Special Event: Book Launch

Location

"Yalta: The Price of Peace"

Co-sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.   YALTA: THE PRICE OF PEACE (Viking; ISBN: 978-0-670-02141-3; On-Sale Date: February 4, 2010; 480 pages; $29.95) is the first major history of the conference in more than 20 years and draws on Soviet archives only declassified in the early 1990s.  Harvard professor S.M. Plokhii offers a fresh account of the eight days Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill spent carving up the map of Europe.  The ink was not yet dry when the recriminations began.  The conservatives who pilloried Roosevelt’s New Deal accused him of selling out.  Was he too sick?  Did he give too much in exchange for Stalin’s promise to join the war against Japan?  Both Left and Right would blame Yalta for precipitating the Cold War, but Plokhy concludes that Roosevelt faired better than we think. YALTA’s stunning thesis is the result of complete access to Soviet archives, virtually all of which are in Russian. Plokhii allows us to hear Molotov and Stalin in their own words and makes extensive use of the diaries of secondary players, including Churchill’s doctor and Roosevelt’s daughter, to bring each figure to life.  YALTA is an authoritative, original and vividly-written narrative history.  At the same time, it offers a lesson for the future: no matter how skillful the participants in an international conference and however promising its outcome (the Yalta Conference was, at the time, perceived as a great accomplishment), democratic leaders and societies should be prepared to pay a price for close involvement with those who many not share their values. S.M. Plokhii, a professor of history at Harvard University, is the author of Unmaking Imperial Russia, The Origins of the Slavic Nations, and The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine.  For three successive years (2002-2005) his books won first prize of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies. This February marks the 65th anniversary of this pivotal historical moment.  We hope you will consider this groundbreaking work for coverage or review.  

Speakers

Plokhii, Serhii

Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History, Harvard University.