Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
July 1985, Gorbachev, made him head of the
Central Committee propaganda department, a
key center from which Yakovlev promoted the
agenda of perestroika (restructuring). Yakovlev
played a central role in advancing Gorbachev's
ideological agenda as a theorist of perestroika
and glasnost. By June 1987, four years after
returning from the political wilderness, Yakov-
lev had become a full member of the Party's
Politburo. He battled Yegor Ligachev, an advo-
cate of less far-reaching reform, until Ligachev's
influence waned after the 19th Party Confer-
ence of June 1988. From 1988 to 1990, Yakov-
lev was an important voice shaping party policy
on international affairs. He stepped down from
the Central Committee and the Politburo in July
1990, but remained as Gorbachev's senior
adviser. Although his influence declined in the
last months of Gorbachev's rule, Yakovlev
remained loyal to Gorbachev, and in 1992 he
became vice president of the Gorbachev Foun-
dation after Gorbachev left government service.
sula became a part of the Ukrainian Soviet
Socialist Republic, the present-day Republic of
Ukraine. By the 1960s Yalta was receiving close
to 300,000 visitors, either tourists or health
resort patients. In the early 1990s, the year-
round population was estimated at 89,000.
Yalta Conference
The second of three major wartime conferences
held by the leaders of the United States, Great
Britain, and the Soviet Union, the Yalta Confer-
ence was held at Livadiya Palace near the Black
Sea resort of
YALTA
in Crimea, present-day
Ukraine, from February 4-11, 1945. With U.S.
president Franklin Roosevelt, British prime min-
ister Winston Churchill, and Soviet premier and
general secretary of the Communist Party
Joseph
STALIN
in attendance, the Yalta Confer-
ence planned the final defeat and the postwar
occupation of Nazi Germany.
A number of important decisions were made
at Yalta by the three Allied leaders, as the end of
the war against Germany approached. The Allies
agreed to divide Germany into four postwar
occupation zones and to give the Soviet Union
one-half of a proposed $20 billion in war repara-
tions to be paid by Germany. The conference
also announced the establishment of a United
Nations by calling for a conference to meet in
San Francisco in April 1945 to lay the ground for
its establishment. More controversial, and a por-
tent of the future postwar tensions that would
lead to the cold war, were the conference's deci-
sions about the borders of Poland, partitioned by
Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939. Faced
with the presence of the Red Army on most of
the prewar territory of Poland, Roosevelt and
Churchill reluctantly confirmed the Soviet
Union's occupation of the territories it had
annexed from eastern Poland as part of the 1939
NAZI
-
SOVIET PACT
. They agreed to compensate
Poland with prewar German lands to the north
and west and the Free City of Danzig (Gdansk).
The postwar Polish-German border was essen-
tially shifted 75-100 miles to the west of the pre-
Yalta
A town in the Crimean Peninsula that has been
a popular winter and health resort since the 19th
century, Yalta was the site of the World War II
YALTA CONFERENCE
held on February 4-11, 1945,
in the nearby Livadiya Palace. The modern town
of Yalta, located on the Black Sea in southern
Crimea, about 55 miles east of
SEVASTOPOL
, was
founded in 1838 on the site of an ancient Greek
colony. The region around Yalta was annexed by
Russia in 1783. Within a few decades it had
become an exclusive resort for members of the
Russian royal family and nobility, who came to
escape the winters of northern Russia and built
palatial estates. As the main site of a network of
health resorts that grew in southern Crimea
after the 1880s, Yalta is associated with numer-
ous members of Russia's political and literary
elites who summered in the area. Among them
was the playwright Anton
CHEKHOV
, and Yalta is
the site of an important Chekhov Museum. In
the 1950s, Yalta and the entire Crimean Penin-
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