Typewriters Of Peace in the Ukraine: The Yalta Declaration of Liberated Europe

Anna Roosevelt types on her Corona flattop portable in her room

at the Livadia Palace in Yalta, Crimea, on February 15, 1945.

It was a little more than 77 years ago that a previous perfidious and bloodthristy Russian dictator signed a typewritten agreement in what should still be by rights the Ukraine. The pact, called “The Declaration of Liberated Europe”, promised to allow the people of Europe “to create democratic institutions of their own choice”. It also pledged “the earliest possible establishment through free elections governments responsive to the will of the people”. Into the bootsteps of mass murderer Joe Stalin now steps that putrid pissant Putin.

The February 11, 1945, Yalta Agreement was co-signed in good faith by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, both of whom had made the fatal mistake of taking Stalin at his word. But in a precusor of current form, before the typewriter ribbon ink was dry on the Yalta document Stalin had started annexing occupied countries as Soviet socialist republics. Roosevelt’s body was still warm in his grave when Stalin ensured the treaty wasn’t worth the paper it was typed on.

Armed with portable typewriters and acting as aides-de-camp to their fathers at the Yalta conference were American writer Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (1906-75) and English actress Sarah Millicent Hermione Spencer-Churchill (1914-82). Also in an assisting role, with typewriter, was journalist Kathleen Lanier Harriman (1917-2011), the daughter of Averell Harriman, then US Ambassador to the Societ Union. These three women are the subjects of a 2020 book, The Daughters of Yalta - The Churchills, Roosevelts and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War by Catherine Grace Katz.

Eleanor and Anna Roosevelt at Anna's Corona portable typewriter.

Anna Roosevelt later worked with her second husband, Clarence John Boettiger, at William Randolph Hearst’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer, serving as editor of the women's pages and columnist for several years. After Franklin Roosevelt's death in April 1945, Hearst no longer had reason to favour Boettiger and they had a falling out. Boettiger left the Seattle Post Intelligencer and he and Anna bought a weekly newspaper in Phoenix, Arizona. They renamed it the Arizona Times and turned it into a daily paper in May 1947. However, they were attempting to turn it into a left-leaning newspaper in Arizona, and the paper failed. The failure left the Boettigers bankrupt. Anna died from throat cancer at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, New York, on December 1, 1975, aged 69.

Sarah Churchill stands beside future British Prime Minister Anthony Eden at Yalta.

Sarah Churchill was born in London and educated at Notting Hill High School. During World War II she joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and worked closely on the interpretation of photographs for the 1942 invasion of North Africa, Operation Torch. She accompanied Winston Churchill to Cairo in December 1943. Sarah died on September 24, 1982, at the age of 67.

Anna Roosevelt, Sarah Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill aboard the USS Quincy before the Yalta Conference.

Kathleen Harriman with her father.

Kathleen Harriman helped her father and Roosevelt with behind-the-scenes management of the American delegation to the Yalta conference. She had worked as a war correspondent for Hearst's International News Service and later joined Newsweek magazine.

Women correspondents accredited by the US Army, February 1, 1943: From left, Ernest Hemingway’s later wife Mary Welsh (Time and Life), Dixie Tighe (International News Service), Kathleen Harriman (Newsweek), Helen Kirkpatrick (Chicago Daily News), Lee Miller (Vogue), Tania Long (New York Times).