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Yalta at Churchill

Documents are basic tools for historians. And Churchill Archives Centre has about a million pages of documents. But, just as tools require skilful handling, so documents must be used with insight and sensitivity in order to reconstruct the past.

All third-year history students at Cambridge University have to do a documents-based special subject. Options for 1999-2000 ranged from Republican Rome to Thatcherism. This year, Dr David Reynolds, Reader in International History, has offered a new course on Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and the World War II alliance. In a novel tie-up with Churchill Archives Centre, students use some of Sir Winston Churchill's papers.

As a finale to their course, in May 2000, the students also presented a simulation of the Yalta conference of February 1945. This was hosted in the Archives Centre in conjunction with a display of papers and photographs from this, the last of the Big Three's wartime conferences.

British, American and Russian teams prepared and enacted imaginary discussions about goals and tactics, drawing on documents they had read. Mr Churchill and Ms Eden, for example, discussed how they were going to handle the Polish question at Yalta and in the Commons. Warren Kimball and Vladislav Zubok, distinguished American and Russian scholars of the war, critiqued the sessions. As one participant observed, it helped bring the documents to life.