The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War

“In the end, their eight-hundred-mile journey by train had taken nearly three days as they crawled past the bombed-out villages and trampled countryside to which Kathy had grown accustomed over these past months. Every train station she saw was in ruins. ‘The needless destruction is something appalling,’ Kathy wrote to her childhood governess and friend, Elsie Marshall.”

Katz describes Kathleen Harriman’s journey from Moscow to Yalta, where her father, ambassador Averell Harriman, would participate in the tripartite conference. This passage shows Kathleen’s impression of the landscape, emphasizing both the destruction of war and Kathleen’s first-hand exposure to the realities in former occupied territories.

“Realizing that her father would never have time to master the language while also performing his ambassadorial duties in Moscow, Kathy had decided to learn Russian for both of them. […] The small number of English-speaking Russian tutors in Moscow were already engaged, so she had to employ a French-speaking tutor […] Her Russian was hardly perfect, but she spoke well enough to act as her father’s interpreter at social gatherings.”

This quotation demonstrates Kathleen Harriman’s intelligence, professionalism and work ethic by showing how devoted she was to her role as her father’s assistant in Moscow. Katz also stresses the cultural rift between the USSR and the US, as there were few English speakers in Moscow at the time and even Kathleen’s father, the American ambassador, did not speak Russian. Such gaps in linguistic and cultural understanding foreshadowed The Tensions Between the Western Allies and the USSR that became more prominent during and after the Yalta Conference.

“The Tehran Conference, a triumph in Allied cooperation, solidified the leaders’ commitment to the D-Day landings at Normandy, which finally relieved the Soviets of the concentrated brunt of Nazi aggression on the Eastern Front. Tehran had left Sarah optimistic. Goodwill seemed to flow among the three leaders, and Sarah felt inspired. ‘Whatever follows,’ she had written to her mother, ‘one couldn’t help but feel that a genuine desire for friendship was sown.’”

In this passage, the author reveals that Sarah Churchill had participated in the 1943 Tehran conference, at the request of her father. The conference had been a “triumph,” since the Allies had managed to arrange the D-Day landings, which were ultimately successful. Churchill’s optimistic expectation that the