was decided that the three final arrangements, but in reality, to travel to the conference sessions leaders would gather at Yalta, the that was not exactly the case. Averell each day. Meanwhile, Churchill and Soviets had just three weeks to turn never passed up the chance to be at his party were to be accommodated the ransacked villas into a site fit for the center of the day’s action. In early at Vorontsov Palace, another Russian one of the largest and most important 1941, isolationism still ran rampant aristocrat’s home the Soviets had international summits in history. in the United States and the nation nationalized, which was a thirty- Lavrentiy Beria, the forbidding head remained neutral. Roosevelt had been minute drive down the road. Stalin of the Narodny komissariat vnutrennikh eager to support the fight against opted for a slightly smaller estate del—the dreaded NKVD, the Soviet the Nazis but could do so only while nearby referred to as both the Koriez Union’s secret police—and the man maintaining a position of neutrality.