Matt Bevan

And so we've given over one room of my house, which is not a large house, to be this downstairs strange sort of semi-basement room to be a TV studio.

And that's where If You're Listening is made.

So, obviously, it was 1944, so the Soviets have retaken the Crimean Peninsula from the Nazis, and it was clear at this stage that the Allies were going to defeat the Nazis, and it was decided that they needed to have a meeting of the major Allied powers to basically decide, what are we going to do with Germany?

Once we beat them, what are we going to do?

And Stalin managed to convince the others that he would be the host of this meeting.

And for very Stalin-y reasons, he decided that he would have this meeting not in Moscow, not in St.

Petersburg, but in Yalta, this city that had been recaptured just weeks earlier from the Nazis.

This is like a resort town, wasn't it?

Yeah, absolutely, it was a resort town.

The Crimean Peninsula is basically the resort...

area of the Russian Empire and the USSR.

It's where all the Tsars would go for summertime retreats.

The Sea of Azov is there and the Sea of Azov is unusually warm.

It's a fantastic place to visit.

And they had retaken it.

And so Stalin wanted to have this meeting in Yalta.

But the thing was, Yalta was a ruin.

It had been invaded first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets in the opposite direction.

And it had basically been destroyed.

And the palace, the Lavardia Palace, is where Stalin wanted to have this meeting.