metimes, international diplomacy involves checking for lice. On February 4, 1945 — 70 years ago today — the Yalta Conference began. In a single week, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin planned the fate of the postwar world. They had to sew together a torn continent and, in the process, negotiate competing domestic and international interests. But they also had to spend a week in the same place, and that meant sharing meals, getting drunk, and avoiding bedbugs.
Yalta is a resort town in the Crimean Peninsula, and it was so difficult to reach that Winston Churchill said "we could not have found a worse place in the world," according to State Department records.
The conference was half international tight-rope walk, half party. Each leader and their entourage had a palace to themselves: the Livadia Palace hosted Franklin Roosevelt and the Americans; Churchill and company stayed in Vorontsov Palace; and Stalin and his entourage were in Yusupov Palace. In some ways, the big three lived large.
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