Yalta: the legacy

By Steve Cunningham

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THE�GRANDCHILDREN of war-time leaders Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin are to meet for the first time.

Winston Churchill (junior), Curtis Roosevelt and Yevgeni Djugashvili will attend a conference in Maastricht, Holland, in April. They will discuss the far-reaching consequences of the famous 1945 meeting in Yalta, where their grandfathers decided Europe's post-war fate.

It will be the first time Djugashvili, the son of Stalin's eldest son Yacov, will travel outside the former Soviet Union. Djugashvili, a retired history professor, has led the Stalinist Party of the USSR in Georgia for�ten years.�He says he will defend the honour of his grandfather.�'I graduated from an academy, produced a doctoral thesis, am a professional historian and know a lot about the issues,' he explains.

Winston Churchill, the former MP for Davyhulme whose father was the war-time leader's son Randolph, kept a huge collection of Sir Winston's private papers.�These were controversially bought for the nation with lottery money.

Curtis Roosevelt, a former diplomat with the United Nations, has previously taken part in conferences recalling the 12-year presidency of his grandfather Franklin D. Roosevelt.

All three men are jealous guardians of the reputations of their grandfathers and each will be given half an hour to speak at the conference, before joining a public debate.

The 1945 conference, held in the luxurious former Tsarist palace of Livadia on the Crimean coast, co-ordinated the Allies' plans for the defeat and occupation of Nazi Germany - and led to the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.

Next April's meeting has been organised by a Dutch agency that specialises in historic reunions. Two years ago it convened a Night of the Generals, bringing together the sons of the war-time generals Montgomery, Patton and Rommel.

But why so sexist Why just invite the leaders' grandsons This is an age of sexual equality - surely all the grandchildren could have spoken up

Take Churchill's granddaughter Edwina Sandys, the artist and sculptor. Edwina, whose mother was Churchill's daughter Diana, has been described as witty, brave and intelligent. But she didn't get an invite. Neither did her younger sister Celia, who wrote a fine biography of her grandfather's exploits as a young officer and journalist in several turn-of-the-century conflicts.

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, a granddaughter of FDR, must also be feeling left out. Anna, director of the Brain Research Foundation in Chicago, is president of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. She graduated in art and then in library science, later working for the Democratic National Committee and for the mayor of Chicago.

Also missing is Olga Peters, the 29-year-old American-born granddaughter of Joseph Stalin. She was taken to Moscow by her mother Svetlana Alliluyeva in 1984 and�hasn't been heard much more of since - but it would have been appropriate for her to get an invitation.

Svetlana defected from the Soviet Union�to India in 1967 and lived in America and Britain. On her return to Moscow she said she was disillusioned with American life.

It would have been interesting to find out what�Olga would have said about the world 56 years after her grandfather helped change it so dramatically. What would you have asked her And how would you quiz any of the Yalta grandchildren Tell us here.