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The ghosts of Livadia Palace

As Russian palaces go, Livadia is rather small, even modest. Czar Nicholas II had this pretty, white, limestone palace built as a family vacation residence in Crimea. Livadia overlooks one of the Crimea’s amazingly lush sub-tropical forests and the shimmering Black Sea.

Like so many things Russian, Livadia twists one’s emotions in different directions. The upstairs walls are hung with intimate photos of the Czar, Empress Alexandra, and their lovely children. The doting Nicholas often neglected state duty to spend time with them. There were sad pictures of his son, who suffered from the Romanov family’s curse, hemophilia.

We see Nicholas’ weary face, the frightened eyes of a weak ruler overwhelmed by a tempest of problems, lacking will or ferocity to rule a Russia seething with revolution.

Photos show the imperial family grouped together at Livadia much as they must have appeared when they were later murdered in 1918 by Communist gunmen in a dingy basement in the Urals. One mourns this family so filled with deep love for one another, and their tragic end. But as l studied these melancholy mementos of Russia’s last czar, I was struck by how much Nicholas bore heavy responsibility for the disasters of the 20^th century.

In 1914, Serbia sought to provoke a war between Russia and its enemy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by assassinating Franz Josef, heir to the Hapsburg throne. As expected, Austria mobilised to see revenge on Serbia. Nicholas ordered his huge armies to mobilise against Austria, forcing Germany and France to mobilise. The Czar’s decision lit the fuse of World War I, which then led to WWII. Nicholas should have rushed to Berlin on his private train to meet with his “cousin Willy,” Germany’s Kaiser, to avert the oncoming cataclysm. But Nicholas did nothing. He ended up losing Russia’s empire and his family — and plunging Europe into three decades of war.

On Livadia’s main floor, there is no melancholy, only anger. There in February 1945, US President Franklin Roosevelt, Britain’s Winston Churchill, and Soviet ruler Josef Stalin met to decide postwar Europe’s future.

The late KGB general Pavel Sudoplatov, who led the team that killed Trotsky and later observed Yalta, aptly calls the pact in his memories, “as cynical as the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939” that carved up parts of Eastern Europe between Germany and the USSR. But in that case, Hitler and Stalin made a two-sided deal, restoring lands their nations had lost during and after World War I. Yalta was a shameful, one-sided sell-out of half the European continent. The left-leaning, likely senile Roosevelt kept hailing Stalin, who had murdered over 20 million people, “our Uncle Joe.” Amazingly, the naïve American delegation actually stayed at the Livadia Palace where the Soviet secret police bugged every room and heard everything that was said by the president and his aides.

The British stayed at the nearby Vorontzov Palace, also heavily bugged. Sarah Churchill remarked to a British delegation member that it would be nice to taste chicken Kiev. It was delivered an hour later. NKVD, the Soviet secret police, and GRU, military intelligence knew almost everything on the minds of the Americans and British. There were two Soviet agents in Roosevelt’s entourage: Asst. Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss. Sudoplatov says he heard from GRU there was a third highly placed Soviet agent in the White House, and another who was a 
famous financier.

How could warlords Roosevelt and Churchill been so foolish and cowardly? Stalin had 12 million soldiers moving into Eastern Europe. Stalin’s might intimidated Roosevelt and Churchill, causing them to replace one totalitarian dictator, Adolf Hitler, by appeasing an even more dangerous one, Stalin.

US general George Patton was ready to turn America’s armies against Russia. The US had the atomic bomb, Russia did not. But the US and bankrupt Britain decided to buy off Stalin. Eastern Europe paid the terrible price.

In one of Stalin’s sinister, green-painted villas, I sat at his desk, imagining how after Yalta his yellow eyes must have glinted with malice and triumph as he puffed his pipe.

Eric Margolis is a veteran US journalist who reported from the Middle East and Asia for nearly two decades