The Crimean Debate

What happened in and around Yalta in the spring of 2005 that first prompted the municipal council of Livadia, the actual setting of the Crimean conference, first to accept Tsereteli's gift and then to refuse it? The city fathers changed their minds mainly for two reasons.

The decision to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Yalta Conference was made by the Ukrainian parliament on 16 December 2004, less than two months before the event. The reason for this last- minute decision was readily apparent, given that in November and December 2004 the Orange Revolution had thrown the Ukrainian par­liament into turmoil. The decision on the Yalta commemoration was made after the resolution of the political crisis but prior to the third round of the presidential elections, which brought the opposition can­didate, Viktor Yushchenko, to power.

As Kazarin sought to promote the commemoration of the Yalta Con­ference in the national media and argued in favour of installing Tsereteli's monument in Livadia, he found himself under increasing attack in the Crimea. The leaders of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis accused Kazarin - who, aside from being vice-premier of the Crimean govern­ment, was also a member of the communist faction in the Crimean par­liament and head of the Russian cultural society of the Crimea - of attempting to rehabilitate Stalin and Stalinism under the pretext of commemorating the Yalta Conference. They reminded the public that two years earlier the communist deputies of the Sevastopol city council had voted in favour of building a monument to Stalin in their city. A leading figure in the Mejlis, Ilmi Umerov, stated that he could not accept the idea of a monument to the Big Three, given the forcible deportation of the Crimean Tatars conducted on Stalin's orders, as well as the controversial nature of the Yalta Conference, which had divided Europe into spheres of influence.

This was not the end of the controversy. On 4 February 2005, the anniversary of the Yalta Conference, communists staged a meeting in Simferopol to protest the refusal of the Crimean authorities to install the monument. They criticized the Crimean premier, Serhii Kunitsyn, for kowtowing to the new 'Orange' government in Kyiv and threat­ened to initiate a criminal investigation into Kunitsyn's alleged embez­zlement of parcels of land on the Crimean shore of the Black Sea. The Crimean Tatars held their own rally in Livadia to protest the installa­tion of the monument. On the eve of the commemoration, Kazarin noted the irony that a bust of President Roosevelt was to be unveiled in Yalta, but that there would be no monument to the Big Three in Liva- dia. At the Livadia Palace, there was an exhibition featuring the offices occupied by Roosevelt and Churchill during the conference but not Stalin's office. Eventually the organizers of the commemoration com­promised, deciding to include Stalin's Livadia office in the exhibition instead of installing the monument to the Big Three. President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia even promised to send artefacts from the Stalin museum in his native town of Gori.⁴⁰ But the controversy over the monument did not go away entirely. In April, Leonid Hrach, the leader of the Crimean communists, called upon the Livadia town council to install Tsereteli's monument in order to honour the memory of those who had fallen for the 'Great Victory.' The leaders of the Mejlis issued their own statements on the matter, threatening to block the roads along which the monument could be transported to Livadia. By that time the decision not to allow the installation was final, forcing Tsereteli to look for a site in Russia, which led in turn to a major contro­versy in the Russian media.⁴¹