Yowta
Peter Jenkins, 20 December 1984
‘Yalta’ is not a word that often comes to mind. Ask someone on the bus or try it on the children. Yalta? For anyone living in the eastern part of Europe, the meeting of the Big Three at a small resort in the Crimea, in February 1945, is the seminal event of modern times, a calamity almost on a par with the Fall. Not that that part of Europe had lacked calamities, but they had hitherto seemed part of a European experience – the European experience: Yalta has, in effect, resulted in its expulsion from Europe. What is more, there was, and is today, an awful finality about it.’