1 The huge, ornate rooms in the former czarist palace where the Cold War may have started were polished and cleaned.
2 Visitors were given their first glimpse of the private rooms where President Franklin Roosevelt slept during the 1945 Yalta Conference.
3 And fuzzy black-and-white pictures of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill determining the shape of postwar Europe were put on display.
4 There were no formal ceremonies, but Saturday marked the 50th anniversary of the start of the top-secret meeting among the World War II Allied leaders on the outskirts of Yalta.
5 Museum curators and local officials say there is new interest in the meeting where decisions were made to split Europe into what became two hostile blocs.
6 'There are suddenly a lot more people coming from other countries who want to see this,' said Natalia Loshbini, deputy director of the Livadian Museum, the former palace where the conference was held.
7 Finding authentic conference documents was not easy and Loshbini easily admitted her exhibit, filling just two small rooms, was on the skimpy side.
8 'We have a lot of problems getting access to the material, which is now in other countries. But we are going to keep trying,' she said.
9 Last week four shiny new plaques were put up marking spots visited by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Roosevelt during the Feb. 4-11, 1945, meeting.
10 'Before, it simply was not possible to put up a plaque for Churchill, one of the Soviet Union's biggest Cold War enemies,' explained historian Vladimir Gorkovech, who has researched the conference.
11 Aside from Livadia, curious visitors can also tour Churchill's temporary residence. The groundwork for the future United Nations was laid by the British, American and Soviet foreign ministers in the huge English-style manor house.
12 Wealthy tourists are also paying hundreds of dollars to spend a night in Stalin's suite at the Yusupovsky Palace on the other side of Yalta. The palace is now a pricey health resort.
13 Crimea has had little help from the West in its efforts to mark the famous meeting. The Yalta Conference is seen in the West as a shameful sellout of Eastern Europe, perhaps best forgotten.
14 The division of Germany and the Soviet Union's unkept promise to hold free elections in Poland are among the decisions that lasted until the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989.
15 Neither American nor British representatives attended the anniversary ceremonies, and they are not expected to take part in a symposium on the conference next week.

And fuzzy black - and - white pictures of Roosevelt , Stalin and Churchill determining the shape of postwar Europe were put on display .
determining the shape
How did pictures of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill determine the shape of postwar Europe?