UIA to co-host exhibit and conference on the Yalta Conference of 1945 (01/23/05)

UIA to co-host exhibit and conference on the Yalta Conference of 1945

by Roman Czajkowsky

NEW YORK - Yalta is a name with wide resonance in European and U.S. history. In Central and Eastern Europe it is associated with the perceived abandonment of countries and peoples to Stalin's brutal regime. For the Balts, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians and other Central Europeans, Yalta had come to mean the sanctioning of their absorption into the Soviet system.

But Yalta was also a conference of allies who had defeated a terrible scourge - Hitler's Nazi Reich. And it was a conference in which two of the 20th century's democratic leaders - Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt - sought to build a foundation for global peace through the creation of the United Nations system.

Yalta also had many implications for Ukrainians, who remember Joseph Stalin as the man responsible for the deaths of some 7 million Ukrainians in the Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933, for his destruction of Ukraine's intelligentsia, and his attacks on Ukraine's language and culture. But one of the unintended legacies of Yalta was that it unified most ethnographically Ukrainian lands by absorbing Galicia (Halychyna) into the Ukrainian SSR. Many scholars believe it was this Ukrainian Piedmont, together with the Baltic states, that played the leading role in advancing the aims of state independence that led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

The history and legacy of the Yalta Conference in all of its aspects will be the focus of an exhibit of rarely seen photographs from the conference and a symposium of distinguished academics in early February at the premises of the Ukrainian Institute of America (UIA) in New York City. A complementary exhibit will provide an overview of Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula on which Yalta is located, that is now part of independent Ukraine.

The photo exhibit and symposium are being co-sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and the Ukrainian Institute of America. The Ukrainian Institute is organizing the exhibit on Yalta.

"Now, on the 60th anniversary of the summit at Yalta, is an appropriate time for the Ukrainian Institute of America to examine this landmark event in 20th century history," said Walter Nazarewicz, the institute's president. "That it occurred on what is now Ukrainian soil, and that the Yalta conference had implications for the world we have known, make the UIA's co-sponsorship of a photo exhibit and related historians' conference an appropriate and timely way to remember an event that to this day is as controversial as it was significant."

Mr. Nazarewicz added that when the Roosevelt Institute first approached the UIA about holding the photo exhibit there, the institute readily agreed but insisted that a historians' symposium be organized to provide a balanced view of the conference. He also said the institute welcomed the symbolism of holding such an event at a recognized center of Ukrainian culture and history rather than at a Russian institution. Crimea formally became part of the Ukrainian SSR only in 1954, a land transfer that still rankles many Russians.

The Yalta photo exhibit, which opens to the public on February 4 and runs through March 4, will feature stills taken during the second tripartite meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin by Sgt. Robert Hopkins and other U.S. Signal Corps photographers who accompanied President Roosevelt. The images are drawn from the photographic collections at the FDR Presidential Library and the National Archives.

Scheduled speakers and panelists at the symposium include Ambassador William J. van den Heuvel, co-chair of the Roosevelt Institute and former deputy U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations; Brig. Gen. Charles F. Brower IV U.S. Army (ret.), former professor and department head at the United States Military Academy, aide to President Ronald Reagan and author of "World War II in Europe: The Final Year"; Prof. Robert Dallek, currently of Boston University, winner of the Bancroft Prize and author of such books as "Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy," "Flawed Giant" and "An Unfinished Life: JFK 1917-1963"; Prof. Charles Gati of the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and a fellow of the John Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute who was senior advisor to the U.S. Department of State in the Clinton administration and is author of such books as "The Bloc That Failed," "Eastern Europe and the World" and "The International Politics of Eastern Europe"; and Prof. Alexander J. Motyl, deputy director of the Center for Global Change and Governance and co-director of the Central and East European Studies Program at Rutgers-Newark and the author of "Imperial Ends: The Decline, Collapse, and Revival of Empires" and "Revolutions, Nations, Empires; Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities."

Prof. Gati is scheduled to speak on the view of Yalta as an act of betrayal of the people of Central and Eastern Europe, while Prof. Motyl is scheduled to address the moral ambiguities of the democratic West's bargain with a man who murdered millions.

The symposium will be moderated by Adrian Karatnycky, counselor senior scholar and former president of Freedom House.

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